(Threshold, Nick Brown, 2006, watercolor on paper, 14" x 22")

The trainer brings me to the room after I’ve been fed for the night and she has seen with her own eyes the movement of my bowels. They still take these precautions, though it has been a year since I was first made available to Red Peter. On that night, when, in the desperation of his desire, he threatened to rape the woman who turned down his bedcovers—two years in Hamburg and not a single pair of thighs had been opened for him—his manager had called my trainer and said that half-trained would have to be good enough, for Red Peter could wait no longer. I had been steeped in a tin bath of hot water, my hair combed while still wet so that it would lie tamed against my back, my toenails trimmed then filed, my teeth brushed with mint paste, the ooze at my tear ducts scraped away by an index finger. All this I had loved, not knowing to what it led—I had been almost frenzied from the lack of the touch of hands, ravenous for warm skin against my belly while I slept. I even liked the jasmine scent they’d sprayed on me as my hair dried. It reminded me of a thicket of wild blossoms that would sprout in the forest of my youth only after the heaviest of night thunderstorms and be gone by first light.
The trainer had led me gently to the cage they used to transport me and I’d gone willingly, thinking we were going back to the lab for another lesson and the promise of fresh plums as my reward. It was only when she left me alone in the hotel bedroom that I thought to let fear undo me. I ripped open the cellophaned baskets of fruit left as tributes to Red Peter, ate everything in them, including an unskinned pineapple, then befouled myself. He came back to his room smelling of gin and tobacco and the starch of stiff tablecloths, his anticipation of me making a tent of his pressed trousers, and even the contempt he must have felt for me, my perfumed hair smeared with my own shit and the fruit entrails haloed around the room, could not stop him.