How often do we come to Amsterdam, anyway? She rolled her eyes heavenward. But you owe me for going along with this. So she followed her boyfriend into the torture museum and dutifully began studying the crudely-constructed medieval devices on display, one after another; taking time to read the English text on the yellowing didactic plates and examining the pictures that illustrated their use.
She studied the information so thoroughly that one would have thought that she was preparing for an examination. Trevor was not surprised. She studied any new subject with equal attention to detail. That was what made her such a successful graduate student in the Sociology Department of the University of Chicago.
After an hour, he was bored stiff, tired of looking at device after device that was designed to stretch, pierce, burn, crush, and break parts of the human body in the most cruel ways that evil, brutal men had been able to devise.
He had begun hinting that he was ready to leave after the first half hour but she had ignored him. Now, after a full hour had passed, he was bluntly nagging at her to hurry up. He was hungry and his feet were tired. Her only response was to remind him that he was the one who wanted to come inside; and that they ought to make sure that they saw everything because they were unlikely to get back here again. She did not respond; she was too busy reading about a pear , a small device shaped like an elongated iron pear.
The two halves would unfold like petals of an evil iron flower, pushing against the vaginal or rectal walls, slowly stretching them until they burst asunder. The pain would be excruciating, the damage devastating. Cindy imagined her own womanhood being ruined by such a device. The fantasy was abhorrent. Knowing that it had actually been used on real people in their vaginas, rectums and mouths was appalling. She took a picture of the device, as she had of every device in the little museum, presumably so that she could remain appalled in years to come.
