Tighten the strings. Tighten the strings. Tighten the strings. They have to be tight. They have to hold. Straighten the feathers. Straighten the feathers. Straighten the feathers. All in alignment, good. Check the wax. Check the wax. Check the wax. Sealed. It should hold. It should. God, I hope this works.

Gripping his son’s thin shoulders -- He seems so frail… Is this really a good idea? -- He repeated the instructions. Again. Three times. It had to be three or it wouldn’t work.

No, wait. He shook his head to ground himself, to come back to reality. That’s crazy. He shook his head again. Three is just a number. One more shake, just in case. It doesn’t have to be three, it just has to be right. He nodded once in determination. Then two more times.

“Do you understand?”

His son rolled his eyes and shifted his feet the way he always did when he was embarrassed and uncomfortable with his father’s quirks. “Yes, yes, yes.”

“Don’t mock me. This is important.”

He let out a long suffering sigh. “Yes. I understand. It will be fine. Stop worrying.”

“Good.” Good. Good. He squeezed the delicate shoulder bones. Once. And quickly turned away.

“Let’s go then.”

They made their way to the window, checking to see that the coast was clear. He went out first, squeezing through, careful not to damage the wings. He leaped off the ledge and let the brisk sea wind catch his wings and carry him upwards. Not too high. But high enough. He looked back to see his son doing the same, just as instructed, a huge grin painted across his youthful face. He took a deep breath. Then another. And another.

As they flew out across the ocean, he began to relax. It’s working! It’s working! It’s working! He smiled for the first time and enjoyed the view. The waves cresting below. The clouds above. The seagulls flapping curiously nearby, yet still maintaining a cautious distance from these bizarre creatures which should not be flying. His son. His only son. Healthy and unharmed and soaring beside him to safety.

Hours passed and he mentally checked and rechecked and rechecked his calculations. They seemed to be on course. They would make it.

Toward midday, the clouds parted and the sun beamed down at them, warming their cheeks. It was a welcome sight, after many long days locked in a dark cell. They shared a smile of pure joy at the freedom and wonder of it all. His son let out a whoop of elation and began swooping about, this way and that, dipping and rising.

“Be careful!” he shouted, still relaxed, enjoying his son’s happiness.

“Don’t worry so much!” he called back. Laughing in delight, he spun in loops, experimenting and trying new moves and tricks. Just as I do with my inventions. He sighed with pride, denying the niggling little worry creeping back in. A quick mental check of their course would calm him. Or three.

Satisfied, he glanced over at where his son had been. His heart lurched when he realized how high the boy had gone while his mind was elsewhere. His breath caught in his throat when he saw a feather fall, released from its position as the wax softened. Then a second. And a third.

Before he could even cry out, the whole contraption collapsed and the boy hung in motionless bewilderment for one endless moment.

As his son plunged through the air in front of him, their shocked eyes met. He tried to grab his shoulders in his hands. They came back grasping only thin, frail, delicate feathers. Numb, he squeezed them two more times.

He had trained her to do many things to please him. Things that she never would have considered doing before. He had trained her to enjoy doing them. He turned her into a thoroughly domesticated pet. He had studied hypnotism. Psychosexual possession was very important to him in a mate. She was completely and utterly possessed.

The break-up was hard. He said he couldn’t tell her why. He didn’t know why and didn’t want to know. It wasn’t messy. He wasn’t mean. She didn’t cry, at least not in front of him. It was all very civilized and amicable. But she had grown accustomed to having someone to belong to, someone to be faithful to.

What had she done wrong? She was nice, accommodating, easy to get along with. She was a good listener. She could sit at his feet and just listen to him talk for hours. She wasn’t messy or demanding. She always respected his space and his boundaries and didn’t expect him to listen to her own dull womanly thoughts. He said that she looked good (she had no idea about such things). She was completely and utterly faithful to him but did not ask for the same in return. She loved the idea of him fucking other women, whether it was one or a few regular ones, or just a string of strangers. The idea excited her. She loved to listen to his stories of all the women he’d had.

