The Ranch Where I Learned What Submission Was
It’s been sixty days since I signed the papers. I count them because I mark them on the wall with a stone I took from the patio on the second day and kept hidden under the mattress. My name is Daniela, though that doesn’t matter to anyone here. Here I’m sow 317. That’s all I am.
I’ve lost twenty-two kilos in two months. That’s not an achievement: it’s a slow mutilation. The food they give us—three dry crackers, a handful of watery rice, a glass of broth that smells like wall dust—doesn’t nourish you. It only keeps the body from eating itself completely. My skin hangs where there used to be volume. My ribs show. My knees look like knots in branches too thin to hold anything up.
But the body is the least of it. What destroys me from the inside is what has no shape.
The training started as normal exercises. Running, squats, planks under the sun. Three weeks in, Claudia—the one in charge of the yard, the one who always carries the stopwatch in her right hand—announced that we were moving «to the next level.» Those four words still make my stomach spasm when I remember them.
The day of the electrodes started like any other. At five in the morning, lined up in the yard, naked, under a sky that still hadn’t decided what color it wanted to be. Claudia arrived with a tray of wires and clips and handed them out with the calm of someone distributing office supplies. Electrodes were stuck to my nipples, to the insides of my thighs, to my lower back, to the backs of my knees. Another pair was placed directly on my clit and on either side of my cunt lips, with adhesive tape that tugged at the hair every time I breathed. Claudia crouched in front of me, pulled the folds apart with two dry fingers, and adjusted the electrode with the same unhurried precision as tightening a nut. She didn’t even look at my face.
They put me on a treadmill tilted to the maximum and started it without warning.
The first twenty minutes were bearable. There was pain, but the kind of pain that still falls within the human. The shocks came with no recognizable pattern: first a brief buzz—a fraction of a second that actually didn’t serve as a warning for anything—and then the lightning strike. It’s not pain that burns on the outside. It’s a fire that convulses the muscle from within, forcing it to contract without asking the brain. In the nipples, the shock shot straight up to my throat and turned into a sound that couldn’t fully come out. In the thighs, the whole leg simply gave way, and if you didn’t grab the bar in time you’d fall face-first onto the moving belt, which scraped your palms and chest like sandpaper. In the cunt, the current was worse: it entered through the clit and spread out in a fan up to the navel, an electric lash that forced my abdomen, ass, and thighs to clench at once, making me feel every millimeter of mucosa as if someone had shoved a boiling hand between my legs. Every shock in that area ripped a gush of warm discharge from me that ran down my thigh mixed with sweat.
I fell four times in three hours. Each time a guard hauled me up by the hair and put me back in position. Claudia never moved from the edge of the yard. Just stopwatch, just a cold gaze moving from one to the next.
—One hour left, sows. The first one to stop tomorrow gets double.
The second hour stopped being pain. It became something else. There’s a point the body reaches where it no longer registers: it simply functions or collapses, with no middle ground. I ended up in a puddle of sweat and piss without realizing I was pissing myself. When the treadmill stopped, I couldn’t get up for more than ten minutes.
***
The ember session was another week. They put us in plank position on a metal grate half a meter off the ground, with a brazier of burning coals underneath. The heat rose from the first second: a dry wave that went straight to the belly, the tits, the face. The instruction was to go down slowly, without touching the coals, and then push back up. Two hundred repetitions.
The first push-up was strange. The tenth was hard. The thirtieth was another dimension.
By fifty my arms were already shaking with that tremor that isn’t voluntary but mechanical: the muscle starting to fail like an engine low on oil. In one of those failures my belly brushed the coals. The sound was the worst part: that brief, precise hiss, that smell of scorched skin that gets up your nose and won’t leave for days. The pain came a second later, because the nervous system takes a moment to process something like that, as if the body needed an instant to understand what had just happened to it.
I screamed. A guard whipped my back without even pausing.
—Keep going.
I did two hundred. At the end, my belly was a map of blisters throbbing with every breath, every heartbeat, with the simple brush of air.
