New Animal Ella Baxter (best books to read non fiction txt) 📖

the whole picture. I keep rolling my pant legs down until they pool around my ankles. I am in a low crouch as I slowly step out of each leg. I notice a few members of the audience wandering off.

I roll my underwear down over my legs, stepping out of them triumphantly with my arms above my head, and then pick them up and fling them into the crowd. They fall to the floor and lie there, crotch open to the ceiling. I’m really bringing the energy tonight. I should tell people that I’ve never done this before, never been naked on this scale before. They would probably be amazed at how I have taken to it like a duck to water. I look down over my naked body and do a slow cha cha cha. It’s actually fine being naked in public; not too weird at all.

‘Finished?’ Leo asks.

A tall moustachioed man from the crowd lifts a chair onto the stage and Leo drags it into the middle and tells me to kneel down and place my chest on it. I hold on to the legs of the chair, and press my forehead into the plastic seat. It smells like the tarpaulin in the shed back at home. It reminds me of camping. I try to relax, but the edge of the chair digs into the bottom of my ribs and I feel uncomfortable regardless of how many minor adjustments I make. I look behind me to see Leo, now shirtless and chatting animatedly to a woman in the audience. She laughs at something he says, as I continue waiting.

I should prepare for the kink. I flex my back like I was taught to do in a yoga class once, a little cat/cow action. Vincent’s meditation guide would say that I should make room to be present. I actively encourage my authentic self to bloom, but my nose is suddenly extremely itchy. I touch the tip of it against my shoulder, but it still feels like a sneeze is coming. My diaphragm is squashed, and my eyes are bulging with all the blood that is rushing to my head. I take what I hope to be a calming breath, and roll my knees in small, crunchy circles.

‘I’m ready,’ I say, turning back to Leo, and he gestures for me to stay where I am, before languidly arcing the whip over his shoulder in time to the music. I can see the woman in the first row still smiling at him as he steps forward in a lunge and throws the whip forward like a baseball. It cracks a foot away from the chair.

‘Um,’ I say, because there seemed to be a lot of effort behind that throw, ‘I feel like maybe that was a bit fast.’

He grins and raises a finger to his lips, shushing me, before pointing to a bouncer who is making sure that the front row of the audience is moving further back from the edge of the stage.

Leo lifts the whip up into the air again, and then cracks it on the ground at his feet. I’ve never seen someone wheel a whip around before, but I have watched fly fishing shows on TV with Jack, and it is very similar.

Leo walks over, the precious whip trailing behind him, then bobs down and winds my ponytail around one fist.

‘I don’t know what you said before,’ he says, pulling my head back until it hurts, ‘but it’s important you don’t move or speak while I’m whipping you, otherwise someone could get seriously hurt.’

‘That just seemed really fast, the way you piffed it forward like that,’ I say. ‘I’m arse-naked here, and all of this is a bit new.’

I shake my way out of his grasp and glower at him, and he laughs, pushing my face down onto the hard plastic. I wonder whether all sadists are like this, or if it’s just him. I’m not sure that I have the natural inclination to be subservient, and yet here I am, being told what to do while bent over a catering chair at a sex club. My mother is dead. I’m sad. I am young. I do have excuses.

More people are milling around the platform, attracted by the sense of danger that comes from being made to keep one’s distance. A woman steps into my line of vision wearing a corset that has squashed all the meat of her body up, so that it has collected in a great mound under her chin. She looks from Leo to me and I see her smile as the first strike lands across my thighs and I cry out in shock.

He whips me again, and like a thunderclap I am flung out of my flesh and into the ether.

I close my eyes and inhale, as my heart syncs to the beat of the music.

Leo hits me again, and everything between my scalp and heels tenses. I try to make eye contact with some of the onlookers, curious to see how they respond to someone being dismantled like this in front of them. Their faces will tell me if this is a routine whipping or not. I look around at the crowd, most of whom regard me impassively. No one is particularly moved by this. People look relatively calm as I am eviscerated in front of them. In a small corner of my psyche, I suspect it is because my body is now a stand-in for all bodies. People have gathered to watch somebody be crushed into the ground, and it doesn’t matter who, or how, but the fact that a body is suffering serves as a warning to their own. Look what I can do to you.

All feeling has gravitated towards the outer layers of my skin. I focus on the heat of my flesh, which feels as if it has split in two, and for a moment I can’t even locate my sadness, and the grief has flown out