He landed in Bangkok with a single suitcase and a hunger that no amount of Western dating apps had ever satisfied. Mark was forty-two, divorced, solvent, and tired of women who pretended to want equality while secretly craving control they were too afraid to name. He had read the forums, the dark subreddits, the whispered stories: somewhere in Isan there were still villages where a farang with money and patience could find a girl raised on old rules—rules that bent, slowly, in the opposite direction once the hook was set.
First, though, he needed to burn the restlessness out of his blood.
Bangkok delivered. He started in Patpong, then Nana, then the darker sois behind Sukhumvit 11 where the neon thinned and the girls grew younger and meaner. He paid bar fines like a man buying lottery tickets, chasing the promise in a pair of eyes that said I will do anything. Most of them did. He fucked a girl in a short-time hotel who let him tie her wrists with his belt and sobbed when he choked her just enough to make her come. Another, a tattooed ladyboy from Phuket with a cruel mouth, rode him until his thighs shook and then pissed on his chest while laughing. He woke up sore, sticky, half-satisfied, and still empty.
He flew north to Udon Thani because someone on a fetish board swore the real thing waited in the rice provinces. He rented a motorbike and drove out past the city limits, past the Big C and the Tesco, into the flat green nothing where water buffalo stared at him with ancient contempt.
The village was called Ban Nong Mek. He found it by asking the right taxi driver and slipping him five thousand baht. The driver grinned like he understood exactly what kind of pervert Mark was and wished him luck.
It was late afternoon when he rolled down the red-dirt road. Children scattered from his wheels. Old women squatting over charcoal braziers looked up with faces carved by sun and betel nut. He parked beside a wooden house on stilts, the biggest one, the one with a newish Toyota Hilux out front. A girl was washing clothes in a plastic tub. She wore a faded pink tank top and a pha sin tied high enough to show the backs of slender thighs. When she turned, Mark felt something drop inside his chest.
Her name was Dao. Twenty-three. Skin like polished teak, eyes set deep and watchful. She lowered them the moment she saw him, waited with hands pressed together, and smiled the small, careful smile village girls give farang who might mean money. Her mother appeared on the veranda, already counting.
He stayed a week in the house next door, rented from an aunt. Every morning Dao brought him food—sticky rice, grilled pork, som tam that made his mouth burn and his cock hard because she sat on the floor while he ate, knees together, eyes down, murmuring khrap-khun-kha in a voice so soft it felt like fingers on his balls.
He took her to the river on the third night. She let him kiss her under the tamarind trees, let him slide a hand under her blouse, let him pinch her nipples until she whimpered. When he pushed her to her knees in the dirt she hesitated only a second before opening his zipper with shaking fingers. She sucked him like someone who had been taught it was her duty to please men, and when he came in her mouth she swallowed without being told and then rested her forehead against his thigh in perfect submission.
He thought: This is it. This is what I flew eight thousand miles to find.
He moved into the big house. Paid off the buffalo debt, bought her father a new truck, sent money to her younger brother in Bangkok. Dao called him “darling” in English she was still learning and giggled when he spanked her lightly, playfully. She wore the leather collar he bought in a Bangkok fetish shop only when he asked, and then only in the bedroom, and always with that shy smile that made him want to protect her forever.
Three months passed in a haze of heat and sex and sticky rice. He taught English at the local school for something to do, came home to Dao waiting with cold Leo beer and her small hands unbuttoning his shirt. She still knelt when she greeted him, still called him “master” in the bedroom in a whisper that sounded half-joke, half-prayer.
Then, slowly, the temperature changed.
It started with tiny things. She asked him—sweetly—to fetch her a glass of water while she lay on the bed scrolling Facebook. He laughed and did it. A week later she asked again, and this time her tone carried an edge, a lilt that expected obedience. When he brought the water she didn’t say thank you, just took it and turned away.
One night he reached for the collar and she stopped his hand.
“Not tonight,” she said. Her eyes were bright, almost amused. “Tonight I want you naked on the bed. Hands above your head.”