***
The beatings are everyday life. They don’t surprise me anymore, even though they still hurt. Anything is an excuse: breathing too hard, finishing a rep a second late, looking in the wrong direction. The implements vary depending on the mood of the guard on duty: leather whips that cut, rods that leave deep bruises lasting weeks, cables that leave irregular marks. My back is now an accumulation of overlapping scars: old ones crusted over and reopening with sudden movements, new ones still bleeding, and in between a layer of yellow and green bruises from last week.
I sleep four hours a night. Sometimes less. The mind starts generating images I can’t tell are memories or delirium.
***
Rebeca came to the ranch five months before I did. She’s lost close to forty kilos. Her cheekbones stand out now with a precision that wasn’t there before, and her eyes have the look of someone who stopped searching the horizon and only watches the next step, the next minute. She has seven months left ahead of her, and that weighs on her in a way you can see without her having to say it.
We talk when we can, in whispers, in the dead time between sessions. She always says the same thing:
—Every day is one less, Dani. One less to go.
She says it as if she’d stop believing it the day she stops repeating it. I tell her yes, she’s right, and I think about the numbers: the ones left for her, the ones left for me. The relief of not being the one who’s been there longest. The guilt of feeling that relief.
***
The video calls with Rodrigo and Julián are the worst moments of the week. Worse than the coals. Worse than the electrodes.
They appear on the screen and for one second my body begs me to tell them everything. To say where I am. To scream the guards’ names. But the cell has cameras and microphones, and the contract I signed has clauses I’d rather not test.
—Mom, I miss you —Julián says. He tells me about a game, something from school, his friends. His voice has that little-boy tone that doesn’t know how to hide sadness and hides it anyway.
—I’m very well —I tell him, forcing my voice until it sounds almost natural. —We work out every day. I’m getting really strong.
Rodrigo looks at me from the other side with a worry he doesn’t know how to name. He says the house feels empty, that they’re waiting for me, that I should take care of myself. I nod. I smile. I hope the connection is bad enough that he can’t see the state of my hands, the marks that reach up to my neck.
When the call ends I sit motionless in the chair for several minutes. The crying doesn’t come all at once: it seeps out slowly, like something searching for cracks.
***
This morning Claudia announced an escalation. A three-meter concrete wall, smooth, damp with dawn dew. A rope tied to the waist as the only assistance. Ten minutes per attempt. Anyone who didn’t make it to the top before time was up went straight to the correction room.
I started climbing. My bare feet searched for any irregularity in the concrete. At two and a half meters, my hands gave out: the sweat and dew combined left no possible grip. I fell backward. The impact jarred my spine with a dull pain that joined the others, the permanent inventory I already had.
The guards dragged me away before I could try to get up.
The correction room always has a treadmill. They strapped my wrists and ankles with harnesses, and hung two-kilo weights from my nipples with metal clips. Before turning on the treadmill, one of the guards—the biggest one, the one with the scar on his eyebrow—stood behind me. I heard the metallic snap of his belt, the dull thud of fabric dropping to the floor. He didn’t say anything. He grabbed my hips with both hands and bent me forward until I was resting on my elbows on the treadmill bar, ass raised and legs forced open by his knees pressing against mine.
He spat once. I felt the hot gob of spit smack into the crack of my ass and run slowly down to my cunt. Then the pressure: the thick glans sinking suddenly into the dry vulva, pushing the folds inward without waiting for my body to settle. I screamed against the bar. He drove his cock in all at once, to the hilt, and stayed there for a second, breathing over the back of my neck, savoring the bite of the tight muscle around his cock.
—Sow 317 —he said, almost in a whisper—. Let’s see if you learn how to climb the wall.
He started fucking me with a slow, calculated rhythm, throwing all his hip weight into every thrust. Each shove rammed his cock up to my womb and made me feel the coarse hair of his pubis rubbing against my ass cheeks. His other hand held my hair, pulling my head back so I couldn’t lower my face. My cunt got wet from the simple friction, from that mechanical betrayal of the body that lubricates even when the brain is somewhere else, and his thrusts started making a wet, obscene sound that mixed with the whir of the treadmill starting up.
