The Virgin Bride is sitting very still on her throne. She thinks she’s like metal: cold and hard and silver and she sits very very still. Before she was the Virgin Bride she was a girl without a job. Became the Virgin Bride, became apparatus. Gave way, like it was always there. Sit still with mechanical precision; sit still because she has to. Before her — separated by an impasse, invisible — nine Bachelors. Below her, too.

The Virgin Bride — she was naked before they took her clothes off. She was naked on the train there. She will be naked on the train home; naked and fragile, with an edge like glass. And seventy dollars; even.

The Bachelors cut their teeth stripping her bare. They count her ribs they count her vertebrae they count how many lengths of her skull are in one leg. Two and a half. From where they are sitting. Five skulls for her whole body; as the Bride is sitting. Eight if she stood. Chin to nipple, nipple to navel, navel to crotch, a skull each, eight; even. The Bachelors measure this with a long silver knitting needle and one eye closed and elbows locked. They are moving through two positions: Measure then draw; like a bow.

The Virgin Bride is a strange stupid apparatus with eyes to stare willfully never unconscious at a Cadmium Red dot on the wall and not droop and not glaze. (Once stripped bare, her eyes are referred to as sockets.) She has been told to stop thinking. Her eyes move, her face changes, when she thinks.

Her eyes were moving around the room too much; they made the spot on the wall bigger. The Bride watching through the glass. Meeting their eyes. The Bachelor to the left; meeting his eyes; even. She was working then too. She was flushing, overheating, and something was turning fast and hard. Cogs were clicking inside when she met his eyes; feeling frantic, buzzing in her ears and behind her eyes in her sockets but she was still still. Feels like traffic when the Virgin Bride looks at you and you look at her. Tastes like chocolate: love/desire. Sounds like nothing at all. Silver silence. Stripping the Virgin Bride bare, drawing her shoulders up, drawing her slow heart out; even.

Time is not inside the Bride it is not in the field of vision it is something the Bachelors hold and just out of her reach. Sinking into the Cadmium Red spot on the wall. A time desert. A clock like a cloth soaked in vinegar in the desert. Time like hot red dry sand clotting through sweaty hands. Three hours is always three hours, three times a week three hours never feels faster three hours always feels like three days three times a week for three months then three months more because she always needs seventy dollars; even. Cash.

Eyes on the wall until the colors melt and seep and invert — the white wall is an uncanny violet; the black blinded windows fuzz out into TV static. The Virgin Bride must blink profusely, fluttering her eyelids not in that girlish way but like a metronome; even. Autonomous — different from autonomy. How many times does she blink a minute. Her brain can keep count almost subconsciously while running many other programs at the same time and it gets better with practice. The Virgin Bride can count many things at once. Anyone could if that was all they had to do. She counted her breaths up to 209.

In 60 seconds she took eight breaths. The National Average is double. In 60 seconds she blinked 33 times. The National Average is half. There is a light above her that is bright, white and hot. There is a light before her that is red and dim. The red light shines on the shadows the white light casts. She is all light no shadows nothing to hide nowhere to hide. The Bachelors could count her breaths, too, if they wanted to. They could stop her breaths, too, and slow them down to nothing and no one could stop them; even. Not as long as the Virgin Bride trusts them, and she trusts them, and she proves it.

The Virgin Bride is not a girl, she is light reflecting on form. Invisible like light. Ask what light looks like it looks like this. The Virgin Bride thinks she’s the color of dust. The Virgin Bride would never sneeze, cough, or yawn.

The Bachelor to her right offers a stalling stare. His drawing lags. His aim skews. Her eyes inside her sockets inside her head look at that dot but the retarded Bachelor before her, he skews and sways into her elliptical vision; crossing that invisible impasse like a crack in glass. His skewed eye stares at her and she stares not back but through. The dot is behind his head; the dot is through his socket. He is an impotent mechanism not drawing any more but staring head tilted back to an obtuse angle, mouth lax, eyes slitted. Inert, vague, stabs at the pallet. Only for a little while, jamming gears — not drawing her but seeing her; not stripping her but fucking her. The Virgin Bride will sometimes feel herself getting fucked but no she is sitting still, very still, in a throne, all alone.

When it gets violent like that the Virgin Bride does not mind. Her beauty is indifferent; indifference beautiful; even. She is a strange stupid apparatus; a timid power. Eyes like prey and bruises and scratches and skinny arms and something the Bachelors call a belly. She is not beautiful; she is naked. Skin the color of dust with green spiders of veins pumping blood slowly and stupidly; she can hear it trickling out from her heart as if from a creek. Sitting still and feeling gravity and bargaining with gravity and feeling time and distrusting it. There are even veins in her legs, through her neck, in her skull. There is a green vein that goes into her left ring finger that is raised and throbbing slowly so slowly. There are veins in her legs and they hurt, she waits for them to vibrate then disappear, go still, very still. The kettle will not scream.

She doesn’t really talk, and if she does they say “What?”

Pale and pink with red marks below her sternum — which looks like a men’s tie, when you get to the bone — from her bra and inevitable red bumps along her bikini line and her legs open and the Assistant positions her at the start of class and says “wider… wider…” Her legs open like they’re relaxed but really they are tensed with bloody muscles keeping them exactly that wide. The Virgin Bride is not a girl, she is light reflecting on form. She has no sex she has a crotch. She is an art object; she is an abject object when she sits still and when the Professor pays her with the money the Bachelors paid him while she’s still naked and she has nowhere to put the money, no pockets, just put it on the ground beside her she can’t see it of course but the Bachelors’ eyes, like predators, like snakes at her ankles, can. Three twenties and a ten.

Naked; her body is sore and back feels twisted. After an hour and a half the Virgin Bride stands up and the Bachelors sit down for their break. And the Bachelors are very old in orthopedic shoes and tired from standing and measuring and drawing. And the Bride is tired from sitting and not thinking so she goes outside and stands and smokes. And when she comes back all of the Bachelors are curled up in the fetal position on the wood floor like assembly line workers in China that sleep below their workstations. Balding heads on the dusty hardwood.

Seeing the Bachelors, previously so steeled and silent, curled on the ground on their side so suddenly stirs the Virgin Bride’s opaque visage. She feels the timid power rising in her throat, the Bachelors so beneath her, pitiable. The Professor lectures but she’s all deaf to him; the Professor is holding a human skull and mashing his thumbs against the cheekbones, as if he must erode the bone to make his point. The Virgin Bride feels it under her cheeks, that muscle, that hollow underneath the skin. Empty like there was once something there and now there is not. The Professor lets his arm holding the skull fall casually, holding it with two fingers, one in each socket, while praising Norman Rockwell’s work ethic. How the shadows on the oval holes of sockets on a skull look like a perpetually furrowed brow. The Virgin Bride remembers to relax her forehead, release the tension from the corners of her lips, to puff air back into her sucking cheeks.

When it gets violent like that the Bride returns to the Cadmium Red spot; her eyes boring into it until it’s not a paint mark but a hole. It grows like it’s on fire and it’s catching quickly all the turpentine and oil paints and flammable fixative sprays and the Virgin Bride is sweating and won’t wipe her brow and the Virgin Bride is sure if the fire grew she would still sit still, and the fire would respect her work ethic and dart around her like a forest fire skirts a placid lake. Bachelors engulfed in flames in a half circle around her, at her shore, as the fire strips them all bare.