He thought it was role reversal, a cute game. He obeyed. She tied his wrists to the headboard with the silk scarves he had once used on her. Then she climbed on top, sank down on his cock, and rode him slowly while pinching his nipples hard enough to make him gasp.
“You like that, farang?” she whispered. “You like when your little Thai girl takes what she wants?”
He came harder than he had in years.
After that, the shift accelerated.
She bought new toys on Lazada—things he had never shown her. A steel cock cage. A thick black strap-on. Nipple clamps with silver bells that jingled when she made him crawl. At first she used them playfully, teasing, always giggling afterward and curling into his arms like a kitten. But the giggling stopped.
One evening he came home late from a night of drinking with the other expat teachers. Dao was waiting on the veranda in a black silk robe, hair loose, eyes cold.
“You smell like beer and cheap perfume,” she said in Thai. She had never spoken to him sharply before. “Kneel.”
He laughed, nervous. “Come on, baby—”
She slapped him. Not hard, but crisp across the cheek. The sound cracked in the humid air.
“I said kneel.”
His knees hit the wooden floor before his mind caught up. She stepped forward, opened the robe. Nothing underneath. She took his head in both hands and pressed his face between her thighs. He licked her desperately, tasting her arousal and his own fear.
When she came she held him there until he couldn’t breathe, then pushed him away.
“Go shower,” she said. “Then come to bed. I’m not finished.”
That night she locked him in the cage for the first time. The steel was cold and tight. She stroked his trapped cock with one finger and smiled when he whimpered.
“You thought you were buying a slave,” she said softly. “But money only rents obedience for a while. Love buys it forever.”
He told himself it was still a game. He could leave anytime. He had his passport, his bank cards, his return ticket. But every morning she unlocked the cage and edged him until he begged, then locked him again and went to the market with his ATM card. She bought gold, new phones for her cousins, a bigger flat-screen. She made him carry the bags home while she walked ahead, hips swaying, never looking back.
Six months in, the cage stayed on for weeks at a time. She fucked him with the strap-on on the living-room floor while her aunt watched from the kitchen and pretended not to see. She pissed in his mouth when he forgot to call her “Mistress” and made him thank her for the privilege. She tattooed her name in elegant Thai script just above his cock—paid for it with his money, held his hand while the needle buzzed and he cried.
He stopped teaching. Stopped going out. The other farang in town whispered about the falang who never left his house anymore. Some of them had seen him once at the market on a leash, naked under a thin sarong, eyes down, carrying Dao’s shopping bags while she chatted with friends.
One night she invited three girls from the village—pretty, sharp-eyed girls who had always resented farang coming to buy their cousins. They drank lao khao and laughed while Dao made him serve them on his knees. When they left, Dao chained him to the foot of the bed and rode his face until dawn.
“You’re home now,” she whispered, grinding against his tongue. “You’re exactly where you belong.”
He hadn’t come in seventy-three days. The number was written on the calendar in red marker, each day crossed off with a neat X. His balls ached constantly. His world narrowed to the taste of her, the sound of her voice, the click of the padlock closing.
Sometimes, in the humid dark, he remembered the man who had stepped off the plane looking for a submissive village girl. That man felt like a ghost.
Dao leaned down, kissed his tear-streaked cheek, and smiled the same shy smile she had given him the very first day.
“Say it,” she commanded.
He said it without hesitation, voice hoarse from screaming into her pussy the night before.
“I am your slave, Mistress. Forever.”
She stroked his hair, gentle as any village sweetheart.
“Good boy,” she murmured. “Now lick me clean. We have guests coming tomorrow, and I want you shiny.”
He lowered his head, tongue already reaching, and felt the last piece of his old life snap quietly away.
Outside, the rice paddies shimmered under the moon, green and endless, and the cicadas screamed like they knew every secret he would never tell again.
The morning before the guests arrived, Dao unlocked Mark’s cage for the first time in eleven days.
She did it casually, almost bored, while sipping iced coffee on the veranda. The key dangled from a thin gold chain around her neck, resting between her small breasts. When the steel ring fell away his cock sprang up so fast it slapped his belly. He groaned in relief and shame.
