Burner by Robert Ford

Author:Robert Ford [Ford, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-11-16T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

AUDREY: then

Audrey felt the cold curl of disgust and repulsion that floods through your system when you’ve seen something you know you weren’t supposed to, something you shouldn’t ever see. Something you can never unsee.

There were eight photographs, a deterioration broken down on instant photos.

The first showed a girl, a young woman, naked and on all fours. Her back was bowed, her hair smeared away from her face, head hung low. The woman’s eyes were raw, pink at their edges. Her shoulders were slumped, her hands cropped out of frame. In the dark background of the photo, it looked like wooden panels and a rack of something Audrey couldn’t make out.

Audrey looked at the side of the girl’s body, along her mid-section, at the scarred flesh there. She recognized it immediately for what it was—how many nights had that same mottled skin slept beside her?

Burn scars.

She slid the top photograph to the bottom and looked at the next.

The same girl, slightly closer than the previous picture, only this time, her arms were out to her sides, a length of pipe separating them. Even though the girl’s body was vertical, her head had tilted backward as if she had passed out. A black strap and ball gag wrapped snugly around her face.

Audrey studied the photograph and saw a square patch of skin on the girl’s hip was darker than the scarring above it on her side. This looked like a fresh burn—a new wound. And there, on the girl’s inner thigh, another patch, the same size and shape of the burn on her hip.

Shuffling the photograph to the bottom, Audrey flipped to the next picture and brought a hand up to cover her mouth. The girl in the photograph was sitting on a short stool. Audrey stared at the girl’s body from a head-on point of view. Several squares of newly burned flesh adorned her body, spaced out like a chessboard.

Her face had changed. There were circles of shadow beneath her eyes and even though she stared directly at the camera, her focus was on something else entirely beyond the photographer on the other end.

Audrey flipped to the next photo, and the next.

Each photograph was a brief jump forward in time. A time-lapse of torture.

She paused and covered her mouth. Audrey wanted to vomit. She wanted to throw up and scream and shatter everything in the room, turn it to dust, destroy it all to absolute and utter nothingness.

She breathed in and out, slowly, and flipped to the next photo. The paler squares of flesh had been burned to match the others, though as the older wounds healed, they were becoming lighter once again. The pattern stopped at the girl’s right collarbone.

Audrey slid to the next photo. Her breath caught in her throat as she saw the close-up of the girl’s face, some of the skin charred and cracked. The girl’s eye is what made Audrey tremble inside. The cornea was damaged, the moist highlight against the eye’s surface was rippled, and the outside corner was blistered and oozing.

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