The Correction Farm Where I Learned to Obey

The bugle sounded at five in the morning and tore me from the only decent sleep I’d had in weeks. The sound was brutal, metallic, designed to destroy any remaining trace of peace. It bounced off the walls of the cell—for that’s what it was, a cell, not a room—and left me sitting on the cot with my heart in my throat. Before I could even swallow, Magda’s voice burst from the speaker set into the ceiling: Everyone to the dining hall. Now. There was no courtesy in that voice. Nothing human.

I washed my face with the basin’s icy water. My hands trembled as I brushed my teeth with the toothbrush they had assigned me, marked with the number that now defined me. I looked at my reflection in the cracked mirror and saw a woman I barely recognized. What did you do, Renata? What have you gotten yourself into?

The dining hall was a large room with metal tables and benches bolted to the floor. About forty women were already seated when I arrived. All overweight, like me. Some huge, others less so, but none thin. Their faces were a catalog of resignation: deep dark circles, clenched jaws, eyes that dared not lift from their plates. I sat in the only empty space, beside three women who didn’t spare me a glance.

—Hello—I whispered. I’m Renata. How long have you been here?

Silence. One of them, a gray-haired woman whose hair was tied in a dirty braid, leaned slightly toward me and moved her lips: Don’t talk. They’ll punish you. I didn’t understand what she meant. I didn’t have to wait long to find out.

A sharp blow against the table made me jump. Magda was there, materialized as if she had risen from the floor, a wooden rod in her hand and that smile that wasn’t a smile. She was tall and thin, with tightly pulled-back black hair and eyes that seemed to enjoy every second of what she did.

—We have fresh meat—she said, pointing the rod at me. Another sow who’s come here for us to tame. And judging by the way those big tits show beneath her uniform, she’s going to be a lot of fun.

Blood rushed to my face. I opened my mouth to answer, to tell her she had no right to speak to me that way, that I had paid for a transformation program, not this. But before the first word could leave my lips, her hand struck across my face. The slap was so hard it shoved me sideways on the bench. The burning was instant, as if someone had pressed a hot iron against my cheek. The tears came on their own, without permission, without dignity.

—You have no voice here—she said, bringing her face close to mine. Her breath smelled of coffee and cruelty. You’re number 387. When I want you to speak, I’ll order you to. When I want you to open your mouth, it’ll be to swallow whatever they put in it. Understood?

I nodded, crying, my cheek throbbing in time with my heartbeat. Around me, not one woman raised her eyes. They all knew. They had all been through this.

***

Breakfast was a glass of orange juice diluted until it was transparent and two bran biscuits that could have served as construction material. Magda announced that would be all until dinner. Then she came over to me, seized my face in one hand, squeezing my cheeks until I felt my teeth digging into the insides of them. With the other hand, without the slightest attempt at concealment, she squeezed one of my tits through the uniform, weighing it as though she were assessing a piece of livestock at market.

—Welcome to the farm, sow. Eat well, because the good part is coming. That fat cunt of yours has no idea what’s waiting for it.

She left laughing, and the sound of her laughter hung in the dining hall like poisonous gas. I chewed the biscuits with difficulty, every bite scraping my palate, while the juice left a bitter taste that came from more than just the liquid. I could still feel the heat of her hand on my breast, as though I had been branded beneath the fabric.

After breakfast, two nurses in gray uniforms took me out of the dining hall without explanation. I tried to ask where we were going, but the look in one of their eyes—empty, professional, indifferent—silenced me. They took me to a room that smelled of disinfectant and metal. A table stood in the center, with leather straps at either end and, something I hadn’t noticed at first, two folding gynecological stirrups at the foot. They pushed me onto it and, before I could resist, ripped my uniform off with one sharp tug, breaking the buttons and leaving my tits bare. They tied my wrists and ankles, then unfolded my legs into the stirrups, spreading them so wide I felt my inner muscles stretch taut. I pulled at the straps with all my strength. They didn’t give even a millimeter.

—No, please, no! Cover me!—I screamed, trying to bring my thighs together and failing. I was completely exposed, my cunt open to the cold air in the room, my tits bouncing with every sob, and a group of men I didn’t know watching me as if I were livestock at auction.

Magda appeared in the doorway. She always appeared at the worst possible moment, as if she had a sensor for fear. She closed the door behind her and approached slowly, savoring every step.