“Shower,” she said. “Everywhere. I want you hairless like a monk below the neck.”
She handed him a pink lady-razor and a can of mango-scented foam. He shaved himself in the outdoor cement tank, water sluicing over his shoulders while neighbors pretended not to watch. When he nicked his balls she laughed and dabbed the blood with her thumb, then made him lick it clean.
Afterward she oiled him head to toe until his skin gleamed like lacquered teak. She painted his toenails crimson (her favorite color this month) and fitted him with the new collar: black leather, three centimeters wide, a heavy steel O-ring in front and, discreetly on the inside, her name in raised Thai letters that pressed into his throat whenever he swallowed.
At four o’clock the first motorbikes arrived.
Dao had chosen three women carefully.
First came Fern, twenty-five, sharp cheekbones, a rose tattoo curling around one thigh. She ran the beauty salon in the next village and had once spat on a drunk Australian who tried to grab her ass in a bar. She parked her pink Scoopy, slipped off her helmet, and greeted Dao with the wickedest grin Mark had ever seen.
Next was Lek, small and baby-faced, barely nineteen, but with eyes that looked a thousand years old. She had been a dancer in Pattaya for six months, come home with enough money to build her mother a new house, and a taste for cruelty she no longer bothered to hide.
Last was Apple, the tallest, almost as tall as Mark, former muay thai fighter turned rice farmer after she broke a German tourist’s jaw in a Walking Street club. Her knuckles were still scarred. She carried a black sports bag slung over one shoulder and kissed Dao on both cheeks like they were sisters.
They drank lao khao mixed with Pepsi and lime under the house, sitting on woven mats while Mark knelt naked in the center, knees already aching on the concrete. Dao had clipped a short chain from his collar to a ring bolt in the floor. The women ignored him at first, talking about family, about which farang in town were running out of money, about the price of gold. Every so often one of them would flick ash from her cigarette onto his back or trail an idle foot across his caged cock (Dao had locked him again after the oiling, just to watch him suffer).
When the bottle was half empty, Dao clapped once.
“Up,” she said.
Mark rose awkwardly. The chain limited him to a stooped shuffle. Dao unclipped it and pointed to the low teak table.
“On your back. Arms above your head.”
He obeyed. The women stretched him out like a starfish. Fern and Lek bound his wrists and ankles with soft cotton rope to the table legs. Apple opened her sports bag and took out a roll of plastic wrap. They mummified him from chest to thighs, tight enough that every breath felt borrowed. Only his cock, balls, and head remained free. The plastic glistened with his oiled skin underneath.
Dao straddled his face without ceremony, pha sin hiked up, no panties. She lowered herself slowly until his world became heat and musk and the faint taste of salt.
“Lick,” she ordered, and ground down.
While he worked his tongue inside her, the others began.
Fern produced a thin rattan cane (the kind used on schoolboys). She tapped his balls lightly at first, then harder, watching his thighs jerk against the plastic. Each time he flinched, Dao pressed down harder on his mouth, cutting off his air until he learned to stay still.
Lek took a different approach. She dripped hot candle wax in slow trails across his nipples and the tender skin just above the cage. The wax cooled into pale pink flowers. When she peeled one off with her nails he screamed into Dao’s pussy and Dao moaned approval.
Apple was quieter. She simply unlocked the cage (Dao had given her the key for the evening) and began stroking him with oiled fingers. Slow, merciless, stopping every time his hips tried to thrust. After the third ruin she leaned close to his ear.
“You don’t come until every woman in this house has,” she whispered in perfect English. “And we are very, very slow tonight.”
Hours slid by in humid torment.
They rotated on his face. Fern tasted sharp and metallic; she liked to pinch his nose shut and ride his tongue until her thighs trembled. Lek was sweeter, almost girlish, but she dug her nails into his scalp and fucked his mouth like she was trying to break something inside him. Apple was the worst (best). She sat reverse, smothering him completely, and reached back to twist his nipples while she came in long, silent waves.
Between turns they amused themselves.
