The first fine-point felt-tip marker that pushed into his skin dragged a line from his right nipple down to his stomach. Dr. Tom Morris, Head of the English Department, flinched. He fought down a ludicrous urge to laugh and protest that he was ticklish. The immense woman wielding the marker had fingers thicker than his thigh and he didn’t dare give her more fuel for this torture session. He gritted his teeth and looked down to see her forming a livid red “R” in the center of his chest.
His eyes flew up to lock on hers. She smiled, an expression at once low, slow, and sweetly malicious.
“Ladies,” she said, standing up straight and addressing the party with one hand on her hip. “Thanks for coming to my interactive performance art piece,” she continued, bowing slightly at the crowd and gesturing to Tom. He had faced auditoriums full of people countless times before, but this was an order of magnitude more intimidating. Under the gaze of so many giant women, Tom’s arms and legs twitched against the restraints that held him in place, spread-eagle and nude. He would never have admitted it, but they terrified him.
“Where are my English majors? Care to explain to this arrogant little mansplainer the literary significance of this first, red letter?” Laughter and cheers bubbled up in response and he wanted to argue that as a tenured professor, his entire role was to explain things to young minds. Could he help that he was a man?
“Let him figure it out from context clues!” Applause and whistles filled the ancient, poorly lit house. Black walls, black lights, paper lanterns, and twinkle lights set the mood for a sex party, but Tom didn’t feel the least bit sexy.
Even the university faculty had known for years about the house on Paphos Lane. Aphrodite’s Trashy Shack of Love. He’d harbored secret fantasies about the place, though clearly this year’s class of witchy, frigid feminist bitches who lived here seemed especially trashy.
He’d been such an idiot to come tonight. This mad bitch had looked hot but deceptively harmless when she’d invited him to “a gallery opening.” No hint that she’d had him in mind for the main attraction.
Eight hours later and he was eight inches tall, buck fucking nude, and taped to a square of white canvas like a specimen. A table lamp highlighted his embarrassingly pale skin and the bucket of enormous black markers beneath his feet. The only saving grace, he felt, was that he was in the best shape of his life, far more handsome at forty as a man with discipline than the horny, beer-guzzling college student he’d been at their age. Maybe one of them would find him attractive and take pity on him.
He’d never wished for pity before.
“Everyone’s signed my release forms,” said the bitch. “So remember the rules.” She walked behind him and draped her arms over the tacky gilded frame. Tom eyed her left hand warily as she trailed her fingers across the canvas, over his knee, thigh, and flaccid penis. Tremors of humiliation and dread ran through him.
“Anything goes, short of actual physical damage,” she said, ticking off rules on those dangerous fingers. “One party guest, one chance to draw or write. We can flip him if you get especially creative. Leave his face and cock blank, they’re reserved for the one other person who’s here tonight with a red marker who’s here tonight.” She twirled her own red marker in her right hand.
"Ready to make some art?"
She smiled at the cheers and moved away from Tom, who had the short-sightedness to be relieved. She removed a black cloth from an object across from him. A phone on a tripod.
"Let the livestream begin!"
Tom stared at the camera lens and thought of all the years of hard work about to be crushed under the weight of this frigid cunt's ego.
Before he could dwell on it, a blonde plucked a marker from the bucket, popped off the cap, and shoved the tip into the skin of his arm. He yelped at the intrusive pen jabbing him in the bicep, but she ignored him.
His eyes widened at the sudden assault on the bottom of his foot, which was even more ticklish than his chest. Some other bitch wasn’t patient enough to wait her turn. He twisted and strained against the bindings, which he was mortified to realize were simple pieces of Scotch tape. The women walked away laughing.
His bicep now read “ASSHOLE” and his foot, “IDIOT.”
A jaded-looking nontraditional student in a leather jacket stepped up to the plate, picked a marker, and leaned in close to write on his thigh.
“Everyone knows what you did to that sophomore. But I was here ten years ago. I’m not letting you leave my sight without paying for what you did.”
“Misogynist trash” stamped the skin of his thigh in shaky, angry letters. He stared up at her and felt true fear as she toyed with a corner of the tape binding his arm to the canvas. Suddenly he wanted that tape in place more than anything.
“Hey!” he shouted, looking for the lead bitch. “Hey, can someone help me out here?” The women nearest to him laughed. “Coward,” one said, then wrote that on his shin.
The menacing woman retreated to a battered velvet chair in the corner, but hadn’t taken her eyes off him.
More words.
He was soon shaking so hard from fury, he couldn’t believe the tape still held him. He fantasized about tearing the marker away from one blonde sorority girl as she leaned over him to write a long paragraph in the white space of the canvas above him. He imagined pulling open her shirt to write lurid, unfair things on her perky little tits. They were enormous to him now, but that was hardly his fault.
