Today I must have the needles and the blade in my arms and chest where I can see them.

The hard part is watching you prepare the area. After you clean the skin, you squirt it with alcohol, and the scent immediately intoxicates me.

Please hurry.

You are wise enough not to tease me. This is no game.

The beveled point of the first needle penetrates my skin and it is all right. All is right.

I watch the point press against my flesh, gather up a few cells-just like threads-just as though it were sliding through fabric to pin a hem. And then the point slides in. The shaft travels under the surface of my skin, snagging tiny nerves and dulling the point as it pierces cell after cell. When the needle is buried along the path just beneath my skin and just about to its entire length, you press against the buried tip the plastic case you had snapped it out of. One last sharp shove and the tip reappears, popping a little July 4 of pain with its pointed head.

One needle. You pause and look at me. I nod slightly.

The second needle slides in parallel to the first and one quarter inch away.

Yes, yes, I nod. My skin is bunched and reddish around the needles, white along the ridges where they are buried. Yes, one more, one quarter inch from the second.

Three needles: a trigram: Ch'ien, the creative, strong.

And now you will cross this symbol, you will slide more slender steel under and up on the other side. This is deeper. More painful.

You uncap a two-inch needle and look at me. When you look at me I know my head is warm, my eyelids are puffing over my dilated pupils. You smile. I'd smile back but I'm already smiling, constantly smiling, can't stop smiling. My head rolls.

The fourth needle you rest perpendicular to the trigram. You turn it to one side, to the other side, letting the metal catch and refract the glare of the light we've focused on us. Breath catches in my throat, and this signals you to plunge the tip under my skin. This needle burrows under the three parallel needles. More pain here, and there's fear, for it has far to travel. The shaft presses on the needles and skin above as it journeys through my flesh. I'm hooting low, sweat peppers my forehead and neck and belly. When the needle tip finally reaches the far side of the three parallel needles, I take a big shaky breath in and blow it out hard, and you jab it back up through my skin at the exhale. Gasp; growl. And I grin and roll my head at the blast of hot energy that flows up the back of my prickling neck to the top of my head.

Two more needles go in beside the fourth and beneath the first three. I am moaning and laboring through the fifth and sixth, panting. Sweating and pleading, but I say, "yes yes yes that's it yes that's it yes yes yes," and you steadily, calmly continue.

Six needles. A hexagram. A sun, a warm and glowing, stinging sun on my chest. Ch'ien the creative, with three unbroken stripes, crossed by K'un the Receptive, with three stripes broken in the middle by Ch'ien. Heaven and earth, father and mother.

Now I want needles down my deltoids and triceps, a line of armor, or feathers, or spines.

You start at the crest of my left shoulder, the curve of my deltoid. The first one hurts. It hurts. I suck in breath through my teeth, hissing, narrowing my eyes at you. But still smiling, can't stop smiling. And the heat, moist heat at my chin and the back of my neck. After the second needle, below the first, after watching the shaft dart through my pale and sinful flesh, there is no pain. The visceral information lets me know where you are, how deep my wings have grown. A line of needles down each side. I refuse to count, but I know it will be an equal and uneven number because I know how you pierce. Thirteen, because I know you well. It is thirteen feathers in each of my wings, and you work them into my flesh quickly so I can fly farther.

Fly I do. I am poised on a perfect warm updraft, surveying everything I can see and I can see everything. No fear. Simple grace. No blame.

You are watching every breath, every blink of my eyes. I am not performing. No conflict. I stand up and walk. I lift my arms, let my muscles press against needles and hurt me, but I feel no pain. I wave my arms and walk. Floating on the updraft. Simple grace.

You let me walk. You watch me. When I tip my wings, you bring me back with a look and I sit on the table and lean against the backrest.

You have opened the case that covered the blade. You present the blade. I touch its cold with my lips. My lips don't warm it, but it cools my lips. My feverish, sweating lips. And I shiver. My smile retracts and tucks up into my brain stem and I wait, breathing. Listening to my own breath. Closing my eyes and hearing your preparations, the sterilization of the knife. I know when it's time, and I open my eyes.

You hold up the knife until it catches the light and reflects light on my eyes and I am blinded. Blind hungry and greedy for the first cut.

I taste metal in my mouth. My tongue is tuning itself for the copper of blood, for the hot supper of life force. Silver I taste, and gold, and brass. The complex granite taste as I suck on a rock of fear, of pain that doesn't hurt any more.

The sun is bright on the left side of my chest. With the knife, you will make me a moon on my right.

How can metal be so sharp?

