The Cinch

Ashley fell to her knees. Her eyes and tongue sought to escape he confines of her head.
Vomit rose in her throat but failed to pass her oesophagus.

The Cinch around her waist tightened with a force that caused Ashley’s bladder to empty.

She fell onto the floor, her fingers clawing without effect at the band around her throat.

The computer screen again flickered to life.

Pim Stansa gazed at her from his horizontal perspective.
Then, ever so slowly, he turned on the screen so that he stood perpendicular again.
From his impossible manipulation of the screen, Stansa gave Ashley another perfect smile and a double thumbs up.

The arm bands had nipped through the delicate skin, soft fat and muscle tissues and now encircled the bone itself.

She tried to scream for help, but all that escaped was a thin whistling wheeze. Her mouth worked like a fish out of water, but to no avail.

The waist cinch tightened again, now cut so deep that she couldn’t see it in the folds of her abdomen.

Her legs began to jerk spasmodically. She looked down at her self animated feet. They were doing ‘Riverdance’ of their own accord.

A varicose vein on the inside of her left knee expanded like a child’s modelling balloon. The skin ruptured and a pencil thin stream of blood was ejected under pressure. The crimson stream covered the whole length of the bedroom, some fifteen feet across.
Then her whole body joined in with the jerking of her legs.

From Stansa’s view she looked like a jockey spurring on an imaginary horse.

The waist Cinch tightened again.

Deep inside Ashley Armstrong’s torso, her liver and spleen burst, flooding her abdomen with both precious blood and harmful toxins.

The neck cowl seemed to loosen for a couple of seconds. In that time, the contents of her stomach coupled with the emissions of her ruptured organs spewed forth.
She had scant time for one shuddering intake of breath; then it constricted again.

The range of sensations she endured was beyond words.
Pain, agony, mind-numbing terror, anguish, torture, suffering, misery; these were words that featured every day in the tabloids.
Ashley’s ordeal reset the very parameters of these words.

With an unearthly snap of bone, her left leg detached itself. As she continued to flop on the floor gouts of dark crimson essence spurted over the dismembered limb.
The cinch had constricted to such a point that it nipped the top of the lost limb tight around the femur.
The amputated appendage now resembled an over sized bratwurst – with toes.

On the computer monitor, Stansa looked directly into Ashley’s bulging eyes.

As she clung to the last vestige of life she watched his name appear on screen in large animated letters. PIM STANSA.

She watched them rearrange themselves; undoing the simple anagram that she’d missed at the start of the presentation.

New torrents of time rendering agony swept her body. With three decisive snaps, her remaining limbs were detached as the Cinch on each reduced itself to a bizarrely small circumference.

Then the waist cinch constricted for a final time, crushing all remaining soft tissue into her spinal column.
She was now beyond individual sensations and the loss of her pelvis escaped her.

Ashley’s perspective of vision changed, twin messages of contradicting sights each vying for dominance in her brain.
Then she realised that her right eye had popped out its socket and was now lolling downwards on her cheek.

On the screen, Stansa, now framed by his real name gave a cheery wave goodbye.

Ashley was still trying to draw one final breath as her head was severed by the cinch around her neck.
What little blood that remained in her torso now trickled lazily from her mangled throat.

The DVD tray on the computer tower opened and ejected the disc.

The disc landed on the floor and then curled into an unrecognisable shape resembling a dead crustacean.

Then silence settled on the household of Ashley Armstrong.

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