16 - The Trophy Wife

Aseneth gave a strange smile as she picked up the next candle. As if she had waited to tell this story.

"There is a difference between knowing what you want, and being willing and able to do what is necessary to get that. For one young woman, her dreams would lead her down the road to hell. I call this tale..."

THE TROPHY WIFE

The Gamwell family was as old as old money got in Dagon's Hollow. Abelard Gamwell had owned the land before the railroad came through, and the family still held mortgages on much of the town. The current heir was Tonya Gamwell—who wore her silver hair in a boyish pixie cut, and trawled the nightlife of the town for models. She had a taste for young women. Skinny or plump, soft or callused. There had been money enough that Tonya could be choosy.

She wasn't looking for a wife.

Alice had grown up on the West side of town. She had earned a scholarship with good grades and a well-placed bit of oral sex, crawling on her knees beneath a desk to give the Dean of Admissions something her husband could not. In her first semester at college, Alice had done a little modeling. Studied dance, gotten involved with the theater, smoked weed, dabbled a little in cocaine and club ****. You could be poor in college and still have a good time.

Which is how Alice and friends ended up drunk and high and playing on the train tracks as the warning lights flashed and bell sounded. Dares had been made. Money laid down. Arms cross the rails. Whoever pulled theirs away last would win the pot.

No one heard Alice's scream over the sound of the train. She won fifty-seven dollars, and lost her left arm above the elbow.

Something left Alice after that. A humor, a hope, a good nature. She attended classes, did her best to keep up with her lessons. They moved her into stage direction, which didn't require two hands. And as the semester ended and Alice had nowhere else to go, she answered an ad for a model.

There were fifteen young women packed into the small waiting room of Tonya's studio. Only one was missing an arm.

"Lose the clothes," Tonya said, eyes fixated on the stump.

With her free hand, Alice undid the buttons on her shirt. Unzipped the skirt and pulled it down. She tried to give her movements a bit of grace, to keep her chin up high. Tonya circled her, staring from every angle. Drinking Alice in.

Alice took in the studio. Statues in clay and marble. Angels missing wings. Legless demons sprawled on the ground. A life-size figure of a one-legged, one-armed woman, leaning on a marble tree, the branch stuck up her ass, face a mask of ecstasy.

The proposal, when it came, was indecent. Obscene. It spoke to a sickness deeper than anything Alice had imagined, a gaping emptiness in the soul that nothing could fill, not if all the money in the world were shoveled into it.

To Tonya's surprise, Alice didn't say no. Didn't try to gather up her clothes and run away. She looked her in the eye and named a price. The highest price.

The nuptials were announced eight months later, in the newspaper. The wedding ceremony itself was held before the Justice of the Peace. The old Black woman had seen hundreds of couples pass before her, sign the paperwork, and move on. Tonya Gamwell wore a slim black suit and tie. Her wife was wheeled before the desk by an attendant. When asked to make her mark, Alice Munroe leaned forward. The prosthetic right arm had a pen gripped in the plastic hand. Good enough to make her mark. With a lurid thrill, Tonya stopped down to slide a golden band over the hook attached to the stump of her wife's left arm.

Later that night, in the master bedroom of the Gamwell mansion, Alice Gamwell writhed. Her arm-stumps were strapped into the hook-appliances, and hung from the ceiling. Her leg-stumps flexed, the five-pound weights swinging back and forth. In her pussy, the vibrator buzzed. Her wife held the remote control. Tonya lay on the bed, her eyes locked on the one thing she never thought money could buy, her hands rubbing her slit, excited beyond words.

The pre-nup had been signed. Alice moaned like a whore, her limbless torso flexing as sweat dripped from her naked body. Even though the wounds from the amputations had mostly healed, blood ran in little rivulets from sores where the prosthetics dug too deep in the flesh. Tonya wouldn't live forever. The Gamwell fortune would be hers. In time. Provided she could endure her wife's affections that long.

"Some say that Alice paid too high a price," Asenath said. "Yet I say, who can put a price on love? Can those who have never known true hunger say they would never resort to cannibalism? Such temptations we are never subject to. How then can we judge such sins?"

So saying, Asenath snuffed out the candle.