After she gets off work, she usually stops by my place, and we decide what we’re going to do that night. She’s always been spontaneous and doesn’t like to plan ahead. She called me and told me that she was going to go out for drinks with her coworkers and would come by later that evening. I was happy that she was going to hang out with other friends, and I know that interaction with other friends is important in any healthy relationship. So I was happy she was having fun.

I sat there watching a marathon of a car show on Netflix that she doesn’t like to watch with me, and when I had binged two complete seasons, I realized that it was getting really late. She had to work the next morning, and happy hour had ended a long time ago. I tried calling and texting her, but she never answered. I started to get worried and paranoid (as you do when you care about someone, thinking that they’ve been in an accident or something). After hours of freaking out, she finally came home at 3:00am.

Relieved, annoyed, and curious—I tried to ask her where she’d been. She gave a vague answer about being out with her coworkers, and she said that she was really tired and drunk and just wanted to go to sleep. I decided to set the curiosity and annoyance aside and decide to just be okay that she was home safe with me.

That was the first night, and every night after that, she’d have a different excuse with a different activity that she was doing. At first, it didn’t bother me too much. I knew that she needed to have some time to herself and didn’t need to spend every moment with me. It wasn’t until she gave the excuse that she was going to get a mani-pedi with her best friend and came home with neither manicured fingernails nor toenails that I became truly suspicious.

Anytime that I tried to confront her about it, she got very defensive, shouting at me that I needed to trust her and that we didn’t need to spend all our time together. The only problem is that we were now almost no waking time together. She would come home exhausted and would always go right to sleep. We’d not had sex in weeks.

Because of all these factors, I had to assume the worst that she had found someone else and was cheating on me. I was devastated but had to know for sure before I went ahead and ended things with her. (I loved her, after all, and had been planning on marrying her, but ongoing infidelity like this is a dealbreaker for me.) I decided that I needed to follow her to know for sure.

I called in sick for work yesterday and waited outside her office in a rented car so that she wouldn’t notice me when I followed her. She left out the back door of her building at exactly 5:01pm and almost ran to her car. She backed up and pulled out with a screech, and I followed her. I followed her through downtown, past a suburb, and into an industrial yard. At this point, I was baffled and frankly scared. This was not exactly a typical clandestine romantic rendezvous locale.

I saw her park her car and enter a building. I drove around the back and parked my own car and found a fire escape was next to a small, broken, and grimy window. Through it, I could see and hear fairly well, but unless someone specifically looked for me, they wouldn’t ever notice me. I saw that there were about thirty people gathered. The large warehouse space was bare except for a couple of tables with hors d’oeurves and drinks and something that looked like a tetherball pole without the ball. The people there were greeting my girlfriend and a few others who had just arrived.

At first, it seemed like a normal social gathering—talking, laughing, eating, and drinking. But suddenly, as, I’m assuming, the last person arrived everyone got quiet and began to sit down. There were no seats in the building, so the only place to sit was on the floor. They didn’t all sit down at once. One person stood to the right of the pole; my girlfriend sat to her right, slightly angled, the third sat to her right—again, slightly angled. This continued, everyone sitting down one at a time, in turn, until all of them but two sat down, forming a spiral formation, with the pole at the center.

One person remained standing on the outside of the spiral formation. I thought that she was going to go to her spot and sit down on the end of the spiral. Instead, she stopped just before the beginning of the spiral formation and removed all her clothing. People kept their eyes fixed directly in front of them, everyone remained unnaturally immobile. The woman, now wearing nothing but large golden hoop earrings, began to walk forward, very slowly, right next to where people were sitting. As she passed the first man, I saw him extend both his hands, which held a box cutter each, and he cut her legs once each as she walked by. She grimaced but otherwise didn’t react as the first man cut her and said, “One. Two.” He put his hands down once he made the cuts and pronounced the words. He turned his head slowly to face the second person. The speed of his head turn matched the pace at which the naked woman walked. At the same moment she was directly in front of the second person, the first man’s head was turned to look directly at the second person. Person number two extended her arms, which contained two pieces of broken glass, and cut the nude woman, just above the first man’s cuts, as she said, “Three. Four.”