She had been told that her cock-sucking skills were excellent and that she had a tight pussy. She was very enthusiastic about sex and all things sexual. She certainly never withheld sex for any reason, but was also careful not to be too demanding. Except when it came to begging to drink his cum or his piss. He said he liked it when she did that.

Her thoughts were addressed to him and only him. But suddenly they had nowhere to go. No outlet. So they just stalled and got all jumbled up and confused. She felt her skull might burst wide open from the pressure of all those building burning thoughts. She became so overwhelmed that the only viable option was to just stop thinking.

He wanted to be single. He wanted to meet new people and play the field for a while. He wanted to get married and have children. But not with her. He wanted someone he could show off and be seen with in public. He wanted to psychosexually possess someone hotter than his high school girlfriend. She had said he could do all those things and still have her on the side.

But that wasn’t what he wanted. She wasn’t what he wanted. She was too much of a distraction. She was too addictive. Shouldn’t being addictive be sort of a good thing in this case?

At first he said they shouldn’t have any contact at all for a few years. Then they could chat once in a while. She spent those first days in bed. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t drink. She faded in and out of consciousness as the thoughts of the past and future swam and dissolved, drowning in their own acidic bile, the juices leaking out of her nose and mouth and tear ducts.

When he called her that first time, in the early hours of the morning because of the time difference, she was ecstatic. She knew it didn’t mean anything, but the contact was intoxicating after that period of withdrawal. She kept her voice light and casual, letting his wash over her in a baptismal flood. She knew it didn’t mean anything. It didn’t mean anything.

It became a regular thing. Those early morning calls. Always light and impersonal. They talked about movies and current events, the comings and goings outside their windows. They laughed sometimes. It was a lifeline. Whenever the phone reception faded out and in, her heart stopped and started along with it. She didn’t want to miss anything important. She didn’t want to miss anything at all. And she knew if it faded out too much, it would bring the call to an end.

The days became unbearable. She tried to distract herself with music, tv, books. She slept when she could. She ate or she didn’t. It didn’t matter. She tried to numb the explosive sorrow with every intoxicant she could get her hands on. She drank an entire bottle of vodka before eight am and cried. She took pills. She had never really been all that into drugs or drinking. They didn’t mean much to her one way or the other. It was just something to try. She drifted through time purposelessly.

She wanted to do the things that he would have wanted her to do if she still belonged to him. Healthy things. Productive things. Exercise. Get a job. Drink the daily recommended amount of water. Socialize. But she wasn’t supposed to be his anymore. She wasn’t supposed to be anything anymore. There was no one to please. There were no rules. No structure. No instructions to follow. There was nothing and no one. She was nothing and no one.

The thoughts continued to jumble and mumble and rumble in the void of her mind. They bubbled and boiled, coalesced into tangled strings and knots. The juices dripped from the holes in her face, either wiped away with tissue or left to fall as they would. It didn’t matter.

She tried to make sense of the past, to envision a future. To survive the present. She missed human contact, a warm body. She took to carrying a teddy bear.

She was very sexual, very sensual. She loved to touch and be touched. Kiss and be kissed. She had been his three-hole slut. She had performed unspeakable acts and loved every moment of it. She’d always eagerly dropped to her knees at his command. She craved the challenge of being pushed just beyond her limits, of honing her skills. She felt most at ease when she was fully submitting to her Master, utterly dominated: body, mind and soul.

But that was gone. With nothing on the horizon. Even if there had been a potential candidate for a sexual partner (the thought of which was quite incomprehensible to her), she didn’t know how to make the transition. In her heart, she still belonged to him. She felt like she would need to ask his permission or it would be a betrayal of trust, the ultimate unfaithful act.

But if she did ask permission, it would be disobedient according to the new rules. All interactions were to be kept light and impersonal. No emotional discussions or displays. She was caught in an awkward in-between world; she specifically was not supposed to belong to him, but she absolutely and completely did. She had to pretend to be disobedient in order to obey the new instructions. Any failure to comply could result in a total loss of contact.

