Room 317
A dark comedy short story that explores themes of financial domination, microcelebrity, stalking, doxxing, age-gaps, inheritance, murder, and a meme.
“Send it. Now. Then you can beg.”
A whimper. The rope tightened. Shame and arousal pumping together.
“Type the PIN. Send the money. And do what you’re told like the scum that you are.”
The phone lit up, banking app opened. The transfer buzzed through, $3,400. Strained mumbles through duct tape.
“Pitiful tribute. If you were really down, you’d open up the books at your company for me. You’d be embezzling for me. Fuck, I should be in your will, and once I am, you should kill yourself. But look at you, sad little rat, begging to be freed with this chump change. Absolute scum.”
The whimpers fell into swampy moans, heaving chest, grinding pelvis. Duct tape peeled off.
“Oh I see. You love being exploited. I’m doing you a favor by taking your shit. Give me more money. Now. Then you can lick my feet. No, I want you to suck on them.”
Another transfer, $7,000 this time. An approving nod. The second phone in the corner of the room captured the humiliation.
“Seven thousand. This is barely worth my time. Barely worth the effort of crushing your ass like the roach that you are. I should just stomp you out right now and end you. Make you a genetic dead end. Maybe after you put me in your will. For now, you’ve bought the privilege of sucking my feet. Do it. Now.”
Tongue moved across the skin, swirled over the ankle, wrapped around the big toe. Saliva dripped down the cracks, wetting the rug.
“That’s right. Clean them, spic-n-span. I want those feet shining. You need to put in work to be my cash cow.”
The heel pressed harder into the lips, then wiggled past the teeth, gagging for a half minute until pulling away with laughter.
“You stupid dumb bitch. Get up. Go turn off that camera.”
The woman struggled to push herself onto her feet. She was nude, except for the beige jute rope that snaked around her torso and cinched her sagging breasts, and bound her limbs in an unforgiving symmetry. Clothespins pinched her nipples into engorged pink peaks. Her cheeks glistened with her own spit.
His name was Max. He wiped his foot off with a towel. He stood a foot taller than her and was twenty years younger. His long blond hair was wrapped into a tight bun. His body tanned and sculpted. He moved with mechanical precision, carefully loosening the rope from the woman, allowing her enough freedom to follow his last command.
She stood up and grabbed the phone, which had recorded her humiliation, and clicked the camera off. Her lips spread into a demented smile, while her mascara bled down her cheeks. Her pale, flabby skin was flush with the excitement of abuse and degradation.
She couldn’t get enough of him.
“Give me that phone, cow,” Max said. “Crawl to me. We’re not done yet.” She lowered herself to the floor and dragged her elbows and knees until she was at his feet, then handed him the phone. “Now tell me who you are and why you worship me.”
She hesitated, her words balled up in her throat. Max slapped her left cheek, which cracked her into awareness. He clicked the camera back on and put her face into its frame.
“My name is Gloria Weyerhausen,” she said, voice meek. “Everything I own, every cent in my accounts, even what’s left of my ashes when I die, it all belongs to you. I’m a slave to my bull god. I worship him because he is superior to me in every way. I’m just a dumb cash cow, one of many in his pen.”
Max turned the camera off, tossed the phone and fell back onto the bed. “You’re so fucking pathetic,” he said as he checked his bank balance. “Get dressed and get out of here. I’ve got other things to do tonight.”
Gloria, still nude, curtsied and picked up her clothes piled in the corner of his bedroom. She wasn’t getting sex from him tonight, and after the sort of degradation she endured she knew that she’d have to find release back at home, but tonight she felt daring.
“I feel like we can be something,” Gloria said.
“What do you mean you ‘feel’?” Max said. “You’re feeling something now? Go wipe your ass with that and flush it.”
Her skin tingled with embarrassment. “I just think that you and me, we can be more than this.”
“You’re thinking? You think? Cow, think about how you should be putting me in your will.”
“Yes, sir, I understand,” Gloria said. “See you next Tuesday. Same time, if it suits you.”
Max ignored her, flicking through his phone.
Gloria turned to leave but stopped at the door. She cleared her throat once, then a second time, to get his attention. “If you don’t mind me asking,” she said. “You’re serious about being in my will?”
Max was annoyed that she was still there and talking. “Your will, life insurance, I dunno. Figure it out.”
“My will, it’ll take time,” Gloria said. “Lawyers and stuff. A month, maybe more. I can call the life insurance agent, though.”
