Pain and gain. Come here. That right my dear, Come to your master. You have been a bad girl. You now you will be punished. You signed the contract. In return for you services as a maid for one year. Your beloved sister is saved from nasty leg breakers. As a dancer by profession that would ended her career. But she did rack up a huge amount of gambling debts. ...
The wagon makes its slow steady progress along the hard pack road. The horse is moving at a pace somewhere between a walk and a trot. The man at the reins and the woman beside him stare blankly ahead as people tend to do when on a long journey. Behind are four, fresh mares, all young, fit. One of them is seventeen today, although she is unaware of it. Mares have no sense of time, nor day. Weeks, months, years mean nothing. They are under contract and the days pass, pass without noting. ...
Pain was the first word that that popped into her head The second word was alive. Georgina O’Keefe eyes opened. She was in a hospital. Michael. Where was Michael? Over half her body was in a cast. From waist down to her toes where encased in in plaster. If she could see her toes. It looked like her feet where enclosed in a blob of plaster. Neck was in a cervical collar, hand and arms where also immobilized in plaster casts. She felt like the mummy that had been hit by a train. She was either covered in plaster or bandages. ...
Brenda looked down from the balcony. Across the yard a man dressed in overalls and a green plaid shirt led two naked women from the barn. They wore bridles fitted with bits in their mouths. Reins were attached to them. They wore leather harnesses which were fixed to the rails of a cart. And they had hooves, hooves on their hands and feet. The man climbed into the cart, shook the reins, and the women went off at a slow trot. ...
Angela awoke with a start. “Where am I? What is this place?” she asked herself with alarm. Panic was mixing with confusion as she tried to recall her most recent actions, but all was a muddle. She dimly recalled driving along the coast towards her cottage up north, but nothing afterwards. What had become of her? The room was dark gray; the walls, floors, everything appeared to be made of polished granite. She was lying on a slab of the same material in the center of the room. There was a dim illumination, but she could not make out the source. Her body was covered from the waist down with a dark sheet. ...