The Rusty Chastity Belt, a short story by Ehren Bivins

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The lines tapered off; and Melinda Scoggins got her first glimpse of the exhibit in its entirety.

"How'd ya like ta put thet thang on?" A fat voice fireworked behind her. She turned limply to meet eyes with a spongy fat man. He wore a sleeveless t-shirt that read: FROG GIGGERS DO IT WITH THREE PRONGS. "Wee-oh-whee!" he said, his houndly jowls undulating. "Don't thet shee-it beat awwllll, girl?!"

Melinda never understood what the correct procedure was when accosted by a throwback of this decline. She never got it. Trailer park dwellers constantly promoted the art of tactless embarrassment with her. This guy was a Matisse. Melinda tried to be civil. She was home. Florida, St. Cintura. She felt that politeness could be her banner.

"Uh.. yes, that thing is certainly disgusting...you know........ this is such a symbol of what thousands of years of male phallocentric oppression does to women..."

Melinda paused, nervous, but continued. "Yes, yes...uwh... yes, you see, the patriarchy had to imprison the vagina, the symbol of womanly power and magic, lock it inside a horrific metal box... furthermore, the physical and mental effects of this sexual domination are based on the insecurity of the male mind ...it's not altogether different from the sort of testosterone-driven torture methods such as female castration, ... foot-binding; even... anorexia or bulemia..."

Fat man dipped his red paws down around his neck. His wide phalanges found a box there. He shot a brightly flashed picture of Melinda in mid4ecture. Amber teeth grinned

and fat legs lumbered off past the chastity belt encased in glass. The fat man had said with one simple gesture what no insult could say. This was the Rankley's Accidents of History and Nature Museum, and fat man thought her to be a freak of nature, an exhibit. Melinda's un-powdered cheeks flushed and reddened. She did not move or take her eyes off the exhibit for a frill hour.

The next afternoon Melinda lunched with her high school chum Diana Weiderhouse. The conversation was rife with revolution and women's issues, but that was just when Melinda was talking. Diana just wanted to chow down and talk about men. The restaurant boasted nation4ess, neo-yuppie crapitizers with clashing knickknacks covering all of its walls. The waiter/person brought watery drinks. The room buzzed like millions of June bugs on strings.

"Really, Mel, I don't figure why you're so unhappy?" Here Diana crunched into a mass of drippy tomato in her hamburger. It fell with relish onto her unsuspecting lap. "Whoops!"

"Di, if you would just listen for a sec. You're married. It's different. Steward is a good human being for also having a penis. You don't have to be out there in the arena with those, those flicking lions groping and leering at everything you do.. you're lucky."

"Heyyyyyyyy, I'd dated before I met Stew... and what was that shit about him being good for havin' a cock... they all do! What d'you want, Mel... a eunuch? Yeh, that'll keep you warm

"Member? Member of what? Are you telling me some poor bastard has to belong to a special club to get into your pants?"

"Di.. be serious. I just want a man who understands the pain and suffering that women have been forced to endure for thousands of years... I want a man that does not treat me as an object... a man that can empathize... one to go to meetings with me... someone who will get involved in the feminist-"

Diana had quite enough. She paid for the check, but not before wishing her friend well and good luck finding someone. Melinda was sure that Di had missed her point. Before they parted, each fidgeting for her keys to her car, Melinda's so wrapped in political stickers that it resembled the ad section of a newspaper) Melinda told her friend about the iron chastity belt at the museum. It confused Melinda that Diana just laughed. "Sounds like a real hot seat to me, Mel," she said and then kissed her cheek. She drove off waving, a loud hard rock song booming through the atmosphere.

Melinda's cheeks blushed crimson. She knew what her training ordered her to do. She was fated to capture that clanging symbol of male oppression, take it back for all the women wronged by men. The image of the rusted chastity belt a bug light in her mind:

Infiltrating the Rankley's Museum after closing hours was too easy. Melinda had gotten an idea from some made-for-TV-movie about real life jewel thieves. She stayed in a bathroom stall, quiet as death, until the lights went out and she heard doors being locked. Melinda crept out of the Ladies room, her shins aching from being tucked underneath her buttocks on the toilet seat. There seemed to be no alarms. She didn't know where the guard

was, didn't even know if they had a guard here. A half-lit shadow appeared on a wax figure of a man with a hole in his head. A candle was pressed into that hole. Melinda felt her bowels gurgle water. This is a stupid fucking museum, she thought, get the beft and go! Her head hurt.