—Every sow receives her mark—she said, walking slowly toward me. A tag in the right ear, another through the septum, with your number. And a tattoo on the right buttock. So you don’t forget what you are. But first we have to inspect the merchandise. Make sure the cunt is healthy, that the asshole can take it. We need to know what we can put inside you, don’t we, sow?

—No! I don’t want this! Let me out!—I screamed, pulling at the straps until the leather burned the skin of my wrists.

No one listened to me. Or worse: they listened and didn’t care. Magda plunged her fingers inside without lubricant, opening me with clinical brutality, while her other hand pinched one of my nipples until it hardened against my will. The pain of the dry penetration mixed with the humiliation of feeling my body respond, treacherous, against my wishes. She began grinding my cunt with two fingers, then three, while I cried and begged, and the fucking bitch smiled as though she were tuning an instrument. When she pulled them out, they were glistening. She smelled them slowly, then licked them in front of me without breaking eye contact.

—Well, look at that, sow. Your cunt says one thing and your mouth another. She put her hand back inside me, this time with all four fingers together, opening me in a way that made me think I would split apart. I felt the burning stretch, the heat of my invaded body and, despite everything I wanted to believe, the trace of involuntary pleasure that disgusted me more than the pain itself.

Afterward, when the nurses were sure I was “healthy,” one of them brought a piercing gun to my right ear. The cold metal touched my earlobe, and for a second there was silence. Then came the snap and the pain: a vicious prick that pierced my ear like a red-hot needle. I screamed. No one reacted.

The septum piercing was something else. The cartilage cracked when the tool passed through it, and the pain exploded in the center of my face, radiating toward my eyes, forehead, and teeth. It was as if someone had smashed my nose with a hammer. Tears blinded me, and blood dripped over my lips, mixed with the mucus I couldn’t contain.

Then came the tattoo. They turned me over on the table—but without releasing my ankles, so I was bent over like an animal with my ass in the air—and I felt the machine’s buzzing before the needle touched my skin. Every prick was a tiny fire that accumulated until it became an inferno. The number 387 was etched into my right buttock while I clenched my teeth so hard I thought they would break. And while the tattoo artist worked, Magda stood behind me, grabbed my buttocks with both hands, and spread them apart. I felt the cool air enter the crack of my ass, everyone’s eyes on it, and then Magda’s finger moving over my asshole, wet with saliva from who knew where, before sinking into my most intimate hole with calculated slowness.

—Tight—she commented, as if she were writing it down in a notebook. We’ll loosen it up. New sows always have closed assholes. In three months I’ll fist you all the way to the elbow.

I sweated, cried, and at some point stopped fighting. My body surrendered before my mind did.

***

When they were finished, they untied me and left me without clothes. All of them. They took me naked into the yard, my piercings throbbing, my tattoo burning, my cunt and anus still aching from the inspection, and the humiliation weighing more heavily than my own body. There were already about thirty women in the yard, all naked, forming a wide circle beneath a sun that fell like divine punishment. I looked at them one by one, and on every body I saw the same mark: the number on the buttock, the ring in the nose, and, on many of them, other marks that made me swallow hard. Nipples pierced with heavy rings. Rings driven through the labia. Some wore leather collars around their necks, like grazing animals.

—One hour of jogging—Magda announced, arms crossed beneath the shade of an overhang. Tits in the wind, cunts in the sun. Anyone who stops before time is up goes to the correction room.

A whistle sounded and we began to run. The ground was loose gravel that drove into the soles of my feet with every step. The heat crushed me. My tits bounced wildly, unsupported, striking my chest, sore and aching. My heavy, undisciplined body protested from the first minute. I saw the other women pant, stagger, and fall. Those who fell were collected by guards and dragged toward a metal door at the far end of the yard. None returned while we were there.

I lasted twenty minutes. My legs stopped responding as if someone had cut their wires. I collapsed onto the gravel, my knees punctured by the stones, and two guards lifted me by the arms without the slightest gentleness. They dragged me to the correction room.

Inside there was a treadmill and, beside it against one wall, a leather buck with rings for securing wrists and ankles. They put me on the treadmill and turned it on. It wasn’t fast, but for my battered body it could have been a sprint. And every time my steps faltered, every time my pace dropped, a whip cracked across my back. The first blow tore a howl from me that didn’t sound human. It was a line of pure fire that opened my skin and stole my breath. The second was worse, because now I knew what was coming and fear amplified everything. The third, the fourth, the fifth. I lost count. Blood ran down my back, mixed with sweat, warm at first and then cold. Every lash was a reminder: keep running, keep running, keep running.

