Free Puppet On A String by Lizbeth Dusseau

name exactly what that was. Desire? No, too strong a word. Desire resided in her heart as much as in her sexually charged loins. To desire the man meant that she had some emotional bond with a known evil.
           Maybe she was going soft on her captor? Was his abuse becoming as welcome as the sound of boots on concrete? Boots brought food and whatever comfort she was given. Boots bore her to sessions of masochistic pain. The sound of boots sent a shiver down her spine…
           Obviously something was happening in her fractured psyche. She’d lost track of the days…in her mind she was living simultaneous to her time with Darcy. She could flip back and forth from one to the other easily, one consciousness as distinct and real as the other. At least she could still tell that the one was her past and the other her present.
           In her present life as a captured criminal, she was regularly taken to the machines. Dildos were fitted into her vagina and ass, and her body was fucked by attached mechanical arms that trust the invaders deeply into her sexual spaces. The erratic rhythms seemed to go on for hours at a time. Although judging time was impossible in this place. What she might take as minutes, could be hours, hours could be reduced to minutes. Is this how insanity begins? she asked herself. But there was no one listening, no one to answer but the voices inside her head.
           “And how is my favorite masochist?” Jessup taunted her when he came to watch the sexual torture.
           Her body spoke when her voice refused to answer. She glanced down to see him staring at her, a foul and vulgar gleam in his eye. He was obviously enjoying the sight of her rapturous body forced to come and come again, having no control over her sexual responses.
           “This is a natural state for you. I think you even know that,
Shelby
. When you’re gone from here, I’ll have the movies of you to play back any time I want.” He pointed to the eye of the video camera set in the far corner of the room.
           Not that she hadn’t seen the camera before; she had confirmation…maybe a reason why she spent so much time on the hateful machines. Would they sell the tapes to some collector? Post them on the Internet? Her imagination rattled on with the possibilities – none of which was hers to control. She closed her eyes, closing out Jessup and his video camera, then turned her face away, giving the lens as little as possible to record – as little as possible for Jessup to gawk at on some future date.
           When she opened her eyes again, the man was gone.
           Long periods of bondage followed the sessions with the sex machines. Jessup fashioned himself an expert in shibari bondage. She hung suspended until her consciousness fell into deep, meditative states from which she could hardly be awakened. Sometimes, she dreamt of flying, sometimes of drowning in the ocean, or diving from the sky into a dark pool of loving hands.
           On more lucid days, she wondered if her captors noticed her delirium. Did the sadist Jessup still get off to his choreographed sessions in torment? He ordered her abuse, which she took with few outward signs of suffering – pain was pain; and there were ways to escape pain. The mind just needed to figure out how to outsmart the attackers, and make its way through the intensity until those merciful endorphins kicked in.
           On the other hand, it became more difficult to avoid reality and check out during the gang rapes. The men were real, so were their mouths, their hands and their penises, hungry for the satisfaction her body could give them. She relished their feral scent. She looked forward to their sweat, even to the odors that in her real life she would have shunned in disgust. They were alive and human, with beating hearts, and mouths that groaned and growled and panted in their quest for the physical satisfaction she would