{"id":4343,"date":"2009-01-16T21:54:35","date_gmt":"2009-01-16T21:54:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=4343"},"modified":"2009-01-17T00:11:05","modified_gmt":"2009-01-17T00:11:05","slug":"chicken-soup-for-the-sadomasochist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/chicken-soup-for-the-sadomasochist\/","title":{"rendered":"Chicken Soup for the Sadomasochist"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Tom Barlow.<\/p>\n

Donnie begs Alicia to heat the alligator clip over the flame of the stove burner before she pinches it onto his nipple.<\/p>\n

“This is not my idea of a date,” she says, bouncing the clip in her palm. “How about I just put a dry cleaner bag over your head and go home?”<\/p>\n

Face-up, naked, roped at two, four, eight and ten o’clock to the legs of the dining room table, Donnie is unconsciously wriggling one chaffed wrist. For a self-professed pain junkie, he has little control over aversion reactions.<\/p>\n

“It’s about the journey, not the destination.” His voice sounds like gravel tossed down a dry drainage pipe. Hours of July heat trapped inside the house, windows shut to muffle his screams, and he’d made her promise — no water. He’d ordered her to fix herself a pitcher of iced tea and drink it slow, inches from his eyes.<\/p>\n

“This is excruciating,” she says, picking up the tea pitcher. She holds it over his foot, tilts until a thin stream of liquid dribbles onto his toes. Slowly, she starts up his leg.<\/p>\n

“You promised to hurt me.”<\/p>\n

She pauses for a moment, entranced by the goose bumps emerging along the tea line. “Sorry. I only promised what I could imagine.” She resumes the pour, now inches above his knee and heading north.<\/p>\n

“I told you I was a sick fuck when we met.” He had stopped sweating an hour before, but now his forehead is glistening again.<\/p>\n

“Yeah, but I thought you meant an ordinary sick fuck. What kind of a come-on line is that, anyway?” She changes course slightly, following the perimeter of the pubic zone.<\/p>\n

“God, that feels good,” he says, “and not in a bad way. Stop it.”<\/p>\n

She takes a slight detour north and lets the trickle fill his navel. When it starts to overflow, she leans over and sucks it dry. Salty, sour.<\/p>\n

She says, “I hate it that after you told me you were a sick fuck you waited to see if I was still interested.” She starts down the line of stomach hair leading from his navel to his groin. His penis is retreating, like the head of a turtle pulling back into its shell.<\/p>\n

“You hate yourself for not walking away?”<\/p>\n

“Would rejection have made you happy? Happy about being sad?” She dips her hand in the pitcher, grabbing several ice cubes. “Can we ever be happy together if I don’t hate myself too?” She presses her palm to his forehead, trapping the cubes against his skin.<\/p>\n

“God, that feels good,” he says, his hands kneading the air beyond the zip ties. “Quit it.”<\/p>\n

“Shush,” she says. “Give it a minute. So you need pain because, what, you’re happy but you don’t deserve to be happy? But if torturing you is making me miserable, that makes you happy, which is sad? I don’t think it’s possible to be a sadist and a masochist at the same time.”<\/p>\n

She can tell when the ice cream headache begins by the way his eyes bulge. “Oh, fuck me, that hurts. There isn’t a person alive that isn’t a mass of contradictions.”<\/p>\n

“You’re welcome.” She picks up the pitcher, sloshes it a bit to distribute the coldest tea, then, winking at him, dumps the entire contents on his crotch. Donnie’s eyes roll back into his skull for a moment, then reappear, tears swelling at the corners. He’s gasping for breath.<\/p>\n

“You are so good,” he says when he finally regains his voice. “You’re the best ever.”<\/p>\n

She lifts her hand, letting the ice cubes roll off his forehead. Picks up the filet knife from the counter and circles the table, cutting the rope bonds.<\/p>\n

“What’s wrong?” he says, rolling heavily onto his side.<\/p>\n

She picks up her purse from the counter, shaking it once to locate her car keys. “I can’t stand a Pollyanna. I’m too good for you, you know?”<\/p>\n

“Wait. You didn’t take me seriously, I hope?” He sits up, hands cupping his frozen balls.<\/p>\n

“Honey, there’s not enough pain here for the both of us. You know what I feel when you’re screaming at the top of your lungs?”<\/p>\n

He shrugs, eyes still watering.<\/p>\n

“Self esteem. Now who’s the sick fuck?”<\/p>\n

She pinches him on the arm, hard, as she walks out, relishing the look of longing on his face.<\/p>\n

\"tom-barlow2\"ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong>
\nOther stories of Tom Barlow’s<\/a> may be found in The Apalachee Review, Hobart, The Duck & Herring Pocket Field Guide, Hiss Quarterly, Thieves Jargon, the Steel City Review<\/em> and many other magazines, as well as print anthologies including Book of Dead Things, Desolate Places<\/em> and Hard-Boiled Horror<\/em>. \u00a0His story “My Daughter of Many Colours” was recently named a Notable Story for 2007 by the Million Writer’s Award, and \u00a0his story “Call Me Mr. Positive,” which appears in the anthology Best of the Intergalactic Medicine Show<\/em>, was called “brilliantly sardonic” by Publisher’s Weekly<\/em>. \u00a0He’s a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"tom-barlow2\"Donnie begs Alicia to heat the alligator clip over the flame of the stove burner before she pinches it onto his nipple. “This is not my idea of a date,” she says, bouncing the clip in her palm. “How about I just put a dry cleaner bag over your head and go home?” Face-up, naked, roped at two, four, eight and ten o’clock to the legs of the dining room table, Donnie is unconsciously wriggling one chaffed wrist. For a self-professed pain junkie, he has little control over aversion reactions.<\/p>\n

By Tom Barlow<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4343\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}