Lisa Marie Nohner immediately captures her audience’s attention with her use of “Stockholm Syndrome” in the first sentence of DiN first published in 2013. She spends the next few paragraphs detailing the relationship between the two characters and the “love” the woman feels toward her captor as she subjects herself to mutilation and self-degradation in return for a single kiss. At the story’s climax, it’s as if the woman’s woken from a trance and can finally see the man as he truly is – a “little shit [who’s] been bossing her around the entire time.”
The reading can be disturbing at times but remains absolutely captivating as readers grapple with the idea of loving one’s soul over their body and the finale of the piece: “Sometimes love, like beauty, is only skin deep.” Though unsettling, Nohner’s piece plays with the concept of skin-deep beauty with which a lot of people can resonate. Do we, as individuals, truly love another person for their soul or do physical appearances play a bigger role than we think? Do we love them for the person they are or the “tall dark wolfman” we believe them to be? Nohner blurs the lines with this piece, interchanging the victim with the reader in a way that chills us to our core!
Emily Radell
Fiction Editor
Cultivar
Some people would call it Stockholm Syndrome, the way she feels about her captor. But not her. No, she calls it adoration. Compassion. Empathy. She calls it love. She’s never had children. Four years of college and a part time job at the local library put a grinding halt to whatever maternal impulses biology would have had her cultivate. But here, in this palace – this seven story mansion in the countryside, where the stars burn brighter than any street lamps, here she feels necessary. Needed. Here she feels motherly.
Mostly because he would die without her. In fact, he almost did. She spent two weeks in the city for a routine holiday visit. That’s it. Two weeks. Granted, she had promised to stay only one- and even that had taken all kinds of bargaining. To earn those seven days, she had spent a lot of time on her hands and knees wearing only a slave collar. At her sister’s house, she had to don long sleeved shirts and turtlenecks to hide the evidence of her negotiations, and the soreness of her bones and the sting of her back eased her into the decision that perhaps she earned some extra time off. Yet true to his word, he left her alone. So alone, in fact, that she found herself glancing at her cellphone every ten minutes, waiting for a text to appear and demand her prompt return. He never rang. Irritated by the lack of attention, she stretched her visit a few days more. Let him suffer, then. Let him pine.
But she couldn’t stay away. What would he eat? What would he do? And what if, in her absence he had been out to the bars and dragged some other girl home – a girl with less education, less sensitivity to his unique plight, a girl less willing to play his games? So she packed her things and returned to the mansion, to find him laying outside in a field of snow, flakes burying him by the minute. When she rushed to his side, and fell to her knees sobbing (who, after all, would push her around if he died?) he squinted, and gave her a big, shit-eating grin. “I knew you’d come back.”
Of course she would! There’s something so rewarding about bringing a giant to his knees. That night, he threw her up against the wall and split the skin above her forehead. The blood trickled down her face and he licked her tears and pumped her hips and whisper-hissed into her ears, swearing to kill her if she ever left him again. Afterward, she lay at his feet, purring happily. As she dozed , he rattled off promises. If she ever disappeared unannounced again, he’d turn her skull into an ashtray. He’d drape her skin across the floor and use it as an area run. He’d dangle her bones from the ceiling fan.
Ah, love.
The problem, however, was his refusal to kiss her. All that time and their lips had never touched. Kissing, she reasoned, was perhaps too intimate for him. He was a giant wolf, after all. Any other man, and of course she’d have run for the hills. But he was simply a 6’2 bipedal animal with an extremely elevated consciousness. Coarse gray fur covered him from head to toe, and when he’d hoisted her over his shoulder that night in the library parking lot, rather than panicked, she found herself elated. Finally: proof the talking creatures of her fantasies actually existed.
He wasn’t perfect, of course. His B.M.s were enormous and covered the backyard. On cold nights, they steamed. You couldn’t take him out in public often for fear he might drop trou at the sight of a fire hydrant. Also, he chewed objects relentlessly, especially the legs of furniture. The grand piano in the foyer, for example, was fucked. Occasionally he drank from the toilet bowl. And more than once she’d gotten out of the bath to find he’d shredded her slippers, slashed open the feather pillows, or eaten part of a bed post. It was merely separation anxiety, to be sure. He needed attention. He needed to be certain he would always be loved.
Still, she felt something lacking in their primal connection. The kiss they never shared left a gap between them. Often she would try to find ways to inspire him to kiss her. She would lean in close, but he always turned away, letting her lips fall on his spiky, whiskered cheek. He was much taller than her, so even when he kissed her forehead, the only time she had a chance to catch his lips occurred when she was wearing high heels. And always, she missed, and always, he struck her across the face, demanding she “Never try that again. I’ll fucking tell you if I want to kiss you. You haven’t earned it.”
So what must she do to earn it? She begged, she pleaded. She offered to walk around in shackles, to scrub the floor with her tongue, to dance on coals, to walk on broken glass. Anything, anything to bridge the awful distance between their lips that niggled at her like a loose tooth.
