Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3

121 Days of Urban Sodom
by Jacqueline Phillips

A fascinating examination of lust and sadism, with a modern and original style, from an exciting new literary writer.

Our unnamed narrator takes her readers through an unusual resolution of lost love-six months after parting from her girlfriend Colette, she's still in pain. So she allows herself one hundred and twenty-one days to recover, while at the same time undertaking a journey into the Marquis de Sade's One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom. Thus does our narrator catalogue her fall from the intense emotion of young innocent love to despairing bitter debauchery, and at the same time exposes Sade's role in her own modern life. This novel is not solely an edgy, explicit tale, nor is it merely a sour-sweet love story. This gripping novel breaks all boundaries and knows few confines.

A fascinating examination of lust and sadism, with a modern and original style, from an exciting new literary writer.

"It is not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?"-the Marquis de Sade

Day one

I made you a promise and I've never broken my promises to you. I promised you a book. You no longer wanted me, but still you wanted certain sections of my mind. Maybe you can peel me and remove the segments you want and discard the rest. Unfortunately you don't posses that control over what my mind expresses and I laugh at the irony I posses the same as you. I have a title, a title and a copy of Marquis de Sade's The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom.

Like a scientist possessed I've not seen media nor did chore mediocrity for weeks, my hair permanently tousled, threads committing mutiny from my clothes. Most people deal with lost love affairs with chocolate, hairstyles, diets, mad weeks spent calling clairvoyants, but after seven months and one novel the pain still won't leave me. I will give myself one hundred and twenty one days and my love; you must take one hundred and twenty one days to read your bequest.

Initially I began to read from the beginning. The Arrow version of 'One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom' begins with a critique by Simone de Beauvior. From her pretentious waffle I expect 'One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom' to be a political, philosophical and erotic masterpiece, repulsive but profound. Simone de Beauvior reveres de Sade as revolutionary ahead of his time, with insight to match that of Freud's. A fighter of freedom, a philosopher of social mores. My next readings include the beginning of 'One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom', followed by random pages in the middle, a break to clear my head, followed by the latter pages.

Repulsed? de Sade doesn't write well enough to arouse repulsion. Sixteen children are kidnapped to partake in orgies by the main characters. The Bastille begins containing forty six people, sixteen people survive. de Sade has written a snuff log, a catalogue of torture, resulting in snuff. His 'hero's' are no different that twentieth century rings who take to the streets luring teenage boys and girls taking them to another country to rape, bugger, flog, and torture in every possible way, before killing. Killing often through sexual acts, being left to bleed to death, asphyxiation, exhaustion, drugs, starvation, dehydration, boys and girls fucked to death and sometimes recorded on film. Sade didn't have access to a camera, or web cam, so he wrote. His writing no more eloquent than the present day acts of snuff. He merely possessed a wider, aristocratic vocabulary. Not an erotic vocabulary or a lulling seductive style, his style was 18th century sleaze, which were it not so violent and incestuous might arouse on a primal level. Sade has succeeded possibly by his breeding in doing what no twenty first-century person can. He has written and has published and printed a snuff novel, openly available to buy, in the guise of academic interest. Interest in what? Sade is not original; he writes what turns him on, because presumably no other snuff novels were readily available. His novel consists of sodomy, sodomy inclusive of all. Eight fuckers are brought to bugger the eight boys and the four 'hero's'. The children girls and boys are ritually sodomised. Sade introduces another favourite theme, all the wives of the hero's are the daughters of another hero and were initially buggered by their fathers before the 'marriages'. Thus are the constituents of the novel, incest, sodomy, violence, children and snuff.

I rub my temples agonising over how it began, you, me, the ending, de Sade? I'm trying to make sense, retrace my steps, and now de Sade's steps, we have a menage de tois.

Accidental Meeting

My curiosity had awoken to cybersex, not as a lusting, just to satisfy a curiosity at an opportune moment. My body was prepared for fulfilment regardless of the screen flashing into life; pressing against the chair as I loaded www.yahoo.com, then entered sex chat into the search box. My fingers massaged the mouse up and down the screen and for no apparent reason I clicked www.thesexguide.com, this led me to thesuburbs.com chatrooms and an array of choices. The Lounge, the hot tub, the bedroom, the nest, the dungeon, erotic chat and so on, maybe twenty rooms. I settled on the lounge. I was an educated professional woman, but no-one was watching, no-one was pointing a finger, questioning why I was in a sex site, questioning why I was in a straight room, rather than the lesbian nest, like de Sade I was free. I had choice. I entered as Fem, wanted to keep the anonymity and this freedom I so liked. Someone clicked on Fem I don't know who, some guy and in the private reserves of a two-way transcript, he typed his hardness out to ejaculation and I typed out multiple.