You clean my skin with soap. You dry my skin with a bleach-smelling towel. You squirt my skin with alcohol and let it dry while I breathe in colors.

You lay the blade flat against my skin, its tip resting where the curve will start.

Then you pick up the knife and begin to lightly, slowly run it across my flesh. The knife feels heavy, as heavy as a car resting on my chest, yet I worry that you are pressing too lightly to break the surface... but my heart knows, my belly knows, and I am holding back sobs and grinning foolishly and finally looking at a thin red line. Thinner than a cat scratch, paler than the depression my bra strap leaves. You run the knife slowly all around to complete the circle. It bumps across my grain on some of the arcs and I croon. It doesn't hurt. No pain. It is perfectly quiet. Pain cannot, could not, would not be this quiet. I leave off crooning and hiss. I am letting air out, releasing demons and telling them begone.

And you stop. I look down and scowl. Are you sure you... and then you take your latex-alcohol-scented fingers and gently pull the skin away from the path where the knife has traveled and perfect red blood beads up and begins to slide down my breast, my chest.

O so beautiful, lovely. I can smell it. Not the acrid dirty smell of dead blood, this is living blood, the fluid that life is made of. Warm brooks skipping and tumbling down my breast, my chest, my belly... one rivulet finds the path to my navel and begins to fill it with life. O lovely. Another rivulet pulses with urgency, pouring out fluid, and that one I drink from. I scoop servings up onto my fingers and lick them. My mouth salivates heavily at the copper it has craved and I forget all the others: the silver, gold, granite. I suck breath in over life and get peppery fertile sustenance: rich oxygen for my blood, to leap to my skin and be cycled right back to my lungs on my breath. . .

You squirt alcohol and blood races out and smears the perfect oozing circle. You wipe it with a cloth, squirt again, make a circle print of my blood on a cloth. We will save this. And then you raise the knife again. You look at me. Yes. Go ahead.

You make eyes and an open wise mouth for the moon. Eyebrows that question everything. It's a big moon, a wise and curious moon. Streaming blood and doubting, watching. With big features, big questions, big life.

I push your hand away when you bring up the alcohol spritzer this time. I want the flavor. I can't get enough of the blood in my mouth, or I haven't yet. I seize you and stand up, balancing on you, and I press myself against your naked torso before you can flinch away. I embrace you tightly. I am feral, invincible. I won't let you squirm until I'm ready. Then I step back. You are covered with blood, my blood, from clavicle to hipbone. You look down and you don't disguise the fear in your eyes and mouth. Blood. Unsafe, unclean. My blood.

But I take the knife from your now unsure hand and I set it down reverently.

And reverently, I lick every drop of blood off your chest, your shoulders, your belly. When you are entirely clean-no waste, I want all of it-I pick up the alcohol myself and squirt you quite wet with it, and rub you off with more towels. It is all right. All is right.

My chest and belly have meantime become covered with wet and coagulated blood. I begin to pull needles from my arms myself, but you stop my hand.

I sit back up on the table, not dizzy but painfully clear. The light is too blue-white. The quiet is too eloquent. The smell is too richly compartmentalized. You pull the needles out slowly or quickly. You grab two at a time and pull them out quickly and I squawk. Or you pull one out very slowly, twisting, so it hurts and so blood streams out of the exit hole. You pull three out one by one and cleanly, efficiently. Or you pull left and right arm needles out simultaneously.

The sun you twist and torture. It bleeds as much as the moon. You will have made a bruise that I can watch turn colors this week just as when the sky sun sets. When you're done, my chest and breasts and belly and arms are striped and smeared with blood. Blood has run hot and eager into the bush between my legs, into the moist lips behind the hair.

I will not wash this. I will not waste this. I will not taste any more, but smell the hot busy odor of drying blood, feel the tightening shell of coagulating blood that coats the front of my body and my arms. I'll treasure the itch in my crotch where the blood has run, where my cunt reaches out for traditional stimulation. I'll ride this perfect series of updrafts, leap from column to perfect column and observe the landscape I am usually doomed to scuttle along, buglikem grounded. I shall not come down by my will. I shall float or bump down as I must when I must and not before.

I will lie alone, untouched, staining linens bleached so painfully white that I squeeze my eyes shut against their scrutiny. And when I sleep, I will dream visions of my life from now on.

This is music. Light and sound. How I learn to keep on living.

About the Author:

Lydia Swartz's work has appeared in various publications, including The Second Coming, Herotica, Women on Women, and The Ecstatic Moment: The Best of Libido.

"You wanna bio? OK. I'm a Kinsey 5 bi girl with a weakness for juicy femmes who bleed prettily, and other than that it's a secret."