They wrote on him with lipstick: farang bitch, property of Dao, Isan ATM. They took photos (faces carefully out of frame) and posted them to a private Line group titled “Village Pets.” They fed him sticky rice mixed with their spit, making him chew and swallow while bound. When he gagged, Dao slapped him until he thanked her.
At one point Dao disappeared and came back with an old Motorola flip phone (the kind farmers still used). She held it open in front of his face.
“Call your mother,” she said sweetly.
He stared, horrified. The screen showed his mother’s number in Wisconsin, saved from years ago.
Dao dialed. Put it on speaker. One ring. Two.
He shook his head frantically.
Dao nodded to Apple, who pressed the cane hard across his balls. He opened his mouth to scream and Dao shoved the phone between his teeth like a bit.
His mother answered.
“Mark? Honey, is that you? It’s three in the morning here—”
Dao took the phone, smiled, and spoke in slow, careful English.
“Sawasdee kha, mother of Mark. He very busy now. Cannot talk. He send love.”
She hung up before his mother could reply, then laughed so hard tears came to her eyes. The others howled with her.
Near midnight they untied him from the table only to bend him over it. Apple greased the black strap-on (bigger than any he had taken before) and entered him in one slow push while Dao filmed on her iPhone. Fern and Lek took turns feeding him their pussies from the front, holding his head steady. When Apple came (she always came loud), she pulled out and made him lick the dildo clean while the others applauded.
Finally, when the lao khao was gone and the mosquitoes grew bold, Dao knelt beside his head. The other women watched, quiet now, almost reverent.
She unlocked the cage again. His cock was purple, leaking, inhumanly hard.
“You may come,” she said. “But only while you say it in Thai. Loud enough for the neighbors to hear.”
She stroked him once, twice.
He screamed it into the night, voice cracking.
“Phom pen khong khun tee rak kap phom tee sut!”
(I am yours completely, the one who loves you most!)
The orgasm tore through him like a seizure. He spurted across the concrete in long white ropes while the women counted each one in Thai (nùeng, sŏng, sǎam…) until he was empty and shaking.
Dao kissed his forehead, tender as the first day.
“Good boy,” she whispered. “Now clean the floor with your tongue. We have temple tomorrow, and you will carry all our bags.”
The women left one by one, motorbikes coughing into the darkness. Dao chained him under the house with a bowl of water and a thin mat. Before she went upstairs she crouched, cupped his tear-stained face, and smiled that same shy village-girl smile.
“Tomorrow I invite more friends,” she said. “Next week maybe the whole village. You wanted real Thailand, darling. This is real.”
She turned off the light. The cicadas screamed. Somewhere a dog barked once and thought better of it.
Mark lay in the dark, tasting wax and pussy and his own spend, and felt something inside him settle into place with a soft, final click.
The morning after the guests left, Dao woke him with a sharp tug on the chain.
It was barely light; the roosters were still arguing. She stood over him naked except for the gold key on its chain between her breasts. Her face was calm, almost solemn.
“Today,” she said in Thai, “you meet my family properly.”
He thought he already had. He had eaten with her parents, drunk with her uncles, given red envelopes at weddings and funerals. But the way she said “properly” made his stomach drop.
She bathed him herself in the concrete tank, scrubbing him with a rough sponge until his skin stung. She shaved the faint stubble that had grown overnight on his head and pubis, then oiled him again. When she locked the steel cuff around his cock and balls this time it felt heavier, as if she had chosen a thicker gauge. She dressed him in nothing but a thin white pha nung tied low on his hips (the traditional wrap Thai men wear for temple ceremonies), except this one was cut short, barely covering his ass, and the cage bulged obscenely beneath the cloth.
At seven-thirty the entire family assembled under the house.
Dao’s father, Lung Sit, sat on a teak bench in a crisp pha biang, silver hair slicked back, face unreadable. Beside him was Mae Ploy, Dao’s mother, small and round and usually laughing; today her mouth was a straight line. Dao’s two younger brothers, Nok and Nu, twenty and eighteen, leaned against the Hilux pickup he had bought them last Songkran, trying to look bored and failing. Three aunts, one uncle, and Dao’s grandmother (Yai Boon, eighty-three, teeth stained red from betel, eyes sharp as broken glass) completed the circle.
