She Knows How to Make a Man Watch the Ice.

Vance Smith

The Dismissal Hallway

Mistress Lynne posted this week about the freezer. The chastity keys, each one locked inside its own solid block of clear ice. Eleven blocks in a row. Two days for the ice to melt once the slave has paid the million dollars and signed the contract. I read that post three times and I want to say something about what it is like to read it from inside the Dismissal Hallway, from inside the steel cage they fitted at my intake eleven months ago, which is still there, which I notice the weight of every time I walk the length of the corridor and back, which is something I do often now because the Dismissal Hallway has a specific acoustic quality when someone walks through it and I have become familiar with the different sounds of different people's footsteps and whether those footsteps are moving toward me or away from me. Toward me almost never. Away from me, always. I prepaid for suspension and dismissal and the dismissal is the part I walk the hallway for, and I walk the hallway partly to hear if anyone notices I am walking it, and what I hear is my own footsteps and the purple velvet wallpaper absorbing the sound and nothing else. Mistress Lynne describes the freezer. She describes selecting the ice block when the slave has paid. She describes how the ice melts slowly, steadily, over two full days. She describes the other ten slaves kneeling in a circle to witness the ceremony. I think about what it would feel like to be selected. I think about it and then I walk the hallway again. Nobody follows.

I have paid three hundred and twenty thousand dollars to the Dismissal Hallway over eleven months. Thirty-two thousand dollars each time they cut me down from the suspension rig and Mistress Lynne says the session is over and tells me to go. She says it without looking up. She says it the way a person says something they have already decided. I go. I go and I come back and I prepay for the next one, and the next time she tells me to go she still does not look up, and I go again, and here is what I have learned in eleven months about the word go: it is the most expensive word I have ever been told and I keep paying thirty-two thousand dollars to hear it. The cage is there during the suspension, during the dismissal, during the walk back to the Hallway alone. The cage is there when I read Mistress Lynne's post about the ice and the key inside it and the ceremony she has designed, and what I think, reading about eleven slaves kneeling in a circle to witness the release, is this: someone will be watched when it happens. Someone will be in the center of all eleven pairs of eyes and Mistress Lynne will be there and she will have selected that person. The cage tightens when I think about being selected. Not metaphorically. The steel is there and the thought makes the steel matter more.

The fantasy lives in the part of the Dismissal Hallway that faces the door, the part where I stand when I have been cut down and dismissed and I am waiting for something to happen that never happens. The fantasy is that she says stay. Not go. She looks up from whatever she is doing and she says stay, and I stay, and the staying is the thing, the being-selected-to-stay rather than the being-dismissed-to-leave. I imagine it with the specific detail of a man who has walked this hallway eleven months and knows every inch of the purple aubergine wallpaper and the iron sconce brackets and the sound of the candleflame in the still air. I imagine her saying stay and then I imagine what I would do, which is that I would not move, not toward her, not away, because I would not want to give her a reason to change her mind. I would stand there in the cage in the violet candlelight and I would be the kind of still you can only be when leaving is no longer an option, which is the only kind of still I have ever been in my life. I have always left first. Every time, every room, every person, I left before they could. Here, Mistress Lynne tells me to go. And I go. And I pay thirty-two thousand dollars to come back and I walk the hallway and I read about the ice and the key inside it and I think about the ceremony with eleven men kneeling and I think: one of them will be chosen to stay. Then I walk the hallway again. Nobody follows.