I used my usual nick Girl when not cybering, which only occurred five times, until I realised reality was preferable and masturbation preferable in its solitude. I'm insular in my pleasure, I have no wish to assist another unless she is real, in front of me and I want her. Girl hung and charmed the nest, until; I tired of the monotonous pleasantries and false gestures. People hugged total strangers seemingly oblivious to the fact they were totally alone with their PC's not hugging the walls let alone a person. People 'fell in love', had relationships' with total strangers, a nom de plume typing from across the other side of the world, who could've been an overweight middle aged man in Montana pretending to be a cheerleader, or a toothless granny from Carlisle pretending to be a power dressing lipstick lesbian.

I came to realise the dungeon and some of the rooms beneath it were domination and submission rooms, my experience of such had been professional dominatrix's in some murder drama or other on the television. Osisris and I spent the next couple of weeks analysing and mocking the patrons of the dungeon while on MSN at the same time as being in the room. Our conversations frequently went:

Woman ha she called you Sir! Oh hello Sir.

Osisris yes slave

Woman grrrrrrr, I'm no slave!

Osisris well don't call me Sir. Damn subs they think I'm in denial, they won't believe I'm not a Dom.

I had been working until the early hours, when I logged onto the site for a break; the dungeon was empty apart from you, Colette. I did my usual ironic ice throwing, while you stared drunkenly at the screen, occasionally interjecting with snippets about yourself, you were twenty-eight, a law postgraduate. I was fascinated, didn't know why, just knew I wanted to talk with you more.

The first day of Sodom begins with adulation to leather.

Leather is skin on skin. The overpowering of animal, her carcass, left to dry, then treated, but still the smell of power and death remains. A smell so intoxicating, new leather sucks the oxygen from my mind causing migraine if exposed too long. An aroma that floods every sense, opening the veins to bursting, rushing the life substance to swell every nerve ending at the mere scent. A texture so soft, or hard depending on preference. Soft curved around your hips so well, thin shards pushing against your swollen rise, evidence of your arousal seeping onto the black. Leather merged with liquid trickling from within you. Black leather adorning your flesh outside, interacting with your want inside, containing it. I could lie forever, my head on your thigh, just falling into intoxication from the leather and you, your scent, your arousal. Watching you strain against the powerful black material, a fight between your powerful lust and its powerful binds. Watching you cover the thin straps with your delicate potent gloss, turning it's matt to shine, a trail of sunlight illuminating your writhing lust. Oh how I could watch for hours, sit beneath your sensual lily thighs and laze my head against you, but just far enough away, while you read erotica, neither of us touching each other or ourselves. My swollen nib throbbing against silk, your lips claret against black, pushing the leather out toward me, teasing us both.

When you've finished reading you push me to the other side of the room and caress yourself into the leather, circling around your skin and the black skin covering you, running your finger along the tight binds, nourishing the flesh with your silky dubbing, rubbing in the transparent gel and droplets of white, feeling your pushed out lips beneath your finger and just a slight escape of your swollen hard bud, pressing desperately to reach your digit, trying to force the black binds loose. You writhe urgently, your cunt contracting against wisps of leather, trying to consume take it within you. Your hands drift lower, but you find a wall of leather, rendering your cunt and arse inaccessible, only able to throb and demand against their powerful captive.

The straps could be loosened, but this is a accolade to that sensuous texture and you like teasing yourself for days, bringing to a peak, then stopping, arousing your mind to giddy euphoria, only releasing when lust cascades your body, her waves unrelenting.