They had often talked about tattooing his symbol on her somewhere. Either he would do it himself or they would just have it done. She knew that he wouldn’t want to keep her around forever so she had wanted it done as soon as possible, so after he was gone she would always have that to remind her that she had once been his, was still his, if only in her own mind. But she would have to pay for it herself and she never had the money. He said it would be too much like prostitution otherwise. Now, even if she got the money, she was afraid it would be a violation of boundaries to have his symbol tattooed on her body, to carry his mark permanently, knowing that she was no longer his, knowing that she would always be his. And again, she couldn’t ask him about it. She could feel the mark burning through her flesh day by day, desperate to manifest itself and be acknowledged.

My heart is breaking. How many times could it break? How many times could it shatter before it was just a pile of dust that blows away in the wind?

Maybe that’s what happened before. Maybe this was a new heart that he had given her when he picked her up from the ashes of her former life and roughly dusted her off. Like a magically regrown appendage on a starfish. Maybe that’s why it hurt more this time, because it was freshly healed and new, uncalloused and pure. If that’s how it worked, she didn’t want another one. She didn’t want to have another appendage to be ripped off, dried up and shattered. Shattered and shattered and shattered until there was only dust. Again. And again. And again.

If he had given her this heart, then perhaps it was his right to do with as he pleased. No matter how much it hurt. Maybe he had only loaned it to her in the first place and had simply collected his debt on the way out. If she had known that, would she still have accepted it from him? Yes. She would have.

The ashes of it still belonged to him. The wind would blow it to him, even to the ends of the earth, until it settled into the carpet at his feet, into the sheets he slept on, into his hair and his clothing, mixed with the lint and receipts and loose change in his pockets. Eventually it would be vacuumed up, washed away and down the drain. Into the trash and the landfill. Into the sewer. Ashes to ashes; dust to dust.

The world was shutting down over the flu. Wherever they were in a few days, that’s where they’d be for who knew how long. She wanted to be with him, or him with her. But he didn’t want that. He specifically didn’t want that.

She was a good writer and wrote stories just for him. He was the one that encouraged her to start writing in the first place. But now she had no one to write for. So the words dried up and disappeared. Maybe they were somewhere in that roiling tangled mess of thoughts in her head, but she couldn’t find them.

Someone once said that it’s good to hug a puppy and it’s wrong to kick a puppy. But if you hug a puppy and teach it to love you and train it to be loyal to you, is it not better to just kick it until it hates you enough to go away when you tire of it? Rather than to politely abandon it on the street? To sweetly order it not to follow you when it has nowhere else to go? No one else to follow? Would it not be more merciful in that case to kick it and kick it hard until it went away? Would it not be better still to find a new Master to care for it? Someone worthy of its trust and loyalty if the old Master finds that it has grown tiresome?

How does one put one foot in front of the other when one has no direction? Putting one foot in front of the other while facing east is going backward if you’re actually supposed to be going west. Putting one foot in front of the other could lead you off a cliff if you don’t know where you’re going. Perhaps it would be best to just sit and be still, to kneel patiently as she had been taught, and await further instruction.

So you like me to play dead. You’ve commanded me to be silent, still, unresponsive. You caress me with your words, teasing, tantalizing. The juices of my consciousness begin to flow. I am wet and ready for you. Waiting for whatever comes next. My senses screaming, I am completely blind to your next move. And then it comes. Playful now, tickling my fancy so skillfully. Still, I do not respond. Now you’re in my ears, filling them with the sound of your mesmerizing voice, hypnotizing my psyche, as your whispers echo through the cathedral of my skull. But I remain quiet. Your words push and pull at me, sucking me in, thrusting me away, manipulating me effortlessly. My heart races. My breath quickens. And yet I am but a ghost, who cannot speak, or see, or touch. But you touch me. You touch me with your mind. Touch me and touch me and touch. Harder now. And faster. You pummel me relentlessly, penetrating my mind until it is no longer mine. Until you own me. Completely. The staccato of letters pound into me ruthlessly, driving every thought from my brain, except the desire to be there with you. But instead, I lie lifelessly, hiding behind this cloak of silence. Awaiting your next command.