Comment on “The Story of O as Told by E”

O is nothing. O is not even a blow-up doll or a bundt cake. She very much wants you to put one of your possessions into one of her emptinesses. But her emptiness-ness is hemmed in by lines of type, lines of time. By lies. She’s an opening caught up in flesh, or text. A conniving nothing inside a torture chamber. An invisible wrist held to the wall by a chain. She’s queen of a perverse universe of, among other things, anal-sadism. She is ruled by pain. She would rather die than not have it. Maybe she is dead. Pain, which she mistakes for her lover’s insatiableness, or for her own signature, is written with a riding crop across her back.