Shoelaced Shower
A few years ago I was literally living in the street with my brother, we only came to sleep in a small dusty room at night. In the day he worked as a loader because he was older and stronger, me I was young and skinny and tried to go around begging as much as I could, but everyone was quite poor where we lived.
Once I met a gypsy who was a fortune teller and she wanted to donate a free reading of my palm and said the result was most unusual. This line, she said, says your body appears to be in a great deal of pain, but this line says you have an intense enjoyment of your life and also your line of will is very strong.
She found this reading very odd and invited me to her tent to get a better picture in her crystal ball. She was gazing into her crystal ball for a good ten minutes as her cheeks turned flaming red as she looked into the crystal ball, then at the poor little me and then into the ball again. My stomach made a weird sound as it was empty since the morning.
She walked across the room and dug into the big chest in the corner until she pulled out some sort of a cord that she asked me to put around my waist and tug as tight as I can. When I did, she hmpf'ed and said it was nowhere as impressive as what she just saw in her crystal ball but she wanted me to take the cord with me anyway.
If you want money and fame, she said, exercise every day with it. One day a woman will approach you, she said, and ask if you can do anything unusual, so you must show her what you learned and she will make you very famous and rich.
I went back home and forgot about it but one morning I woke up, opened my eyes and I was really damn hungry, my stomach and bowels were completely empty as yesterday I only managed to get some water.
At first I couldn't do much more than just open my eyes and what I saw was a wasp sitting right in front of my face, it was sleeping so I looked at it for a very long time and suddenly felt a strange power in my body.
I got up, found that cord and tugged it as tight as I could around my waist. I was surprised how deep it went into my belly. I spent the whole day wearing it and pulling it tighter from time to time.
On the next day, putting it on was the first thing I thought about in the morning. Since then I would wear it the whole time I was awake and at first I thought I was doing great but then I realized I wasn't progressing at all, so I made my first coming out and showed my tiny waist to my brother asking if he could train me.
He was very upset with what I was doing with my body but after hearing out the story about the gypsy he calmed down. The desperate life made him very superstitious so he wouldn't doubt a single word if it was from a fortune teller.
Since then he'd always help tighten my morning cord and also give me a good training in the evening. He often apologized for being so upset about it at first and now kept calling my waist "a wonder worth a million dollars". You better not miss that wonder lady of yours, Jim, he kept repeating, tugging on the cord, sometimes burying it almost to my very backbone.
I knew that without having to remind me all the time, I searched for that lady all around all day, every day. I was ready to lift my shirt at once for any woman who asked about something unusual. But weeks and months passed without any sign of her, but I kept practicing and improving because I couldn't imagine myself without a tight belt or cord anymore.
Meanwhile life hasn't improved much and it felt like everyone around was getting even poorer. Our neighbors were of the Persian descent, very poor people who had the only treasure, their beautiful daughter Elnaz. I kept seeing her doing street performances, wearing a long skirt and some strange bra that barely covered her chest, she would roll her hips and move her belly in some beautiful and hypnotic ways to the music played by her relatives.
Often I was part of the crowd gathering to watch her and couldn't help but notice the coins dropping one after another under her feet as she rolled her hips, making her bare belly do all sorts of beautiful things. If only I could do anything worthy of being called a street performance, I thought...
Since me and Elnaz already knew each other more or less as neighbors, I met her once by her house to compliment her dancing and her beautiful belly and I couldn't wait to get her impression of mine. She was so shocked to see it but all of a sudden, she started begging me to join her! I couldn't believe she'd so easily let me join her but then she literally pulled me into the house and gave me one of her long skirts to put around my hips, telling me to loose my shirt completely.
So she dressed me in nothing but a simple long skirt and nothing else, I felt a bit under a spell being in a company of this foreign girl, my mind was somewhere else, too hypnotized to resist anything she wanted me to do...
Elnaz led me to a large mirror in her room and asked me to tilt my hips to the left and to the right. I don't know how it usually feels to most people but having my tight cord around the waist at the time, moving the hips felt really incredible and I couldn't stop moving once I started. I couldn't stop even though it was incredibly embarrassing to see myself in the mirror, moving like that, so my face turned red in a second.
As my only occupation at the time was begging, of course I told her I have all the free time in the world and she can count on me in every way. So she instantly started teaching me the art of bellydancing. If I could call things by their real names, I would rather call it "an embarrassing massage of my bowels that kept me blushing the whole time" but bellydancing was a shorter and more decent term.
After several days of intense training, Elnaz confirmed that my bellydancing skills began to improve and so we finally brought this show from her room into the light of the street for the first time.
For some reason she insisted on introducing me as "Gem" instead of Jim, and also announced me as "the prince of dance from a distant country". It was a little embarrassing since many people in the crowd knew who I really was and saw me many times before in the street. To my surprise they totally swallowed it and cheered me on, pretending to believe every word of it.
I stepped forward and began my dance, only wearing a long skirt and some arm decorations that my new partner made for me from metal scraps, threads and even paper and wood. From a distance it all looked really good though, some bits would even shine in the sun.
Since it was my debut as a wasped boy, we decided to take small steps to warm up the crowd, so at first the cord around my waist was completely loose, burying into the skin by not more than an inch, only a hint on what's to come...
I thought it was a good idea to go slowly, so we kept dancing and sometimes Elnaz would go behind me and help to tug the cord some more, challenging me to keep dancing with a tighter and tighter cord around my waist.
Apparently all of it looked incredibly exotic to the crowd and we had a great success, so much in fact that my new partner demanded something in the evening. No, she didn't want a bigger share of our earnings, but she said that in exchange of her teaching me how to bellydance, I must now teach her how to make her own waist as wasp-like as mine...
A most passionate year later...
Thanks to Medooo for helping with ideas :)