Max ignored her.
She nodded, thanked him again, and took her leave.
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In his free time, Max shitposted on Twitter.
He had grown a niche account of 3,700 followers by making video edits that mocked terminally online personalities - everything from journalists to lolcows. His style and the targets of his edits appealed to the far-right fringes on the platform.
His username was GoldenBvll.
Max kept his personal life, and more importantly his work as a financial dom, fully segregated from his online persona. But he was just as exacting and cruel on Twitter as he was with the women who paid him for humiliation in real life.
The psychological desire bubbling in the subconscious of both his clients and followers was that need for humiliation, except for the former it was of themselves, and the latter of others. Sometimes these two circles overlapped in a perfect Venn diagram of a person.
Her username was IronKunt.
She grew an account of 58,000 followers by peddling cheap takes on gender relations with a patina of racism and provocative personal anecdotes. Her favorite insult for a man that didn’t meet her standards was “choad,” a word that revealed her age as vaguely Millennial, along with “spunkrag,” which she reserved for the anonymous accounts of men who attacked her.
The two had gotten into spats before, quote-tweeting each other with jabs and insults, which petered out harmlessly.
That changed when IronKunt was doxxed. It was the middle of summer on a slow posting day when her mask fell off. An anon dug into her past and found a LiveJournal from when she was a teen, then her college photos. She was revealed to be 28 years old, butterfaced, a bob-cut ginger with freckled pale skin and wide-set hazel eyes. Her name was Melissa.
The perfect target for a Max edit.
He plastered her face on a slave woman cloaked in rags, crawling towards a bronze-skinned behemoth of a man with a bull’s head sitting on a throne. The audio was a voice reading Nietzsche, “Because the infliction of suffering produces the highest degree of happiness, because the injured party will get in exchange for his loss an extraordinary counter-pleasure: the infliction of suffering - a real feast...”
The slave woman reached the throne and the man swung his foot into her jaw. She recoiled. The reading continued, this time with a lyre weaving through syncopated EDM beats, “The sight of suffering does one good, the infliction of suffering does one more good - this is a hard maxim, but none the less a fundamental maxim, old, powerful, and ‘human, all-too-human’; one, moreover, to which perhaps even the apes as well would subscribe: for it is said that in inventing bizarre cruelties they are giving abundant proof of their future humanity, to which, as it were, they are playing the prelude. Without cruelty, no feast: so teaches the oldest and longest history of man - and in punishment too is there so much of the festive.”
The slave woman crawled closer with a golem’s grin. The bull-headed man then seared her forehead with a branding iron with the username GoldenBvll.
The Tweet went viral, racking up over 47,000 likes and a million views, and many derivative memes of it were posted after.
Melissa kept up appearances on the timeline, pretending to be unphased, even quote-tweeting the video with her signature misandrist style:
Choadbrain sees me once and made an entire Neet-chee Pixar short to tell on himself, spent more time on this than his personality
The tweet was a dud, though, landing flat and brought on a slew of replies that mocked her looks and praised the video.
For two days this went on, until the memes dried out and the timeline was onto newsier topics. But the sting on Melissa’s ego only grew, inflamed by the video, which she watched on repeat over the following week. The humiliation swelled, palpable and hot, until it bubbled over one night while she was drinking vodka cokes and shot a message into Max’s DMs.
IronKunt:
lol so u really stared all night at my face making that clip huh? 🤡
GoldenBvll:
nah. that clip took an hour. you’re just that easy to make into a slave.
IronKunt:
u made me famous. everyone’s jerking it to my face now thanks to u
GoldenBvll:
you’re welcome. consider that one a free collab.
IronKunt:
collab? lmao u wish choad. i should sue ur broke ass.
GoldenBvll:
broke? check the views again. you’re branded now. with my name on your forehead. i own you.
IronKunt:
yeah ok, keep jerking off to your own edits. i’m the one w 58k followers. you’re a lowbie, i’m a movement.
GoldenBvll:
movement? lmao. you got exposed as a mid ginger with a bob cut. the only thing moving is you on your knees in my edit.
Melissa paused, typed out a response, deleted it and typed one out again:
... ok ngl that’s kinda hot
GoldenBvll:
thought so. you like being owned, cow?
IronKunt:
a bit on the nose. don’t call me that.
GoldenBvll:
then block me, CuntCow.
IronKunt:
nah
It was 3:30AM Pacific. The two fell asleep, landing in the sandman’s soft embrace.
