I have turned a man because I could. Because I knew I could. However, to discover the breadth of my capacity was not the point. I wanted to learn if remorse was something that rose in my throat or something that dripped from my eyes.

But as it turned out, remorse was a stillness in me.

Or rather, a stillness where it should have stirred.

I didn’t feel it.

He was a man I worked with. He had an uneasy smile and a tiny voice, only audible through repeated coaxing. A very courteous and accommodating man, he often helped to organize the Christmas parties. He was a mouse. He buttoned his collar to his throat and tied his tie tightly. It was not very difficult to do what I did.

How the affair began is immaterial. I softly tied the correct strings around his body and firmly tugged at each of them when the time was right. Once I had him the first time, I had him for as long as I would have liked.

The first time I took his shirt off, his wedding band dropped from his shirt pocket. He must not have noticed. I took it home with me later. A golden fetter that legal lovers must tie on the hand. A pricey synecdoche; a purchase required to validate a union. A fetter that had customarily rested on the very red right hand that embedded a fury of designs into my skin on multiple occasions that had left long red lines over my back and pieces of my hair on the floor of the motel bathroom.

Such binding fetters were better placed around the throat.

I had taken his delicacy. I had taught him how to be ruled, and how to rule another with his own tender reddened fingertips. I often mused about his changed mannerisms. Did he take his wife with the selfsame sweetened violence that I had so carefully taught him? Did he leave her muddled bruises on the insides of her thighs? Little love letters to that warm and thriving act, so very close to home. I had them.

What did she have?

I had never met his wife. I had nothing to signify he had a wife except that glinting bauble I had taken from him. He had never asked after it, either. Maybe he thought he misplaced it. Maybe he sincerely and rightfully did not notice or care.

Make no mistake, I did not care for his affections, much less his attentions. He offered them of his own childish attachment, and I did not encourage them with reciprocation. His amorous glances across the office were useless components of a useless infatuation. He was only a tool. A toy. A game.

A complete stillness inside me.

When the wed remove their rings, I always expect to see a splotchy blue silhouette around their fingers. Is that strange?

I tarnish all that I touch, because the pure and the chaste must be taught the crueler ways to affirm that purity. Purity isn’t natal. It isn’t ceremonial.

Purity is only attained through the absolving of dirt.

To my knowledge, he has yet to wash himself of his dirt. And I remain ready with the shovel.

The lessons of skin are a fascinating practice. It is a labor of learning every corner, every quirk and glitch of another naked body and then rewiring it. Changing it. Forcing it into another shape and then carefully observing how it reacts to that force.

When you burn magnesium, it emits what is literally a blinding light, almost unreal. When you put sodium in water, it explodes. When you push someone, they will always push back in ways that are undetermined and often exciting. This was my task, and I relished every sin of the flesh.

He moaned. He didn’t grunt. He moaned. It bothered me a bit. Men can moan, sure, but his moan was frail sounding. I didn’t like it. I took to drawing blood with my nails in his thighs just before he came. I could always tell when he was about to. Little sounds would fall from between his teeth, covered in sighs.

After a week, he only made the roughest noises.

One day at work, he bled through his slacks. I couldn’t help but smile.

After a few weeks, I had left my indelible marks on him. A library of scars and a body with new attentions, renewed instincts. He no longer spoke to me, no longer batted his foolish eyelashes. His grip became firmer, and his thrust rougher, more urgent. He bore scars, scratches, scabs.

I had my own marks, too. My favorite was a particular raised scratch that ran from the center of my collarbone, between my breasts, over my stomach and ended inches above my clit.

I got the feeling that he never made love to his wife. These were marks too prominent not to notice.

I’m not sure what finally alerted his wife to it (read: why it took so long), or why she decided to react the way that she did. One sunny day, she stormed into the office screaming. Practically incomprehensibly screaming. She stomped and huffed and caused a scene right in front of her bewildered husband’s desk, animatedly pointed to my desk a few cubicles down, and cried hysterically until she was removed by security. He had never uttered a word. After everyone began to return to work, he shot me a defeated look. I turned away and continued my work.

I had unraveled a thing greater than him. Knowingly. Forcefully. Indifferently.

I was not sorry.