The alarm, when she busted the thick glass was instantaneous, hideous. She dropped the hammer that she had placed in her purse hours before. She cut her hand in a wide crescent and the red seepage precipitated onto the velvet of the exhibit case.

The rusted chastity belt weighed heavy, leaden in her wounded hands. Protect me, she thought. I just have to get this thing the Hell out of here... She ran to the doors at the entrance, of course finding them locked. She knew that some sort of authority would be in the parking lot soon-- But who, a curator, the police, Roger N. RanMey's ghost? Anyway, the authority would undoubtedly be a man. Melinda then remembered a window in the bathroom. She ran double time across lacquered floors trying not to see the surreal exhibits beside her. Too late.

The Samoan Mermaid glowered with sunken monkey eyes, forever glued to a fish's posterior. A wax dummy of Percy Pinky, world's shortest dwarf, seemed to gaze off in disgust at her thievery (at about ankle level). A mummified geezer, stuck inside a box spring mattress since he died, appeared indifferent but sad.

Melinda screamed a garbled yowl and tore-ass toward the ladies' room. She picked up her hammer, reopened the wound on her hand, and ran off toward the only exit she knew of, with the chastity belt secure in her arms. Percy Pinky might've heard the ladies' room window smash. The mummy in the mattress should've caught the sound of a body dropping to the grass outside. The Samoan Mermaid probably wished someone would put it into the ocean. Gulf of Mexico air rushed through the hole in the window. By morning it had filled the room. When the museum opened up, the janitor, Bo, found the mess. Blood dried over a broken, empty exhibit case. The chastity belt was missing. Later in the day, he was fired. He was supposed to clean the place last night. If so, might have stopped the thief None of the other exhibits had a thing to say. But one could almost detect that the Samoan Mermaid had moved closer to the glass in its case, closer to the broken window with all that salt sea air riffling through it.

By the time Bo the janitor was being sacked and the story was sent out on the St.Cintura newspapers, Melinda was already on her way to New York City in a rental car. She couldn't have taken a flight with that large, iron apparatus to be stowed in the overhead compartment; wouldn't have made it past the metal detector. So here she was, gliding down the back roads in a Ford Taurus, bobbing her thin head to a Joni Mitchell tape in the cassette player. She kept glaring at the gently swaying belt in the seat next to her. Flakes of rust were falling all over the seat and onto the floorboard. The sun was about 95 (in the shade) and Melinda loathed air conditioning. The windows were down. She decided to lecture the chastity belt.

..... uwh. . .if it took me years to explain it all to you about how much women have suffered to be a part of the Virgin-Whore complex, you still wouldn't understand. How could someone with a sprit and a heart invent something like... you?" She pressed the tip of her index finger up against the warming iron. "You really make me so sick."

The belt, swaying to the motion of the automobile, shrugged and fell to the floorboard with a pinging crash.

.... .What?" she was screaming at it now. "What is so important about you that I would risk being thrown in jail.. just to.. just to...

The belt still swayed on the floorboard, waddling in its flaky skin. Melinda Scoggins pulled over to a large gas station. She put the chastity belt in her duffel bag. She got out a loosely fitting, hippie dress from her gym bag and put that in the bag, too. Duffrl in hand, she marched right up to the aged Spanish attendant, asked for the key to the Women's Room. One day ago she would have wished the sign was spelled Womyn's Room. Now all she cared about was getting that belt onto her body.

Days later she sitting was at her fiberboard desk typing a recent article on Gloria Steinhem into her word processor. She stopped typing and swung her head from side to side. Her cheeks were rosy. Every other woman from The Monthly Visitor, the feminist magazine that Melinda worked for, had gone to lunch at the vegan restaurant across the street. Melinda lifted up her blue, tie-dyed skirt to reveal the chastity belt in all of its ferric grittiness. She scratched her thigh where a flake of rust itched.

Melinda had tried to rationalize what she was doing since she had gotten back home. Could her feminist instincts be trying to tell her that she was stronger than this horrible symbol? Was she looking for a way to impress or sicken the other women she knew? Was she merely deficient in iron? All she could think about, with dumbing horror, was what her estranged brother said on the phone last night: "Melinda, one of these days you're going to become that thing you hate. It happens to every person who thinks too much one way or the other.. your personality will explode!" Her thighs got sweaty and heavy if she thought about this too much.