He watched her perform these depraved parlor tricks with a skeptical eye. He dined on thick legs of turkey as she licked the dirt from the marble for his entertainment. He smoked cigars while she lit cigarettes and ground them into her arms. He ate mutton while she lay under a steady drip of water that seemed to burn a hole between her eyes. Yet nothing impressed him. She continued for weeks, until her body was mutilated and her soul was scorched and the concept of pride was no longer even a distant memory to her. After dinner one night, rather than amuse him with acts of self degradation, she humbly carried herself upstairs to the bedroom, resigned to a kissless fate.
Just as she was giving herself over to the tides of sleep, she heard his heavy footsteps carrying him up the spiral staircase. He rarely, if ever, followed her to bed, so she stilled herself, trying to calm the waves of anticipation that threatened to consume her. The door creaked open, and his hulking form crept in. In his hands, he carried a large glass box that glowed with a warm, rosy light. It emanated from a flower inside, a rose so radiant and lively it was almost fiber optic. She sat upright and gaped.
“Is your love for me pure?” His voice was full, so booming and yet so restrained. She imagined if a cello could speak it would sound exactly this way. “Absolutely,” she answered, reaching for him – arms stretched wide like a child longing to be held. “Is it my soul you love, or my body?”
His soul? She briefly worried the glow the flower cast would shed light on her puzzled face. She had scarcely even considered he might have one. Surely though, if he had a soul then she loved it. She loved it endlessly, and she told him as much.
“You’re certain? It’s very important. You must love my soul, or I cannot kiss you.”
His words inspired curiosity, and yes, she might’ve asked why. But to ask why would betray her confidence, and her lips tingled so achingly, and in this light, the resonance of his voice incited a humming between her thighs she could not ignore. So yes, yes, yes she nodded. I love your soul. Give me your kiss.
He placed the glass box beside her, where it shed light on the two of them. He knelt before her, and took her face into his enormous paws, staring into the depths of her eyes. He gripped her so hard her cheeks hurt, but his deep brown eyes were warm and animal and painfully sincere.
“Tell me how much you fucking love me. Make me believe it.”
She did. The conviction of her words surprised her. They came out guttural and carnal, almost like a snarl. I fucking love you. I love you, you piece of shit, you animal bastard. I love you. Now kiss me, you sadistic mother fucker. Kiss me and make me yours forever.
They kissed. Some kisses aren’t worth detailing for the sake of all the Valentine’s day mourners in the audience, all the people who squirm at passion moderated by a presumably hard up writer. Some kisses, like some fairytales, are smoldering hot saccharine gold, but the cumulative result is nothing more than cotton candy which melts in your mouth and leaves your teeth furry, your hunger for depth unsatiated.
Fortunately, this was not one of those kisses.
When they kissed, her bones shuddered. The taste of his tongue rolling against hers caused her muscles to quake. Her arms spasmed. Her legs jerked. Her toes curled. However, she did not move with pleasure. Rather, it was painful – electric in a way that made her hair stand on end and her spine tremor. Her body seized. She began to vibrate and squirm, prying at his hands which weakened and released her. The light from the box beside them grew brighter, despite the fact that her eyes were closed she could sense it expanding and contracting, just as she herself felt she was expanding and contracting, and then…
A sound of breaking glass. The shattering of headlights. The bursting of lightbulbs. The entire house filled with the melody of a thousand mirrors breaking simultaneously. Then stillness.
When she finally opened her eyes, tearing her mouth from his– She found herself looking at a smallish, pale, blonde-haired boy. His clothes hung from his body. Practically he was swimming in them. His eyes, no longer animal in nature, were huge with fear, with shock. His mouth, flimsy and thin-lipped turned down at the edges. She couldn’t believe those lips had kissed her. Strangely, he trembled before her.
As the pieces slowly came together, she became increasingly insulted. This little shit had been bossing her around the entire time? This was the tall dark wolfman that hauled her away from her life and her career? This weak, scrawny little fuck had been whipping her and chaining her and ohmygod fucking her? This, what, sixteen year old kid? This child? She opened her mouth to laugh, but the deepness – the baritone quality her voice had taken surprised her. What’s more, the kid looked terrified.
She looked down at herself. The buttons on her nightgown had popped off. Her breasts were higher, and her entire torso covered in downy fur. She regarded her hands– the nails had grown into thick black claws, but surely they belonged to her—they still bore traces of the pink polish she’d applied earlier that day. She clenched and unclenched her fists, marveling at the strength she felt, the tightness of her body – her torso. Before her, the small boy quivered.
“But… You said you loved my soul… I don’t understand. This wasn’t supposed to happen…This wasn’t what I was told…”
”Sometimes,” she told him as she encroached on him, her nimble wolf feet crunching against the broken glass, “Sometimes love, like beauty, is only skin deep.”
--- Lisa Marie Nohner
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Emily Radell is studying English at NMSU with a concentration in Literature, Language and Culture and a minor in Journalism. She currently lives in Las Cruces and is expected to graduate in the Spring of 2022. She hopes to be accepted to an MFA program post-graduation and aspires to pursue a career in publishing. Emily wants to become an acquisitions editor for a major or medium sized publishing house in YA or Contemporary fiction. She enjoys reading a variety of genres --- fiction, self-help, memoir, among others --- and listens to Ted Talks and podcasts in her free time on current events and social issues.
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