Free Dolorosa Soror by Florence Dugas

certain moment, a memory floats to the surface, and each time it seems I am going to grasp it. Not a memory of physical pain: the brain does not remember physical pain. No. It's as if my torn skin were a metaphor of mute suffering, buried."
    "Your parents," Nathalie said.
    What, my parents? The explosion of fights, and me trembling alone in my room. Once, the noise of blows, cries. And in the end, the obligation to choose between them. Who can choose between one love and another?
    I suddenly realize that in J. P. and Nathalie I am trying to reconstruct that fatal couple, my parents, though I treat Nathalie like a little girl most of the time—if only to punish her. I have the fantasy of being beaten by my father as he beat my mother— as he made her suffer, in any case.
    "I don't think so," continues Nathalie. "Look farther. Fantasies are screens that keep real memories from rising to the surface."
    The fantasy of punishing the womb from which I came— punishing it for all my suffering, and all of hers, as well. Is it an accident that these last few times I have concentrated my whipping on her sex?
    "You're stupid," I say. "That's got nothing to do with it."
    ***
    Later in the afternoon, we are in the bathroom. With the shaving cream J. P. sometimes uses, we smear our mounds with soap, then shave each other with the razor he gave me.
    Not without doing some damage. The razor slides with a screech to the edge of our delicate labia. Several tiny nicks. The blood wells up in the foam. It stings a little.
    Afterwards, we go back to bed and with tweezers, depilate each other very patiently, completely. Even I do it, who can barely tolerate the depilation of my "bikini line," as they say, because each plucked hair is a trauma in miniature that irritates the area until, little by little, I can't be touched at all. We get in the sixty-nine position, our eyes buried in each other's pussies, making each other smooth and hairless up to our buttocks. It's unforgettable.
    Aflame, we roll atop each other. Her crotch is smooth against mine—two pubescent little girls' groins, girl-children with women's breasts. Her mound is as cool as a cheek, her mons quite round, like little buttocks. Her tongue runs over my sex, plays with its most sensitive parts, buries itself in my vagina, explores it lazily, to the depths.
She rolls against me, takes my face in her hands, and kisses me. Her tongue rolls against mine like a wet finger. "It's true that women taste salty."
    Of the two of us, I am again the only one who comes, and when I do, I come hard.
    ***
    Next shot: I am sitting on the edge of the bed. Nathalie is on her knees between my open thighs. I lean over and grab her by the hair, my hands full, so I can raise her face to mine. I kiss her passionately and tell her I love her. And then, my eyes on hers, I piss on her breasts.
    The jet rebounds against my knees and calves, spills to the floor, surrounds my feet. The strong odor of urine rises toward us.
    She frees her face from my hands, bends over, and begins to drink the last drops at the source.
    Two days later we are dressed, ready to go out. I call to her; she already has her hand on the door latch. "Nathalie?" "Yes?"
    "Come here. Get on your knees, please."
    I take off my underpants, hitch up my skirt, and jam my already gaping sex against her mouth. Then, deliberately, I piss. She swallows.
    She doesn't miss a drop.
    It became a game between us. Often—and in the most compromising or unexpected places—a door, a public garden, or between two parked cars—I humiliated her in this manner—or honored her, as you like.
    I especially remember one night on the Quai de Bethune, at the tip of the He Saint-Louis. A hot spot of gay cruising. There is a streetlight there; it's also where the riverboats taking tourists up and down the Seine turn.
    She leaned me against the streetlight while a boat full of spotlights and onlookers turned fifteen feet away, and she drank from me, lengthily,