The bindings were especially tight.  Not only the partially applied physical implements of bondage, but also the strange foggy, haze that dulled her senses and weakened her will.  It subdued her.  It made her comply.  It made her WISH to be compliant.  It was unshakable, this influence.  It saturated her being.

“Little One.  Be at peace.”  The voice was familiar.  It was the only voice that had ever reached her.  The voice had been with her from the first.  But the voice had an odd undertone.  The voice was unsure.

“Hurry.  Something isn’t right.”

That wasn’t the same voice.  That was definitely a different voice.  The thick, white haze was thinner.  She could make outforms or silhouettes.  She felt force against her physical body.  Some material wrapping over and over securing her wrists, crossed, in front of her.  She wondered if she could reach the silhouettes.

“Wrap the arms.  Do it now.”

This OTHER voice was the wrong one.  She tried to reach her hands out and found her arms pulled into her chest like she was praying.  No.  The need for compliance had a weaker hold over her.  She rolled to her side a quarter turn.  A sound like grinding.  She felt the ground shift.  Why wasn’t she floating?  She stretched but her legs were also wrapped.  Every inch pressed against the thick layers.

“We waited too long.”

The other voice again.  And it was fearful.  The grogginess was ebbing faster now.  She realized that her mouth was full.  Her hands were also full.  The were wrapped tightly around firm objects so that she could not let them go.  She opened her eyes but not in time.  Her head was now completely wrapped.  And she remembered her weapons.  She felt the hands of men pushing her down.  Trying to contain her.

“I said be at peace!”  She trembled from the force of the old voice.  The right voice.  The hands pulled away.  She was in peace.  In the dark.  She was compressed and contained.  But not completely.  She reached out with her senses.  And she found weakness in her bondage.  Her head was still foggy from the voice’s commands, but her body had had enough.  She prepared to writhe.  The bindings flexed and creaked.  They were holding.

“Close the lid.”  The fog had left but not in time.  She was trapped again.  She was wrapped tightly, head to toe.  The vessel holding her was sealed and buried.  Buried deep.  And the voice had left.  So now she waited.

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Tina was never trained as an engineer.  She just always had a knack for taking things apart and an interest in figuring out how things worked.  It was pure luck that she randomly picked an unpaid “writing” internship as an English major working on drafting instruction manuals for self-assembled furniture kits.  At first, she sat next to the craftsman and watched as they put dozens of pieces together to make a stool or an end table.  Tina’s job was to write out the steps concisely but with enough detail that anyone buying the product would be able to understand.  It was clear from the start that Tina had a real talent for this extremely mundane writing style.  Between that, her barely average GPA, and her position as an always-injured college cheerleader, the other more seriously artistic students in her creative writing concentration delighted in taunting her.  “How’s the internship, Tina?  Figure out a creative way to describe putting Tab A into Slot 7?”

To be honest, the taunting really did bother Tina.  She was involved in a lot of activities and wore a lot of different labels, but she hadn’t found the one that really fit.  She was still trying to find out who she really was.  But writing was one thing that made Tina feel at peace.  She’d hoped she’d found a group where she’d fit.  Tina was a social person and did not struggle finding friends or relationships.  But she did not have an easy time truly connecting.  People seemed to already think they knew who she was before she had a chance to say “hello.”  But a reader didn’t know Tina before reading her words.  A reader’s connection with her was formed on a basis of truth instead of perception.  And even though Tina completely understood that people reading the directions she wrote were hardly engaging with her on any kind of remotely intimate level, she was still there in her “mundane” words.  She got to be with them, hopefully filling a need.  And Tina assured herself that this connection, small as it was, still mattered.  And besides, it was a foot in the door.  Tina would use the opportunity for what it was; a chance to hone her craft, maybe earn a living, and make connections that would eventually lead to more fulfilling art!

Eight years later, Tina was still writing directions for furniture kits.  Only now, she was a hot commodity.  She had found a niche that she was perfectly suited for.  It turns out that the smaller manufacturers who don’t sell out of the large retailers don’t have the administrative budget to produce their own instruction packets in-house.  It also happened that a lot of those “mom and pop” outfits were set up in a few hours’ radius of Tina’s home in central Kentucky.  Maybe it was concentration of Amish communities.  Whatever the reason, it spelled opportunity.  And as Tina’s grandma always used to say, “Fortune is what happens when opportunity meets hard work.”  And Tina was a relentless worker.  Tina made the most of the opportunity and was able to grow her unpaid summer internship into a highly busy, highly profitable, one-woman enterprise.  Tina loved getting lost in the completed furniture pieces her clients sent her.  She’d spend hours inspecting every corner, every angle.  And then she’d carefully disassemble the pieces in her workshop in her basement.  Tina photographed every step.  She made notes of descriptive words based on the textures of the individual components from the first time she touched them because the readers would also be touching the components for the first time as they removed them from the box.  A support might be “jagged.”  Another one might be “rough.”  Tina’s careful precision in word choices was something that definitely set her written work apart from the direction manuals produced by the major manufacturers.  And her smaller clients were quite happy to pay her well and reap the benefits of fewer returns, less spoilage and more satisfied, returning customers.

Tina was happy with her career.  She had made connections through her art.  Maybe not the kind of connections that she hoped for when she signed up for her first English class, but that was fine.  She loved working from home, when she wanted to, and as much or as little as she wanted to.  And the freedom of being a self-employed freelance writer afforded her the time and the resources to pursue her other interests like hiking, firearms, defensive tactics, and to spoil her nieces and nephews.  And even though Tina had come to accept that she would never lose herself writing the next great American novel, she was getting to enjoy a pretty fabulous life.

