Project D

The latest in a series of serials... stories written for Mistress. This seems like an impossibly huge challenge but it is not for me to complain; it is for me to write stories for Mistress to enjoy.

----------------

If you look at it from the right angle, it really is probably my own fault.

She kept me in a tube for a few days, alone and isolated. Only she would talk to me and then just to remind me that the glass tube I was in was to be my permanent home. After a while her reminders became more and more empty. “Yes, yes, in here forever, never leaving. I got it.” Then she added a light. I guess she wanted people to be able to see me better. It didn’t much matter to me since I could see out but couldn’t hear or talk to people. It might as well have been me watching them. Of course they had clothes on.

So the light…

She said it would be like the light you see in an aquarium.

I said I didn’t like that analogy.

She filled the tube up to my chest with water.

I wondered out loud how I’d sit down.

She said she’d empty it sometimes.

My mind flew. She’d empty it? How often? How could I exist like this? Living in a tube of water? All of a sudden her promise to keep me there seemed so grave and it became so urgently important to convince her that she was being inhumane.

She didn’t care or at least didn’t admit to caring.

So I lived and waited in my tube, always desperately fearful that she’d never let any water out.

Somehow the conversation stuck on that aquarium bit and we were talking about mermaids. Not seriously talking, just kind of imagining. I was glad for it, for any distraction from my future in the too small and now too cold and too wet tube.

She is one of those people who let nothing stand in the way of what they want. While I was imagining a mermaid, she was planning one.

She filled the tube with water so icy that I turned blue and so salty that I nearly wretched. That awful light that started it all was off at the time; I remember the light from the full moon pouring in and filling the tube with a glow. I watched her for what seemed forever but then when you are in a tube, time tends to go slowly. A tube filled with icy seawater makes time positively stand still.

She seemed to be chanting and carving something… a candle maybe? She buried herself in it, intensely cutting notches and grooves into the candle, her mantras becoming almost hysterical as she worked.

She stopped in an instant. “Midnight.” she announced suddenly. It jarred me from my chattering, shivering daze. “It’s time,” she said. I didn’t bother to reply. I assumed that ‘It’s time’ meant that she’d finally drain the frigid water from my world.

‘It’s time’ meant that my world would stay as much the same as it would change. She lit the candle and with another screeching, almost alien shriek, she floated it across the water. Watching it drift made me less cold. No… not less cold at all. I was less bothered by it. What bothered me was that there was not enough water all of a sudden. Somehow I need it. I needed to be in it and breathe it.

So I wait and live in my tube, desperately fearful that she’ll let some water out.