A Story of Tongues and Knives

By. Stephanie Parent

When I started working as a submissive at a commercial dungeon, I stopped writing.

This was not a coincidence.

At first, the reason seemed obvious: I was making more money at the dungeon than I ever had in my life. Why would I continue putting myself through the agonizing process of writing novels, trying to sell them through my agent, failing at that and self-publishing on Amazon and watching the pennies trickle in, only to start the entire ordeal over again? I’d been doing this for two years, since I’d signed with my first agent, and I’d been writing for much longer—and I was exhausted. The dungeon was a welcome respite, one that immediately took up my entire attention, my entire existence. 

In The Little Mermaid, the girl with a fish’s tail—she doesn’t have a name, in the original version—gives up her voice to walk on land, and to have a chance to win the prince’s love. The girl with a fish’s tail opens her mouth, she allows the sea witch to cut out her tongue; she agrees to a fate where, with every step on her newborn human soles, it feels as if the points of a thousand sharp knives impale her flesh.

The dungeon was like a fairy tale. I stepped through the threshold, and I was someone else. I took a different name there—Lily, a beautiful, delicate flower name, the opposite of the unremarkable Stephanie I’d been all my life—and with every session, I believed I had the chance to make myself more beautiful, more worthy of love. As a submissive, my role was to be spanked, flogged and caned, and tied up. I loved the pain my clients inflicted, the way it made endorphins rush through my body, bringing every nerve ending to life. I believed that pain would transform me as surely as a mermaid’s tail might turn to two human legs. The pain had to be worth something, I had to be worth something, if men would pay two hundred dollars an hour to session with me.

Right?

“I know what you want,” the sea witch tells the Little Mermaid. “It is very stupid of you,” the wise witch says, “but you shall have your way.”

My first year at the dungeon, I didn’t stop to think what would happen when the endorphin rush wore off. I didn’t believe it ever would. Was the Little Mermaid the same? Did the sensation of knife blades beneath her feet make her dance more lightly, almost floating, flying, sure she was traversing the path to love? What need had she for the voice she’d given up, when her body full of pain and light could tell the story?

Tell the story.

I had no desire to tell the story, those first months at the dungeon. My body absorbed the story, purple bruise blossoms, slashes of cane strokes, ghost touches that lingered in the wrong places. They were all marks of how I was worthy, worthy of the men’s money and touch and validation, and maybe, if I accepted the pain for long enough, if I allowed it to transform me, of love. It was the kind of logic that would never make sense outside of a fairy tale—but I had been raised on fairy tales. Had tried to write my own, in a past life that was starting to seem distant. But I’d never quite succeeded.

The Little Mermaid had her way. She lived with her prince, but she couldn’t speak to him, and so he never knew her truth.

Life has a funny way of giving us what we think we want, and turning it into what we need, even if we have to walk across a bed of knives to reach it. For me, it started with loss: the loss of the endorphins I felt at the dungeon. I spent three years as a submissive, being spanked and flogged and caned for a living. Eventually, some chemical switch in my brain desensitized, then turned off entirely, and pain no longer felt like pleasure. My body forgot how to produce dopamine with each strike against my flesh. Maybe my body was trying to protect me. Maybe I was just waking up. 

Some haze around me lifted, and I saw that what I’d thought I’d desired, what I’d believed was a fairy-tale transformation, a journey to a lovely new world, was also something else. It was giving myself to men who didn’t care, to whom I was disposable, interchangeable.

I thought I’d understood pain, that it would always be beautiful and transformative. Now it was something simpler and uglier: the slap of hands I didn’t want, dirty hands, angry hands, greedy hands, against my flesh. I had kind and thoughtful clients at the dungeon too, of course; but now that the fog around me had dispersed, all I could see was the ugliness. All I could feel was the knives under my feet, taking me down the path that I had chosen. 

I’d been walking too long to step off that path now.

The prince loved the Little Mermaid, but not the way she wanted to be loved. He loved her like a doll, a toy, a sweet body that would give and ask for nothing in return. And how could anyone fault him for believing that was all she was? After all, she had no voice.

So I stayed at the dungeon. I became a switch, performing dominant as well as submissive sessions, hitting men the same way they hit me. But it didn’t help. My hand slapping a man’s backside, my hands holding a paddle or flogger—those actions didn’t say what I wanted to say. My body had spent so long absorbing pain, walking on knives, that it didn’t know how to release that pain.

And then…

And then…

Pieces of a story began to come to me. Not while I was at the dungeon, giving or receiving pain, but while I was alone, running after dark. A time when edges were blurred, and the impossible seemed possible. It was a story about two girls who gave themselves to pain. One girl yearning for love, the other for violence. Two pieces of myself. Soon their voices crowded my mind, speaking to me while I was in the shower, putting on makeup, waiting in line. And, yes, while I was absorbing the impact of men’s hands and floggers at the dungeon, or while I was wielding the floggers myself. The voices took over till I had no choice but to begin writing their story, this great tangle of a novel about two girls, two characters who were two parts of me.

The Little Mermaid nearly turned to sea foam. She nearly drowned in the salt water of her tears. But instead she joined the daughters of the air. She spoke again, in an ethereal voice, different than the earthly one she had imagined for herself. She found love, different than the kind she had hoped for. She searched for a soul.

After everything I’ve been through, I only know of one way to search for a soul. It’s not by absorbing pain, or doling it out. It’s not by reading fairy tales. It’s not by giving myself away.

It’s by writing the words that were always inside of me. The words that are the only blade I need. 

The words that have finally broken free.

Stephanie Parent is a graduate of the Master of Professional Writing program at USC. She lives and writes in Los Angeles. Connect with her on Twitter at @SCLanggle.