“Staring at my chest, aren’t you?” she said, startling him from his fantasy. She continued writing, but asked, “like what you see?”
“There's small choice in rotten apples,” he sneered up at her.
Without missing a beat, the arrogant little cunt spat the Shakespeare right back in his face. “What’s wrong, not enjoying your 'whipping at the high cross’?”
A smattering of applause reminded him he was surrounded. The blonde took her time writing.
When she pulled back, it was with an air of revulsion, as if she couldn’t stand to be near him. Then she tucked her hair behind her ear and spoke with a dangerous calmness. “May you reap everything you’ve sown, you sadistic prick.” She took the edges of the frame in her hands and nobody made a move to stop her. He could feel the canvas vibrate with her tension. “May Hecate tear your heart from your body and leave the pieces of you at the crossroads and force feed you your own pride.” She gritted her teeth and glared at him, mere inches away.
“You’re insane!” he shouted at her. “You’re all fucking psychopaths! I will have every one of you expelled and arrested—”
“May the dark Goddess bless you with the true understanding of your actions, and empathy for those who have survived you.” She spoke with a cold and awful passion that seemed to silence even the music. The room full of women held its collective breath.
Her face twisted with hatred as she loomed over him and pressed the tip of her marker into his cock. With dread, he realized that she’d been writing this whole time with the only other red marker in the room.
“What’s wrong, can’t get it up this time?” she spat. “Your cock is too small to write on properly.” Instead, she wrote “RAPIST” in the space between his legs. An arrow took aim at his penis.
She capped the marker and threw it on the table below his feet like a gauntlet. “You will never speak to me, never touch me again, you worthless excuse for a human being.” Then she turned and walked out of the room, several friends following protectively in her wake.
All eyes followed her.
It happened so quickly he didn’t realize what the tearing sensation meant until his body lifted from the canvas.
A grip like a demon launched him on a disorienting, jolting ride through the air and into a dark confined space. The smell of leather and cigarettes buffeted him. He shouted and threw himself against the fabric, trying to get to his feet and climb to freedom, but his prison was too dark and confusing, and besides, it was moving. Quickly.
A car door. Keys jingling. An engine. Vibrations. The Cure.
Silence.
The hand returned and cinched around him. Run, run, he thought. I should fight this. I have to run.
The anger that had sustained him through the horrific “gallery opening” drained away as he stared up at the woman in the black leather jacket. From his vantage, he could see massive round thighs swelling on either side of him like prison walls. Her face illuminated with a burst of livid firelight as she lit a cigarette. It fell to darkness again, but he could still see her eyes. Watching.
“You are disgraced,” she said around a mouthful of slow smoke. “Impeach'd and baffled here.”
She took another long drag, then stabbed the unspent cigarette into the car’s ashtray. She pulled something oblong from a bag at her side. A big, red dildo. She set it between her thighs right in front of him, where it towered over him.
He turned and bolted, fully intending to launch himself off the car seat into the darkness of the floorboard. Maybe he could hide under the—
Her enormous hand snatched him and flipped him over, then suspended him up-side down like a piece of trash. He turned red as she took the time to read all the words branding his skin with shame.
“Pierced to the soul with slander's venom'd spear,” she continued. From the opening act of Richard II, some part of him knew. He no longer taught the tragedies. But he had when he’d first been hired here. He searched his memories for the girl this woman thought she was avenging. Which girl? There had been so many parties.
He panicked again when she held him one-handed against the sickeningly soft surface of the dildo. He thrashed as she pulled the elastic band from her ponytail and pushed it over the top of the sex toy, then twisted it and wrapped him again. The binding was alarmingly tight, and he strained to breathe. I should fight this!
To his humiliation, he didn’t fight at all as she set him and the dildo on the car seat again.
“The which no balm can cure... but his heart-blood.” Her eyes brimmed with emotion but her face was ferocious with a kind of lust he himself hadn’t known in years. Three parts power, one part desire to own another with absolute certainty.
“Please, don’t do this! Let it go! Do you really want to pay this price?” he asked hoarsely. It was hard to pull in enough air to shout up at her while the band compressed his ribs. “What if you can’t forget what you do to me?”
She lifted her skirt and pulled down her panties, shoving them past her knees. “Doesn’t seem to have bothered you one bit.”
There he stood, eight inches tall between the thighs of a she-demon. Humbled and bearing the marks of a rapist, and though he couldn’t recall his sins, he also couldn’t deny them any longer.
“Deep malice makes too deep incision,” his brain offered him, as he froze, unable to resist, unable to run. “Forget, forgive,” came the next line, but he couldn’t remember the rest. She took him deep, and did not let him go.