Something was wrong.  Tina couldn’t avoid the “conversation” with herself any longer, no matter how much she buried herself in furniture projects.  She’d been bouncing back and forth in her workshop between the drafting table, the work bench and several prototyped pieces, ever since she got home from Point Blank.  Design, craft, test, observe, redesign, tweak, repeat, over and over.  It was six AM.  Tina had been at it all night like a woman possessed.    And besides the constant haze of fatigue that hovered over her, she was less than halfway paying attention to her work and mostly thinking about her encounter with Mia.

“Let’s do this, then.”  Tina was still taking measurements.  She was still adjusting the angles of planks and boards.

“You’re not gay.  And even if you were, Mia wouldn’t be your type.  But that’s beside the point.  You froze like a deer in crosshairs, and you never freeze.  You have specifically trained yourself never to freeze.  You don’t even know how to freeze.  Fuck!”  Tina dug a long splinter deep into her palm.  She grabbed it with her teeth and pulled it out.

“And you blacked out!  If it were a bar, then you’d know someone spiked your drink.  Which you ALSO would never allow.  Because you don’t let your drink out of your sight.  EVER!  But you were at the range.  YOUR range.”  Tina caught her booted foot on the cord of the air compressor on the floor and stumbled into the large wooden frame she was fashioning.

In the moment that she caught herself, her mind stopped thinking about her work and about Mia and in the momentary vacuum, she felt another daydream invading her mind.  She leaned hard on the device, panting to regain her breath.  She was exhausted.  She had been fighting off visions or Egyptian pyramids and Edgar Allen Poe stories she read in school all night.  None of them made sense.  Just like her blackout made no sense.  And just like the serpent that picked her up and carried her off to Mia’s car made no sense.

“You’re hitting the wall girl.”  She’d been working too long.  She’d been awake too long.  She hadn’t eaten since breakfast the day before.  “And you’re clearly going crazy because….giant snakes.”  Tina chuckled weakly.  “Just close your eyes for a minute.”  Tina closed her eyes.  She felt peace washing over her like a warm wave rushing over her toes in the sand on the beach.  “Maybe lay down for a minute.”  Tina rolled herself up onto the frame she’d been working on.  It was sturdy.  No buckles.  “Another fine piece of furniture.  Tee Hee.”  Tina drifted off.

“Good girl.”  Tina said to herself using Mia’s voice.

Tina had a headache.  It was more like a body ache.  She hurt all over.  WHY hadn’t she gone to bed instead of just crashing on a half-built pile of lumber??

Tina’s right hand went to do a weapon check.  She hadn’t taken off her holster since she put it on for work yesterday.  Only, Tina’s fingers did not find her Glock’s hilt strapped to her hip.  Her hand wasn’t actually moving at all.  Tina flexed her arms and found that they were both pulled up behind her, with her wrists crossed high between her shoulder blades, in a reverse prayer.  Tina tried to pull her hands down.  They seemed to each be in a cuff or strap made of leather.  Try as she might, she could not budge her hands.  But as she pulled, she felt another strap that seemed to run over the back of her neck, over the front of her shoulders, crisscross her breasts and then wrap back around her ribs.  It formed a kind of harness.  As best as Tina could tell, her cuffed wrists were somehow secured to this harness, locking her arms in the reverse prayer.

“What the hell!” ran through Tina’s mind.  She meant to say it, and not just think it, but she also discovered that her mouth was filled up completely.  Her tongue was pinned to the bottom of her mouth.  It tasted like rubber.  Tina “Mmmphffeedd” as best she could, but very little sound came out.

Tina’s ankles were crossed.  She could wiggle and squirm but she couldn’t move much.  Her crossed ankles were pulled up behind her.  Tina’s back was arched sharply.  It seemed that her ankles were attached at the same point of the should harness as her wrists.

Tina was freaking out.  She’d been disarmed.  She was naked.  “Oh my God, I’m naked!”  The coolness of her skin and the lack of fabric pulling on her as she struggled made that frightening fact obvious.  She was gagged and she was blindfolded.  It felt like she was laying on a cushion of some sort instead of the rough wooden planks she’d rolled herself onto last night.

“Hey, you’re awake sexy pants!”  The blindfold was removed from Tina’s eyes.  Mia was standing in front of her.  Tina was still in her basement.  She was laying on an inflatable tumbling mat she used back in her cheerleading days.  The mat had apparently been added to the device she’d worked on last night.  But as Tina scanned with her limited movement, the bare bones wooden frame she’d started had been completed.  She was now laying on a much more complex apparatus of wood, metal brackets, pulleys and cables.  What’s more, she saw numerous other wooden devices spread out against the walls of her basement.  All of them looked both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

“You’ve been doing simply amazing.  You’re really like a genius, cunt.”  Mia was all smiles.  She hugged Tina tightly around the neck.  “We need to get back to it though.”  Mia pressed a button on the side of Tina’s device.  There was the soft sound of small electric motor.  A cable pulled Tina’s chest up higher off of the mat, arching her back a little more.  Tina’s breasts peeled up off of the slick rubbery material.  “Hello!  There are your sensitive little nubs.  Waky waky!”  Mia was holding an tens unit.  It was actually Tina’s tens unit.  A tens unit is used to repair injured muscles by applying electric pulses through pads into tissue.  Tina had used it to help rehab sprains and strains from her cheering days.  Mia applied two electric pads around each of Tina’s nipples.

“Say ‘thank you Mistrecss’,” Mia said.

“MMmphfffff……”  Tina, in spite of herself, tied to do as she was told.  What was wrong with her???  But before she could attempt the impossible task with a mouth full of inflated rubber, her efforts were interrupted by the excruciating convulsions that overcame her from Mia turning on the tens unit.  Instead, Tina screamed into her gag and thrashed and strained.  Completely confused.  Completely dominated.