Half an hour in, Magda entered the room. In her hand she carried a thick black rubber cock attached to a leather harness. She fastened it around her waist with the calm of an office worker preparing for a meeting. Then she climbed onto the treadmill behind me, grabbed my hips with both hands, and drove the fake cock into me in a single thrust, without warning, without any lubricant beyond the mixture of sweat and blood already running down my buttocks. I howled. I howled like a slaughtered animal while the treadmill kept forcing me to walk and she fucked me in a perfectly synchronized rhythm, shoving my head forward with every thrust so I wouldn’t stop moving my feet.

—This is what whores like you come here looking for—she panted in my ear as she buried herself in me, again and again. This cock is your new owner. It’ll fuck you on the treadmill, on the cot, at the dining table. Wherever I want, whenever I want. And you’ll spread your legs and say thank you, sow.

Every thrust drove me against the treadmill and forced me to keep running so I wouldn’t fall, and between the fake cock destroying my cunt and the whip a guard kept bringing down across my back whenever my pace faltered, I lost all sense of time. I felt the pressure in my belly, the heat rising against my will, the humiliation of an orgasm I didn’t want, shouldn’t have, and that my body, pushed to the brink, tore from me anyway. I screamed with pleasure and rage at the same time, and Magda laughed loudly as she kept fucking me. Her hand slid around in front, found my swollen clitoris, and began rubbing it while she thrust into me, taking me to a second orgasm that came almost on top of the first and left my legs trembling on the treadmill, held up only by her hands on my hips.

—There it is, sow. There it is. Your cunt knows what it wants before you do.

I completed the hour. I don’t know how. My body operated in a mode I had never known, an animal mode of pure survival in which the mind shuts down and only the muscles remain, doing the minimum necessary to avoid another blow. When the treadmill stopped, Magda pulled the cock out in one hard motion that tore a moan from me, slapped my tattooed buttock brutally, and I fell to my knees on the floor, panting, my vision blurred and the taste of blood in my mouth from biting my tongue so hard. I felt my own fluids running between my thighs, and I gagged at the mere thought of my body responding to this.

Magda squatted in front of me. She grabbed me by the hair and lifted my face so I would look at her.

—Good work, sow. You survived day one. Her smile was the coldest thing I had ever seen. She put two fingers in my mouth, the same fingers that had opened my cunt on the table, and forced me to suck them clean. You have three hundred sixty-four left.

She gave a short laugh and left. They left me there on the floor for several minutes that felt like hours.

***

The showers were like those in a prison: an open room with showerheads in a row and no partitions. The water came out ice-cold, a brutal contrast with the heat of the yard and the burning of the lashes. There were fewer than ten bars of soap for everyone, and the women passed them around in silence, moving mechanically, without looking one another in the eyes. Some had backs striped with red marks, the freshest still glistening with blood. Others moved carefully in ways that betrayed pain in places I didn’t want to imagine.

I pressed myself into a corner and washed as quickly as I could. The icy water on the welts was a new kind of pain, a freezing burn that made me clench my teeth. As I soaped myself, I noticed that some of the women who had been there longer were watching the newcomers with an intensity that raised gooseflesh on my skin. They were the “veterans,” I understood later: women who had survived long enough to become part of the machinery, whom the administration had allowed to form a small internal hierarchy that made them accomplices to the system. Their tits hung lower, their bodies were battered, but they also had the look of people who were no longer at the very bottom.

I saw one approach another newcomer—a chubby woman with brown hair, who couldn’t have been less than twenty-two—and whisper something in her ear. The newcomer backed away wide-eyed and tried to move, but the veteran shoved her against the tiled wall. Another veteran joined her. The newcomer opened her mouth to scream, but the first covered it with her palm while the other forced her thighs apart with a knee. The one with her hand over the newcomer’s mouth shoved three fingers into her cunt without preamble, while the other bit one of her nipples with a cruelty that made mine ache in sympathy. The newcomer writhed against the wall, eyes full of tears, and no one in the showers moved. No one looked up. The water kept falling. It was as if nothing were happening, as if it were merely the background noise of the farm.