Day two

The fourth time I read 'One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom' I almost passed out. One of the narrators, an old crone was describing in the shortest of paragraphs a variety of killing techniques. These ranged from injecting with a venereal disease to frigging a woman to death. Incidentally de Sade uses frigging to include any kind of masturbation, manipulating a phallus, anus, and in this case, it refers to a rubbing of the woman's clitoris, not the definition of frigging I am familiar with which is vaginal fingering. I find Sade's fascination with death and destruction difficult. There is a certain instinctual excitement in violence and death, but not the same excitement as lust and Sade's deaths are neither violent nor passionate, but, slow and premeditated. One includes a woman buried from the waste down until she slowly rots to death. After the giddiness passed I put the novel down for a while, and considered the research of Masters and Johnson who found women are capable of orgasming until boredom or tiredness overtake. I wonder how a woman can be orgasmed to death and conclude her body would have stopped reacting days before her death, which was probably from loss of blood after the persistent friction burnt away her flesh down to her artery. I consider whether she gained any pleasure at all before her death as men's fingers are not designed nor trained for the female form. How absurd that my thoughts give contemplation, thus credence to a piece of psychotic fiction. Far more valuable are my questions as to how Sade could gain pleasure from a one way interaction. The pleasure from sex is the arousal, lust and enjoyment of the other person. Yet the emotion and reactions of Sade's vessels are rendered impotent. Maybe this is a gender difference or maybe Sade became so insular after years of incarceration he trained himself to derive pleasure from immobilised blank objects, human, but dehumanised, and human only because that texture and imagery gave the greater satisfaction.

Sade wrote fantasies not realities. His actual experiences consisted of flagellation of and by prostitutes and molestation of innocents. Thought is always more extreme than action, because it can omit boundaries other than those set by the imagination. Sade's imagination is as wooden as his imagery; all the fuckers have similar penis's thick and long. All anuses are pink and beckoning apart from the dribbling crone with the impossible hanging haemorrhoid. Why didn't he write her as a hermaphrodite, which could have been a scrotum and phallus attached to a vagina, rather than an implausible pile, and far more appeasing to the spectrum of imaginative possibilities...

Getting to know you

My days analysing the behaviour of the dominants and submissives decreased in frequency and intensity as you consumed more of my time and mind. At first we talked a little each day, disclosing our work, lives, and eventually fears and desires. You would tease with words, personality rolling from your linguistics, stamping your idiosyncrasies into every syllable. I love contradictions and you are a perfect specimen. A Geordie lass, a law school graduate, a working class kid, a styled woman, an English rose, half Italian, gentle, feisty, vulnerable, strong, open and very, very closed. You would tease and call me yours, then pull away to talk intimately to some American. Your wit surpassed any sublimity during that first phone call:

"Hey is that Colette?"

"Nah"

"No?"

"Nah"

"That's not Colette?"

"Nah"

Bear in mind I suffer with embarrassing dyscalculia.

"Is that 00654686754"

"Aha"

"But that's not Colette? Ok sorry to bother you"

"It is me"

"Oh ok"

We chatted somewhat awkwardly after this and I left doubting your stability and unsure of much you had said due to an accent barrier. To all intents it could've ended there, yet when you next called a few days later my every cell responded to your soft northern lilt, understand you or not, you had a voice as smooth and husky as velvet espresso dripping down the throat.

The voice is much underestimated, unutilised tool and corridor to the mind. Sade pays no homage to sounds. I could lie on my stomach, untouched just listening to you all day. Your voice is as paradoxical as your personality, swinging from sensual breathy accent, going softer and lower with your arousal, to the fearful harsher received pronunciation of your 'law school' voice, which always rendered me to feeling like a naughty child no matter how innocent my actions. Your voice breathed my skin, vibrating the layers between your lips. Your voice caressed my ears sending me into an oblivion of sensation encased in a bubble containing just you and I. Moans into my mouth, into my shoulder, murmurs that expressed your needs and pleasure, short sharp breaths heralding your explosion into a space where every cell burst open with colour and intensity, each contracting in a harmonic rhythm. Vocals teasing with innuendo and whispered private profanity. Waves of sounds caressing my fears, showing your love, lifting me through exhaustion. I could tune into your arousal immediately from your tone, though your 'law' voice tantalised me as much as your soft low whispers. I wanted your law voice to drive me urgently against you, pinning me, biting me in anger, whereas your gentle lilt I wanted to overpower, take you, consume your voice, your breath, your moans in my mouth. Sometimes our vocals in the lonely nights apart would lead to seduction and it wasn't the same as you by my side, but I would feel you by my side as our breathing communicated the sweet honey lust of previous and future lovemaking.

Day three

Writing draws me into the early dawn, or maybe it's Sade, or maybe it's you. I don't recall the last time I chose day over darkness, life over reclusivity, though, the world is now my Bastille. A Bastille without you, empty and distorted.