Over the next weeks they kept up an unspoken peace agreement, both ignoring each other on the timeline. Max moved on, turning his edits on the next chumps, but Melissa couldn’t shake that delicious feeling of humiliation that he had given her.
She needed more.
The phone rang. It was Gloria.
“Yeah,” Max said flatly.
“I did it,” Gloria said. “I had my agent put you on the life insurance policy.”
“And your will?”
“It’ll come soon.”
“Make it happen,” Max said. He hung up and went back to tinkering with his next edit in DaVinci Resolve.
Melissa archived all of GoldenBvll’s tweets. Max was selective in posting and only had 2,100 tweets since starting his account three years prior. It took Melissa less than a day to save them.
Combing through them was more time consuming. Melissa posted infrequently as she carefully pored over the tweets. Most of his posts were photos and videos, which she watched in full, looking for any slip-up or clue that would reveal information about him. But his productions focused on the targets of his mockery, using details from their lives and not Max’s own.
In his personal tweets, Max’s OPSEC was impeccable. Out of the 2,100 posts that Melissa archived, she identified 17 of them that spoke about anything personal. These were mostly irrelevant and banal, things like “I hit the trail today and not a nig in sight,” “Tanning my butthole, GM and HH,” which gave no hints that could lead to who he was or where he lived.
Except for one.
When his account was only two months old, Max had replied to a dumb trend that went around Twitter asking “what’s the most cursed meal you’ve ever eaten?”
A random lowbie had posted a photo of an attractive, curvy Latina with the caption “El Cursed Meal Time,” and GoldenBvll replied with a photo of a burrito saying, “This is the only beaner I’ll eat.”
In the corner of that photo was a white paper bag with the slightest hint of a logo printed on it, which was a cartoon donkey wearing a sombrero and the letters “BU” in bold green and yellow print.
A few Google searches later, and Melissa found that the logo belonged to the Mexican food chain Burrito Boy in Eugene, Oregon.
Bingo. She was on the prowl now, like a cat in heat.
The next day she booked a plane ticket from Chicago to Eugene. Melissa checked into a budget motel, showered, and Ubered to the closest Burrito Boy, where she snapped a photo of her enchiladas plate with the logo visible in the shot.
“I’m here,” she tweeted.
This golden egg fell into Max’s lap.
He had a stalker on his hands, a woman whose name he didn’t even know. But he did know what it would take to lure her in.
Max prepared his apartment, tidied it up, set aside the tools that would be used in his plot. Rope, clamps, the whip, the knife, the bull mask. He placed a camera in the upper corner of the living room so that its wide angle lens could capture the entire scene.
Over the next two days, IronKunt’s hunt turned to an obsession, sending dozens of DMs to Max begging to meet up, which he kept on read. After every flurry of messages he made a post to stoke her growing mania.
“Gift from a real fan,” one caption read under a photo of a Tudor Pelagos watch, new in the box.
Melissa liked the tweet. The iPhone glowed, the only light in the motel room. She snapped a selfie, her face ghoulish and barely visible, and sent it to Max.
“I’m so lonely,” she said. “Come see me. The Autzen Inn on 6th Avenue.”
Max read and ignored the message. It was time to put things into motion. He picked up his phone and scrolled the contacts. The phone rang twice.
“Yes hello,” Gloria said, pepped up and surprised. “It’s Saturday. I thought you’d be busy.”
“Come over tonight,” Max said. “I’ve got an idea that I’ve been toying with. I want to test it on you.”
Gloria set down her glass of wine. She had been stuck in Excel hell all evening. Calculating product costs against another vendor. The suggestion that her bull god wanted to test something new on her, outside of their scheduled appointment, was like lighting a match on propane. “Give me an hour to get ready,” she said. “Then I’ll be over.”
She arrived in a low-cut red dress, black heels, and her favorite pair of pink lace panties.
Max stripped her down the minute she walked into his apartment. He threw her to the couch and fucked her raw. After twenty minutes, Max instructed Gloria to take a photo through the bedroom window looking out over downtown Eugene, so that the reflection showed her naked body but not her face.
Gloria straddled the couch, leaning over the back, hiding her face behind a hanging indoor fern. It was 10:30PM, a cold drizzle pattered against the window. She positioned her breasts so they hung in a way that pleased her and snapped the photo, then sent it to Max.
He sent it to IronKunt with the message, “I’m here”.