Because the treadmill started anyway, with his cock inside me. At maximum speed and incline. I had to run with him fucking me, with the guard keeping pace with his dick buried to the hilt, the two-kilo weights swinging from my nipples and the clips biting deeper and deeper. Every stride opened my legs wider and he took advantage to shove himself deeper. Every sway sent a wave from my chest to my jaw, and every thrust of his ripped a short moan from me that was no longer my choice.
After a while he pulled out. I felt him slide out with a sucking sound and felt the cold air rush suddenly into my open cunt. There was no pause: the tip pressed against the hole of my ass and pushed in without lubricant, only with the discharge from my cunt that it had dragged along. The sphincter resisted for the first few seconds—a tight, dry ring trying to close against something twice as thick—and then gave way with a burn so intense I tasted metal in my mouth. He pushed it in to the balls. I howled. The whip came the second after: back, thighs, ass—right over the very spot where the cock was going in and out—all of it beaten by the other guard who had stood off to the side and was now watching with his hand already inside his pants. The first blow opened something that was just about to scab over. I felt the blood before I felt the burn.
The scarred one fucked my ass for what felt like forever, thrusting to the rhythm of my forced strides, growling every time the treadmill made me pick up the pace. When he came he did it inside, with a short ugly roar, emptying himself in hot spurts I felt rise all the way to my stomach. He stayed pressed against my back for a few seconds, breathing hard, his cock still buried and pulsing. Then he yanked it out and the semen started running down my thigh mixed with a thread of blood.
The other one didn’t wait. He grabbed my hair, turned my head, and shoved his cock into my mouth in one thrust to the throat. It tasted of stale sweat and old piss. He fucked my mouth to the treadmill’s rhythm, not letting me breathe, choking me against his pubic bone every time I tried to take air. My eyes filled with tears and snot that mixed with the spit dripping onto the moving belt. He came in three short thrusts. He dumped the cum onto my palate and squeezed my jaw with one hand to force me to swallow. I swallowed. I felt the warm semen sliding down my throat and it left a salty, bitter aftertaste that didn’t go away for hours.
I ran for an hour. The last twenty minutes I did with my vision reduced to a tunnel that only included the treadmill immediately in front of my feet, with my cunt and ass throbbing in the same rhythm, feeling the semen from both guards running down my thighs and drying in sticky crusts. When the machine stopped, it took me several seconds to understand it was over. My nipples were purple. My back, a wet mess. Between my legs, a different kind of mess: my cunt swollen, my ass open and not fully closing, and a thread of semen and blood still dripping onto the floor drop by drop.
***
They took me to the showers. Rebeca was there, thin and marked, and when she saw my face she knew without needing to ask. We held each other under the cold water—there’s no hot water here—and didn’t say anything for a while. No need. She put her hand between my legs, without any lechery, just to wash me, and I felt the icy water dragging away the thick mess I had inside. When her fingers passed over my swollen ass I didn’t even complain: it was the only gentle contact I’d had in months. Then she rested her forehead on my shoulder and stayed like that, letting the stream fall on the back of her neck.
In the opposite corner, a group of the veterans was surrounding a new girl. She arrived three days ago and still cries without holding back, mouth open. The veterans have no patience for that. Rebeca and I pressed ourselves against the wall and watched without watching, relieved it wasn’t us tonight.
That shame—feeling relieved because the pain is happening to someone else—is one of the few things that still gives me a clear sensation.
***
Back in the cell I lie down on the cot. The body throbs with a pain that no longer has a specific name: it’s the permanent backdrop I live on, the base volume I got used to without wanting to. The mind takes a while to shut off. I think about Rodrigo, about Julián’s face when he says he misses me, about the smile I forced during the call and whether it was ever really mine at all.
I look at the wall. Sixty marks.
There are many more to go.
I close my eyes. Tomorrow will be the same, and the day after too. Until the body holds out or the calendar gives what it promised. Whichever comes first.