Then I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned and saw a tall woman with her hair shaved to a number one, a snake tattooed on her neck, and rings through her nipples. She looked me up and down slowly, just as Magda had looked at me on the table.

—You’re next, 387. Welcome.

—No, please, no—I whispered. I just… I just got out of correction. I’m hurt.

—All the better—she said with a smile. She grabbed me by the hair and pushed me to my knees. The tiled floor was hard and cold beneath my injured kneecaps, and her cunt appeared in front of my face, shaved, with a gleaming piercing in her clitoris. She smelled of cheap soap and something else, something heavier, more feminine. If you make me come quickly, you’re free to go. If not, you’ll have to repeat it. Learn fast, sow.

I closed my eyes. I stuck out my tongue because I had no other choice. The taste hit me—acidic, strong, alive—and for a second I thought I was going to vomit. But she pressed my face even harder against her sex, and my tongue began moving on its own, searching for the pierced clitoris, licking between the lips. The woman moaned, slowly at first and then with more desire, while she rubbed my face against herself. She squeezed my neck with one hand and slapped the back of my head with the other to correct my rhythm.

—Higher, sow. Suck the clitoris; don’t stay in the hair.

I obeyed. I sucked. I licked. I pushed my tongue into the tight hole of her cunt, sucked on her clitoris with everything I had, and ran my teeth over it carefully because I knew one bite would cost me blood. As I did, I felt another veteran move in behind me, force my knees apart, and push two fingers into the cunt that Magda’s dildo had already battered. The new intrusion tore a muffled sob from me, but I kept sucking, because the truth was that if I stopped, things would get worse. The second veteran added a third finger, then a fourth, and began fucking me from behind with her whole hand while I continued sucking the first woman’s clitoris, both bodies moving over me as if I were a piece of furniture.

The woman with the piercing came quickly. She shoved my face against herself so hard I thought she was going to break my nose for the second time that day, and I felt her thighs close around my ears, her whole body shake, and her warm orgasm wet my face, filling my mouth and running down my chin. When she let me go, I nearly fell backward. My face was soaked; I didn’t know whether it was her orgasm, shower water, or my own tears. Probably all three.

—Good sow—she told me, slapping my cheek. You learn fast. Next time it’ll be your turn. But when it’s your ass—today you’re still tender—it’ll be a party opening you up.

They left me on the floor, panting, with shower water falling over my ruined back. The veterans left, and the other newcomer—the brown-haired one—lay sprawled beside me, her thighs stained with blood and fluids. We looked at each other once, without saying a word. Each of us knew what the other had just endured.

Dinner was an insult: a glass of murky water and a handful of white rice that would fit in the palm of one hand. The women ate desperately, counting every grain, measuring every sip. They trembled with exhaustion, hunger, and fear. I chewed that tasteless rice as if it were the last food of my life, because at that moment I wasn’t sure it wasn’t.

Magda came to my table one last time that day. She leaned over my shoulder and whispered in that voice that was pure venom wrapped in silk. As she spoke, she slid one hand beneath the table until she found my sex beneath the new uniform they had given me for dinner, then inserted one finger without asking, as if checking the temperature of an oven.

—Get used to it, 387. Miserable food and long days. Open cunts, broken asses, mouths at work. This is what you asked for. She moved her finger inside me two, three times, felt the flesh respond against my will, and pulled it out. She wiped it slowly on my own neck. Tomorrow we start with the nipple rings. You’re going to look beautiful, you’ll see.

She walked away laughing, and the sound of her heels on the concrete floor was the last thing I heard before they sent us to our cells.

Alone on my cot, I took out the only photograph I had brought: Damian and Sofía, my husband and my son, smiling on the beach the previous summer. I pressed it against my chest and cried until my body had no tears left. My tattoo burned, the tags tugged at my ear and nose with every movement, the lashes kept me from lying on my back, my cunt throbbed with a dull pain that wouldn’t go away, and my anus burned whenever I moved. I curled up on my side, the photograph clasped in my hands, and thought of the promise I had made myself: one year and I would return transformed, thin, new.

Three hundred sixty-four more days.

I closed my eyes, but sleep didn’t come. Only the silence of the farm, broken now and then by the muffled sobbing of some woman in the neighboring cells, or by distant moans—some of pain, others I no longer knew how to classify. And the certainty, cold and heavy as the straps on the table, that I had entered a place I might not leave as the same person.