Poison by Kathryn Harrison Read Free Book Online

his tongue. We had no time to squander on modest kisses. Besides, it mattered not where he began, it was as if he touched me everywhere at once. The soles of my feet blistered, and flames licked between my fingers in his hair.
    Trying to remain still under the tutelage of his tongue. Its tick-tick-ticking followed by a calculated, expert, teasing pause. He was the clock that made a mockery of time.
    My inner eye saw only sky. Despite the late hour and the darkened room, on my back I looked up to a bright day, a day flooded with light. He touched me, and I saw one filament spun by a worm, one almost invisible thread cast between two branches and hung glistening in the air. Bowed by a breeze but impossibly strong. Why did it not break? As soon as I asked the question,
snap
, the strand was gone. I was gone. I was what gave way and snapped.
    He pulled away from me. “When were you born?”
    I gasped. “Now,” I said. “I am … being born … now.”
    He touched me, my belly, my shoulders, my face. I touched him, too. Were we truly there? Was he? Was I? “
Bonissimus
. Yes,” he said. “You are being born now.”
    I felt the night sigh all around us, with us, through us. His lips seemed fuller when I could not see them, when I tried to know them by touch. I counted his teeth in the dark, I dug my fingersinto the soft, wet well of flesh under his tongue. I pulled him to me, into me.
    “Oh, please, I beg you. Please.” Arching toward them like a bow, trying to divorce my spine from the rack to which they make me fast. “Please. Further. Go further. Kill me. Split my heart, please. I am begging you.”
    They do this in the light. In the bright light. Standing near to me, making fast the ligatures, their robes are so long that they drag on the floor. Their hoods obscure their features, and all I can see of my tormentors is an occasional glint of light reflecting on the wet surface of their otherwise hidden eyes.
    The robes they wear and the hoods that preserve their anonymity are made of the most wonderful and lustrous silk. Silk so beautiful, so like the silk of which I dreamed when I was a child, that I find myself wanting to touch it. I wonder how it might feel under my fingers.
    Their robes are black, but a black that light reveals as containing all colors, a black that shimmers and glints red, green, purple: every hue. Their hoods are white, most of them, and a few are red. Those in red hoods are in charge, they direct those in white. One of them, one only, the one who asks the questions, is the head of this prison. He wears a purple hood.
    They do nothing in the dark, of course. They need light to see, they need light to write down what I say, to record my confession. But I can close my eyes. I need not be here, with them.
    Scindite cor meum
. Split my heart.
    I am remarkable for sheer mortal stubbornness. My flesh will not succumb, and its insistent clinging to life enrages them. Is interpreted as a sort of insolence. But it worries them, too: how can so seemingly frail a creature survive all this without the help of some higher, or lower, power?
    We begin with the rack, as usual we begin with the rack. After one White Hood secures my ankles and wrists in their shackles, after he turns a crank until I am stretched as taut as a harp string, another stops up my nostrils with wax. Wax he has kneaded with his fingers until it is warm and pliant, until the feelof it is as intimate and terrible as that of his fingers themselves. When my nose is sealed, he forces water into my entrails through my mouth, pouring it from a little height, enough that it courses through the funnel jammed between my teeth. It’s either swallow or drown, suffocate.
    As they do not want to kill me before they hear what I have to say, they stop after a jug or two, which I generally vomit, and then the Purple Hood begins his questions, after the caution that silence will likely result in further encouragements to make me speak.
    I’ve