Dao walked Mark to the center on a short leash clipped to his collar. She made him kneel on the packed dirt. The sun was already fierce.
She spoke first, voice clear, formal, the village dialect everyone understood.
“Father, Mother, elders. This farang came to our house looking for a wife. He gave gold, he gave money, he gave respect. But gifts are not the same as belonging. Today we decide if he truly becomes part of this family.”
She turned to Mark and switched to slow, deliberate Thai so he would understand every word.
“Repeat after me, and mean it. If you lie, the spirits will know.”
She made him recite the old words, the ones used when a new son-in-law formally asked to enter the lineage. Except she changed them.
“I, Mark, once a farang, now nothing, offer my body, my breath, and my future to the house of Lung Sit and Mae Ploy. I surrender all rights to Dao, daughter of this house, to use me as she sees fit, for the honor and wealth of this family. If I disobey, may the spirits of the rice and the ancestors strike me down.”
His voice cracked on the last line. Yai Boon spat betel juice the color of blood and nodded once.
Lung Sit stood. He held a length of white cotton string that had been soaked overnight in holy water from the village temple. He walked three circles around Mark, chanting under his breath, then tied the string around Mark’s left wrist and Dao’s right. The knot was tight enough to bite.
“You are bound now,” the old man said. “Not by paper. By something older.”
Mae Ploy stepped forward next. She carried a small porcelain bowl filled with nam mon—water blessed by the monks that had been mixed with Dao’s first morning urine. She lifted it to Mark’s lips.
“Drink. All of it.”
He hesitated half a second. Dao’s fingers found the back of his neck and squeezed. He drank. The taste was warm, sharp, unmistakable. When the bowl was empty Mae Ploy smiled for the first time all morning.
“Good son,” she said softly.
Then the real initiation began.
They led him up the wooden stairs into the main house. The sala had been cleared except for a low platform covered with a new mat. In the corner sat the household shrine—Buddha statue, photographs of dead grandparents, joss sticks still smoking. Dao’s brothers carried in a heavy teak yoke, the kind used for water buffalo, but smaller, polished, carved with flowering vines. They fitted it across Mark’s shoulders. Leather cuffs locked his wrists to the front ends. The weight forced him into a permanent stoop.
Dao spoke again.
“Every member of this family will now take what is theirs. You will serve. You will thank. You will remember who owns you.”
She started with her father.
Lung Sit sat on the ancestral chair carved with nagas. Dao unfastened the old man’s pha biang. The cock that appeared was thick, half-hard, the color of mahogany. Dao guided Mark’s head down.
“Show respect,” she whispered.
Mark opened his mouth. He had never touched a man before. Lung Sit smelled of fish sauce and diesel and age. The old man placed one hand on Mark’s shaved scalp and pushed until his nose pressed into gray pubic hair. When Lung Sit came minutes later it was with a quiet grunt and a flood that Mark swallowed because Dao’s nails were digging into his neck.
Afterward the old man patted Mark’s cheek almost kindly.
“Strong mouth,” he said. “Good for family.”
Mae Ploy went next. She lay back on the mat, pha sin hiked to her waist, legs wide. She was heavier than Dao, softer, the scent different (sweeter, earthier). Mark licked her slowly, carefully, the way Dao had trained him. When she came she pulled his ears so hard he saw stars and laughed like a girl.
The brothers were rougher. Nok fucked his mouth while Nu took his ass, both of them still half-drunk from the night before, laughing and calling him phi noi—little brother—even as they spat on him. Dao watched the whole time, eyes shining, occasionally correcting his posture with a slap.
The aunts took turns sitting on his face, gossiping about rice prices while they ground against his tongue. One of them (Aunt Ratree, the meanest) pissed a thin stream across his chest when she finished and told him to rub it in for luck.
Yai Boon was last.
They helped the old woman onto the mat. She was tiny, bird-boned, skin loose on fragile bones. She smelled of camphor and betel. Dao knelt beside her grandmother and gently parted the ancient thighs. The hair down there was white and sparse.