And the past couple of weeks had been an adjustment. She missed a rally against a factory because she had severe chaffing. She had to go to the bathroom through a slitted line that ran through the iron garment (which worked fine, it was just the noise that the belt made against porcelain made her sick). She had to clean it with a damp towel often. The belt went off for the shower, but that was it. The fact that she didn't go out much and had put on a few pounds made her co-workers gossip. Thunder Spirit, an aging lesbian with no Native American background whatsoever, said "My people can recognize when a woman is in a family way... Melinda is pregnant". Thunder Spirit bought her tan from a bottle and dyed her blonde hair jet-black. So, Melinda's friends in New York shunned her because they thought she had a lover, or a baby... or both. No one knew the bulky truth.

.... .What was it like down there in St.Cintura? Were there rednecks, and illegal immigrants, people with webbed fingers and shit?" Paul was an uninterested gay queen who perked up only at the grotesquely sexual, or the sexually grotesque. His lover Ramone rolled his eyes, knowing that Paul was on a kick that no human could stop.

"Well, I grew up around that area... uwh, and no Paul, I didn't see any people with webbed fingers.. .really, you can be ignorant about so much."

"Whaaaaat? How ~de, Mel. At least - at least I didn't grow up in some Podunk hick burg. and just how many times has your father flicked his cousin?"

Melinda, in a nanosecond of pure rage, grabbed Paul by one of the green pigtails he was sporting and rammed his head into her groin-into the belt itself. A boxing-match style pang! broke the atmosphere of the coffee house and then a shrill, piping scream opened up.

Blood was raining down Paul's face. Two of his front permanent teeth shot into a passersby's mocha latte. Without a second thought, Melinda grabbed his shivering head, rammed it once more into the chastity belt. Ramone took Melinda's arm before she could do it thrice. His sad lips mouthed the word enough. She ran out of the coffeehouse with her eyes streaming, Paul's cliche' scream breaking into a smaller howl as the door slammed behind her. Two blocks down she raised her skirt, threw the belt in a dumpster. She could hear rats around her. They sounded like Paul's front teeth scraping on the belt.

Her common nightmare centered on her viewing a five-story phallus made of titanium, bent on destruction. It the haze of the dream, it always said one thing, "I am the throbby machine of envy and maleness... do, do you happen to have any rust-proof on you?" No? Then the giant phallus upended itself and swung on its scrotum to destroy New York. Melinda always noticed it swung just how someone would swing a baseball bat. The city was obliterated. Melinda taught the surviving Amazon-type women that shaving your legs was not necessary in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Then Melinda looked around in the dream and found that she had become the giant phallus. She would wake, crying.

Melinda didn't write for The Visitor anymore. They had fired her immediately when a wounded Paul screamed into the office, his jaw wired, his eyes aflame.

Pointing: "Thith... thith ith tha bith thath luckth me upth tha othah night!" The other girls had to ask him to repeat it. Melinda was already packing her stuff. Without a job, she stayed at her place, watched blue foreign movies, and drank too much.

She had developed a strange rash where the imprints of the chastity belt were. Great, she thought, probably some 700 year-old Japanese fungi.. Melinda decided to go to the doctor, a psychiatrist, actually, to get rid of the nightmares and other difficulties. Surprisingly, the rash went away. She was almost sad to see it go; it reminded her of the belt. She was torn, the belt disgusted her, made her sick, but she felt strange without it. Believe it.

In the long run, she found it wasn't healthy to wear an ancient chastity belt. Her therapist gradually unearthed her childhood traumas and performed the most degrading of mental sex acts on her. He also had a lazy eye and wore pink bow ties. She was pronounced disturbed, and was prescribed medication. In a Xanax haze, Melinda got on the bus on a Wednesday. There was only room to stand, so she did. Drooling. A young man hopped onto the bus and grabbed onto the same strap that she was holding- a smile formed, the first man unafraid of Melinda Scoggins. He was gorgeous, kind- he talked for the whole ride home. The drugs wore down and Melinda danced herself into the conversation. The bus brakes puffed and spat, like an urban elephant in must; until they both got off at Melinda's. It began to mist, rain, then pour. The young man snaked a wet arm around her bony shoulder. She liked that. Melinda and the young man ran to the overhang in front of her apartment building; she lurched into his arms. They were out of the downpour. She murmured "I love you" but was drowned out with a metallic clang, when her body fell against his. The metallic noise rang out from the chastity belt around the man's quaking hips. A look into his eyes: feral, owned