
So it wasn’t the sex and it wasn’t the pain or the sexpain or the painsex.

Her tiny tits and sore, swollen nipples bounced back against her chest like a pair of hard rubber balls. After slowly yanking them out again, she thought, I’m in training, and started giggling so hard she had to let go. She thought of a dancer doing hamstring stretches, and she figured the technique and level of pain must be fairly equivalent. She didn’t back off even a millimeter, just took some deep slow breaths for a moment or two and tried to pull them out even farther.

She pulled and pulled until her nipples ached, then held the rings at the Maximum Stretching Point, feeling the pain course through her, then settle back down again. She gripped the rings on both nipples and stretched them upward as far as she could, dragging her small twin mounds along like a pair of stub- born mules. That’s when she realized it wasn’t a sex thing. She knocked off a quick O like she was popping a wine cork, light and charming but nothing special. As she rubbed the two silver rings that held her clit hostage, she wondered again why she was up so early and why she felt so…horny? Hungry? What? She wasn’t sure why she was awake, but now that she was, she knew what she wanted to do about it. So Rose, blissfully unaware of her crimes against humanity, lay wide awake at nine-fifteen in the morning, twisting and turning her nipple ring. In the time she’d been working, she had already been responsible for the possibly fatal infection of eleven pierced and tattooed members of the “tribal community.” Unfortunately, they weren’t any more effective than the jar of clear blue liquid that the barbershop used to sterilize combs. She’d been following the sterilization techniques handed down by her creepy boss. She worked nights at the tat- too parlor, happily infecting all the ink-crazed kids with HIV and hepatitis C (if they were lucky). Still, she usually slept like a pile of cannonballs at Gettysburg. The booms and bangs down below sounded like artillery fire. The garbage trucks were the obvious reason.

Rose slowly fingered the ring on her nipple and wondered why she couldn’t get back to sleep. The gentry joggers were up already, circling the park in huffy, puffy laps, their pounding hoofbeats echoing the clang-whirl-shwoop-crunch of the mob- owned garbage trucks. Junkies were up with their crackhead cousins, prowling the lanes of Tompkins Square Park, looking for a not quite empty vial to suck on or maybe a john so they could buy one. It was a bright, bright beautiful cool crisp day in the neighborhood.
