“Wakey-wakey! I have a surprise for you!” I opened my eyes and saw a gold wedding band held up to my face. My mouth was gagged, so I could only groan. Mitski was always especially cruel when we were married. Had we been married before? The woman in surgical smocks giggled at me.

“Baby, while you have me, for richer or for poorer, for sicker or in health?” Mitski gripped my restrained hand, forced my fingers open, and put the finger on me. My trembling muscles were too weak to resist. Humming to herself, Mitski turned her attention to something I couldn’t see. My senses slowly returned, and I took in my predicament. We were in a lab… we were back in her lab! In her basement! I remembered it now, clearly, what was behind the basement my eyes had slid off of for weeks on end. We were downstairs in Mitski’s basement lab and I was strapped to a gurney, practically cocooned by leather and velco, barely able to breath in the restraints, totally unable to shift my head, a needle in my arm connected to the IV bag just inside my peripheral vision…

Why was I here? What did Mitski do here? Sluggishly, I recalled what happened last time               -

Mitski shushed me as I screamed and screamed. She held up a syringe for me to see. “Don’t worry, sweetie. I have your memories of our wedding right here.”

Mitski, the woman I left my wife of 20 years for, because I was drawn to her passion and her sexual appetite… No! Bullshit! She was not the gorgeous secretary I had affairs with at the office! She was not my childhood friend who had been with me through thick and thin! She was not the manic pixie dream girl who rescued me from drudgery! Mitski was a monster, and those memories of late-night comfort or spring bike rides or pina coladas in the rain were bullshit!

My head hurt as I tried to remember who Mitski really was and how I met her. A vortex of happy memories scrapped at the inside of my skull. Mitski merrily hummed and danced in place as she stuck a syringe into the IV, then a second, then a third, then a fourth. My insides boiled with fear. Memories were mixing together in the saline like Schlieren lines. Mitski was experimenting on me. She was testing combinations of desires, fears, traumas, and deprivations in order to design a choke chain for my soul.

I must have been an easy target because my dad beat me… No, wait, my dad left us when I was too young to remember. But, didn’t he die in that car crash? Didn’t both my parents die in that car crash? Something was wrong. The scraps around my teeth were so tight there was no danger of me biting my tongue. No, of course, those memories were fake. None of the bad things happened. My breathing accelerated.

Mitski smiled kindly on my struggles. Mitski, the only woman who would touch me after what that older boy did…. STOP! Mitski, the only woman who could forgive after what I did to that girl in college… STOP! Mitski, the only woman who would touch the body that disgusted people for my entire life… NO! STOP! Mitski, the only woman who had the patience to love me after decades of being afraid of other people… NO! STOP! BULLSHIT! Mitski, the only woman who ever smiled at a pathetic man like me who didn’t deserve to be alive because surely if I was a good person I wouldn’t want to kill myself… FUCK YOU, MITSKI! FUCK YOU!

“Poor thing.” Mitski wiped my tears with her hand, then stepped back and reached under my gown. The moment her fingers touched my balls, it was like Pinocchio’s strings were cut. My panicking body, my swirling memories… they weren’t important anymore. As Mitski stroked my cock in steady rhythm, I dissociated further and further. My blood absorbed new memories. Numbness turned into darkness and as I drifted down into that dreamless slumber, switched off as easily as a machine, I realized that I would be a new person when I woke up and I felt nothing, except Mitski.