The same thing continued as the woman made her way through the spiral. Each person would cut the woman twice and say what number of cut they were, and she would proceed forward as the last cutter turned their head toward the next person. They never moved their heads after they had turned. They just kept their eyes fixed on the back of the next person’s head. She reached my girlfriend, who cut her saying, “Sixty-one. Sixty-two.” My girlfriend slowly turned to the standing woman next to her, staring at her leg.

The woman did her two cuts, but rather than a cut on the legs as the other cuts were, she did a cut on her breasts, bifurcating each nipple, “Sixty-three. Sixty-four.” The naked woman then proceeded to the pole. Her nipples were now streaming blood that trickled down her torso, and the blood droplets intermingled with the other cuts on her legs and feet, which were now glossed in red. She stood with her back to the pole, and reached up with her hands, grabbed hold of her gold hoop earrings, and pulled as she screamed, “Sixty-five. Sixty-six!” The earrings ripped through her earlobes, and she let the earrings drop and tinkle on the ground.

She put her hands behind her back, around the pole, and the person standing next to her proceeded to wrap her hands with duct tape so that the naked woman was bound to the pole. The woman facing her began to speak as she pulled out a stack of photographs from one pocket and something that looked like a doll’s head from the other. She said, “May you have the strength to do what I cannot! One!” As she said that, she took on of the photos and pulled a needle from the doll’s head (it must have been a pincushion) and pinned the photo onto the naked woman, right in the middle of her chest. The woman on the pole screamed as the needle entered her flesh.

As the needle entered, everyone’s heads snapped back in unison so that they were all facing forward again. Then the person at the end, as if receiving a signal from somewhere, turned his head to face the person next to him. This started a chain reaction, like some sort of fucked up wave, down the line. Once my girlfriend turned toward the person facing the bound woman, who pinned another photo (it looked as if it was of a man) to the woman, “Two!” Everyone’s heads snapped back.
This continued for a very long time, until the woman pronounced “Sixty-five!” as she drove yet another pin into the woman’s shoulder to hold down a photo of the same man. She then unsheathed a long knife that had been at her side. She cut the tape that bound the naked, now bloody and shaking, woman’s hands, and she handed the knife over. The domino heads started again until it reached the center, and the woman facing the bleeding woman handed her the last needle and the last photograph. The naked woman took them, and said, “May I have the strength to do what you cannot! Sixty-six!” She inserted the pin right into her belly button and held yet another photo in place.
This seemed to be the end of the ritual as everyone began to clap and stand up. They went up to the two women at the end and appeared to be congratulating them. My girlfriend was one of the first to talk to them, and I noticed the pincushion doll head get passed to her.

I had to go. I couldn’t let them find me here. Who knows what they would do to me if they found me? I quietly pulled away, with my headlights off, and drove to a hotel and paid with cash. There was no way in hell that I was going to stay at home.

I texted my girlfriend and told her that I had a last-minute business trip I had to take and would be out of town. She texted me back saying that she really wanted me back the next day. I told her I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to. She sent me a photo of her boobs and said, “I’ll make it worth your while.” Not wanting to let on that anything was wrong, I text her back, “You make two very compelling arguments. I’ll be back at all costs!”

The next day, I waited until I was sure that she was at work and went to gather my stuff. Adrenaline pumped through me as I gathered up as many of my things as quickly as I could. I was in the bedroom when I felt chills run through me and my stomach turn. Sitting on her nightstand was the doll head pincushion and a stack of photos turned upside down. I went over to them and flipped the photos over. They were of me, sixty-six of them to be exact, and there was one pin to match each photo stuck in the pincushion.

She keeps texting me and sexting me, trying to make sure I’m home tonight. I don’t know what’s going on or what to think, but I wish she’d just been cheating on me.

Last edited: 19-Jun-14 09:13 AM

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