Melissa zoomed in on the photo. The street sign on the corner was clear, even through the rain: 9th and Broadway. She had him now. She showered, packed her bag, booked an Uber, and on the way her mind percolated with what would happen when she arrived.
The woman in the reflection. Would it be a cat fight, a threesome, rejection, humiliation? It was all so daring and alive.
The night dumped the last bit of its rain and the witchy clouds cleared for the half-moon. Its spell was cast, sealing the fate of all below it.
Curtains opened, lights on. Melissa spotted the two fucking in the window. Third floor, corner room.
Max stared down at her, like an eagle on his perch.
Melissa pulled her hoodie down and tucked into the apartment lobby. She moused across the linoleum floor. Up the elevator, down the hall. Room 317. The door unlocked, she slipped in.
Gloria muffled profanities into the cushion, a demon’s lust dripped from her tongue. Her pale, old ass lifted up, then slid down onto Max.
It was time to don the bull mask. Max slipped it over his long blond hair. He yanked Gloria off the couch. She looked up at her bull god, trembled, and lowered her face to his feet.
“You’re my everything,” Gloria said.
Melissa crouched low in the shadows of the kitchen. She watched the two, her snatch wet, gut smoldering with jealousy. She needed to be the one there groveling.
Max turned to the kitchen. His bull horns curled up and cast a long shadow across the floor, like Pluto’s dark bident. He pointed at the dining table in the corner.
“I fucking love you so much,” Gloria said, slobbering on Max’s toes. “I fucking love my bull god. I fucking give you everything. My bank. My heart. My body. My soul.”
Max groaned, pleasure ripping out in guttural chords. He tightened the clamps on Gloria’s nipples, they flared into red embers. She was perfectly oblivious to who lurked through the kitchen.
Melissa found the knife, seven-inch fixed blade. She imagined its bulk as if it was his cock. A stampede ran up her thorax. Max gave her the nod, then looked back down onto Gloria, whose porcelain skin glistened with lust and sweat. Melissa pushed out from the shadows, knife in air.
“What the fuck!” Max shouted. He jumped back and pointed at the knife, which was raised above Melissa’s head. “Who the fuck are you!”
A banshee scream. Gloria scrambled up to her feet, arms flailing, and threw herself in front of Max. The knife plunged into her left shoulder once, then slashed across her cheek. She folded onto the ground.
Melissa smothered her and hammered the knife relentlessly into her body like a piston firing. Ten, fifteen, twenty times. The bloodied knife slipped out of her hand, splatted onto the rug.
Max pointed at the red light blinking in the corner. “Look what you did,” he said. “You dumb bitch. You made such a mess and it’s all on camera.”
Melissa broke down, blubbering with tears, clinging to his knees. “I did this for you.” She finally was at his feet. She was finally seen.
Gloria heaved, her pale chest rising and falling, spattered red. A cackle thundered from the pit of her spleen. A packet of theater blood, half-empty, dropped from under her breast. “Absolute dumb bitch,” she said between fits. “You fell for it so hard.”
Melissa pushed back from Max’s knees, his bull mask in full view. Gloria shuffled up, her shadow eclipsing Melissa, who now clutched her knees at the edge of the leather sofa. A new fear in her eyes, grim forecast of fate. Raw humiliation gathered in ionic pulsing black clouds that pillared at the edge of her mind and terminated at the top of her skull.
“Get up,” Max said. He picked up the knife from the rug, slapped the tip. “Prop knife, ordered it on online. This is cruelty, this was my feast. I got mine. Now I’ll ask you to leave.”
Melissa ducked out, gripping her stained arms, running as fast she could away from that place. The light from Room 317 glowed behind her as she vanished into the night.
Melissa deleted her Twitter account and went dark from any online activity. She moved in with her mother in the northern Chicago suburbs and got a job as a CNA.
Max used the video from that night in a clip that he posted, which was his most viral post ever. Three years later, Max inherited $1.8 million from Gloria Weyerhausen’s life insurance payout after she passed away from a stroke.
The GoldenBvll Twitter account is still active with 127,000 followers. Max shitposts his edits there to this day.
Well, what do you think?
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My next piece will be a history of the Patels and how they took over the hospitality industry in the US, along with my experience working at one.
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Wow, I really enjoyed reading this. It feels very realistic. I feel like I need to read it again to appreciate even more details. 10/10 from me.
Fantastic build up. Well done, Mythos.