I haven't opened Sade again; he lies on my desk next to the keyboard, in his favourite position, face down. I'm still chewing over him, he's like liquorice root, you chew until it's dead, but just before you spit or swallow a burst of flavour floods the tongue. I've thought of him all night and morning; he's shared my sleep. I've lolled over why he doesn't enrage me, why he doesn't rip my veins from their sinews and temper my mind with fear and pain, branding my thoughts forever. Why he remains within the realms of intellectual. Here is a man revealing acts of festering, burning forced fucking, flogging and buggering onto men, women and children. Fresh children, sweet smelling hymen sealed with no sexual appeal at all. Increasing with fervour to reveal mutilations, disembowelments, and foetus's ripped from wombs, and finally murders. Thus, I'm locked in this conundrum, why do I feel nothing? Am I so depersonalised? Possibly, but, more potent than that, the cause lies in his linguistics. Linguistics that don't build, don't create real people and empathy for them. Children described in three or four sentences outlining their physical attributes. Children silent apart from their use as tools bodies bent and contorted at the will of the 'hero's', but minds and emotions never disclosed to the reader. Maybe he already has them developed in his imagination and his writing is selfish, unconcerned for the reader, or maybe Sade and his modern day contemporaries never allow their perception to work. They never see the person, like the scientist they reduce life, in order to damage and remove life. It might not be the case that they see children as sexual objects, because to see another as sexual there is reaction from his or her responses. Sade writes of amoral freedom.

Freedom derived from a pure concern with the egocentric and nothing existing beyond that. A pain that is relative, hurting only the receiver, providing freedom and satisfying want to the perpetrator who cannot feel the pain. Thus, is it possible that for Sade, his 'hero's' and contemporaries they are the centre of the universe they don't find arousal in the external, but when aroused use people like any other object to relieve themselves as one would dry dishes with a cloth then discard it? That, the attraction of children isn't all their attributes, button nose and hormone free smell of candy that possesses no sexuality, but, the ease of usage of this object, compliant, unresponsive, easily overpowered.

The meeting.

Our first meeting was April the seventh, two months after over first exchange of typescript. I waited against the wall of the platform in beige gap jeans, a black gap T-shirt and long leather trench coat, smoking nervously. A dreamy haze slowed time; people exited the steel cylinder in slow motion, blurring into the background as you slowly stepped out. I stood staring. I didn't know what you looked like, nor you I, we were a mystery to each other, yet as I laid my eyes upon you, I'd known you for eternity seen you constantly in my head, in my dreams in my waking moments of solitude.

We melted together, the rest of the world disintegrating leaving just the ground under our feet. Your shy vulnerable smile drew me to you stirring the core of my protective instincts. You looked so stylish, black leather gloves protecting your soft white hands, a black cotton jacket, zipped to your neck, blue jeans curving around your sensual hips, widening at the ankles to compliment your strong thighs. Wisps of the softest curly dark hair falling before your right eye, lazing on your cheekbone, so soft, so curly, so dark, so tousled, so wild, so real betraying the Latin against skin of chalk, striking a contrast inducing melts of emotion and passion.

The sun shone that first meeting; we walked through the park, climbing the knee-high wall when faced with locked gates, walking without touching yet not a space between us, just the breaths of our nerves. We weren't yet lovers yet, we were no longer strangers held by mouthpieces or screens. I walked slowly looking straight ahead, scared to look at you, you stirred me so, but every now and then I sneak a glance, take in your strong roman nose, your paradoxical determined yet vulnerable hazel eyes, your contrasting undefined jaw emphasising small yet full pouting lips.

I can't recite our lovemaking, it's too precious, too sacred, the touch, smell and taste of you still residing with the clarity of yesterday in my mind. I was so totally concentrated and taken with your body, I raised my head from your thighs after taking your tides of pleasure and consuming it within me, raised my head to embrace you, hold your quivering body close, stunned by the magnetism between us. I was but a breath away from your thigh, your rise still glistening in my vision and I meant to say I love your taste before kissing you hard diving your flavour into you, but taste remained silent in my head and I startled, afraid of the three words that actually escaped my mouth, then realising I really did, I repeated them before kissing you hard and passionately.

© 2004 Jacqueline Phillips

About the Author

Jacqueline Phillips, born in the English Midlands in 1973, did her first poetry reading at a women's bookshop at 18, and has had many subsequent colorful experiences. She graduated in Psychology at Staffordshire University and is currently teaching. 121 Days of Urban Sodom is her first novel.