The Sacrament
The torturer holds her thin hands above the scarred body. Her nails are clean and cut neatly, and on first glance her pale white hands are the embodiment of human aesthetics. They carry a grace that can hold the fate of humanity in perfect balance. The scarred body is not yet a corpse but it’s frail with hunger and malnourishment. A fasting scarecrow of a boy of about eighteen or nineteen years of age. The torturer’s hands move across the skin of the boy’s with great delicacy. A layman would look upon those movements and call them loving. But there is no overt love here, nothing immediately recognizable as love, nor quite so beautifully human. The boy doesn’t struggle for he’s familiar with the torturer by now. Those hands of hers are the closest thing to a God the boy has ever known. The torturer slips over his flesh, caressing the boy’s soul through her fingertips. Eventually he’ll be a living scar, a calloused thing to be hidden beneath the floorboards, but until then she will maintain as much of the boy’s beauty as possible, and he is beautiful. Every scar that’s formed from the soft cuts across his form has only added to his apperance and the facade of his masculinity has only been built upon by every surgical slice in his skin. The torturer remarks to herself of the relationship she shares with the boy. People would look down on her, mock her, scorn her, wrap her in binding and cast her away in a padded cell, for this relationship, but it’s consensual. Before becoming her subject the boy submitted himself to her, through written word and video, and then signed in blood from a nick in the tip of an index finger. The torturer sheds a tear that slowly trickles down the side of her face like runoff from an arctic glacier. It’s with pure admiration, admiration of her own work, and of the boy and his dedication to her. The boy glances up, eyes slightly shut against the soft white light, and he notices that lone tear. It would be all too perfect to weep with her and share in this moment of humanity but he’s stronger than that and so only gives the slightest nod of his head, a nod indicating for the torturer to proceed. Varying instruments of surgical steel rest on a metal tray beside the boy. Instruments that both parties have an intimate familiarity with. To say the experience has become sexual for the two of them is inaccurate, at first, perhaps, but now the relationship has become religious in nature. A divine sacrament between two consenting adults. A sacrament of surgical scars and love. Routine worship of a blade, the literal dissection of love. The welling of blood to fresh cuts, the methodical healing of the wounds, and then the soft angel hair scars that follow the healing process. The torturer’s hands were designed to scar, just as they were designed to caress the boy’s skin, to show him a love that the surrounding world would never understand and brand as criminal. Isn’t all love fetishistic and obscene? Instead of scalpels and medical instruments, others offer words of affirmation and monstruous betrayals, or verbal abuse and domestic strife. The torturer’s tear has fallen and it hits the sterile ground with virtual silence. A thin pale hand moves to the scalpel in the centre of the tray. Today, the torturer and the boy will make love, the only way they know how to.
