to inflict excruciating torture. Fingers probed his asshole without the benefit of lube and he felt the thick end of a medical speculum being inserted. They spread the apparatus so they could insert the nozzle deeply into his colon. He braced himself in defiance, determined not to show signs of weakness but the second the clamp was released and the scalding water flowed into his bowels, he screamed out like a wounded animal. Slapping his face, the women revived him just as he was to be administered a second enema of ice cold water. The second enema was more painful than the first and he soon lost consciousness again.

Restraints were placed on his ankles, wrists, and balls so that if he moved his arms or tried to run it would cause his testicles to be pulled painfully from his body. The women picked him up and placed him in a box smaller than a coffin and shut the lid, leaving him to expel the rest of the contents of his bowel in the tiny prison. He smelled his burnt flesh over the putrid filth that leaked from his anus. He closed his eyes and tried to leave his body, to go someplace where he was normal, where pain didn’t motivate his perverse fantasies.

Someone opened the lid to the box. He braced himself for more torture but he felt the soothing touch of a hand helping him sit up. He tried to adjust his eyes only to see a white man. He had a plate of food and fed Charles with his dirty, bare hands. It was a humiliation the likes of which Charles had never contemplated before, to have be dependent upon the kindness of another man for his very survival. His mind flashed to an image of what Black men might have had to endure but he couldn’t hold the thought too long. He was too exhausted to fathom the concept that his experience was choreographed but actual slaves didn’t have a safe word, there was no reprieve at the end of a week, a month, a day, a decade, or a lifetime. The white man snapped him out of his daydream and said, “Dem 'ooman dun fuh smaa't. De buckruh dey whup baa.” It was almost beyond his comprehension how this white man was speaking that gibberish.

“Speak English, I don’t understand,” Charles pleaded. What the hell was wrong with him? Charles tried to comprehend what could have happened to him in order for him to start communicating in the language of these vicious people. He remembered the cryptic message on the Internet and realized that he had been reading some variation of what these people were speaking. Was this man aiding him one of the men that chose to stay? Why would anyone want to stay in this hell? Questions raced through his mind.

The man pulled a pouch from around his neck and put some soothing salve on Charles’ burns and put a container filled with fresh water in the coffin slamming the lid closed again. Charles licked what rice and turtle meat he could from his lips and tried his best to find some comfortable position in that tight, cramped space.

He was not to get much sleep as the women would take turns abusing him every couple of hours. The days ran together