“Make Yai happy,” Dao said softly. “She has not felt a tongue since grandfather died.”
Mark lowered his head. Yai Boon’s hand, trembling with age, rested on his skull. She came with a sound like dry leaves, a small exhale that seemed to empty her of something long carried. When it was over she touched the white string on his wrist and spoke in a voice like smoke.
“Now you are ours, luk. No way back.”
They left him there, still yoked, while the family ate lunch upstairs. He could hear them laughing, passing plates of laab and sticky rice, talking about the new tractor they would buy with his next ATM withdrawal.
In the afternoon Dao unchained him only to tattoo the family surname in elegant script across his lower back—tramp-stamp position, impossible to hide. Mae Ploy held his hand while the needle buzzed. Lung Sit gave him a shot of lao khao when it was finished.
At dusk they performed the final rite.
The entire family walked him on his leash to the rice field behind the house. The moon was rising, huge and orange. Dao carried a small clay pot filled with water from the irrigation ditch. She poured it over his head while the others chanted the old words for binding a spirit to the land.
“You are not a guest anymore,” Dao said. “You are the land’s now. You are ours.”
She pushed him down into the mud. The yoke kept his face inches above the water. One by one the family stepped forward and pressed a bare foot between his shoulder blades, marking him with the black mud of their fields. Even Yai Boon managed it, leaning on her cane.
When it was done, Dao knelt in the muck beside him. She kissed him—soft, tender, the way she had the very first night by the river.
“Welcome home, husband,” she whispered.
Then she stood, wiped her feet on his back, and led the family back to the house for dinner.
Mark stayed in the field until the mosquitoes drove him crawling after them, yoke heavy, mud cooling on his skin, the taste of his new family still in his mouth.
Behind him the rice stalks whispered in the wind, and somewhere in the dark the spirits of every ancestor who had ever worked that land laughed quietly at the farang who thought he had come to buy a girl, when all along the land had been waiting to buy him.
The house changed overnight.
Where once there had been a spare bedroom with a Western mattress and a wardrobe for Mark’s clothes, there was now only a low teak platform in the corner of the sala. No mattress. A single steel ring bolted through the floor. A thin reed mat. A plastic bucket for waste. A water bowl with his name burned into the wood in Thai script: ทาสมาร์ค — Slave Mark.
Dao sold his passport on the third day after the rice-field ceremony.
She did it openly, in front of him. A man from Udon came to the house on a rattling tuk-tuk, handed her 180,000 baht in purple 1,000-baht notes, and took the blue booklet with Mark’s photo still smiling inside. Dao counted the money twice, tucked it into her bra, and kissed the man on the cheek like an old friend.
“You won’t need that anymore,” she told Mark, patting his cheek. “Paper is for free people.”
They removed the last of his body hair permanently. Mae Ploy drove him to a clinic in town run by a friend who did laser for Bangkok ladyboys. Six sessions, paid for with his own dwindling account. When it was finished his skin was baby-smooth from collarbone to ankles. Dao rubbed chili oil into the freshly burned follicles the first night just to hear him scream.
The yoke became permanent too.
They replaced the ceremonial teak with ironwood banded in steel, heavier, the crossbar curved to force his neck forward. Leather-lined cuffs were riveted shut around each wrist so only a locksmith could free him. A short chain ran from the front of his collar to a ring in the yoke, keeping his head bowed. He could stand, shuffle, kneel, or crawl, nothing else. The weight settled into his shoulders like a mortgage he would pay for the rest of his life.
Dao added a second ring through the septum of his nose (thick surgical steel, impossible to hide). A thin chain ran from it to whichever family member currently held his leash. When no one held it, the chain was locked to the floor ring so he remained on all fours, nose inches from the concrete.
They fed him from a dog bowl now. Always after the family had eaten. Always the leftovers: fish bones, rice crust, fatty pork rind, sometimes just cold som tam scraped from plates. If he hesitated, someone kicked the bowl over and he licked it from the floor while they watched Thai soap operas.
His cock lived in a new cage: flat, steel, custom-made by a welder in Nong Khai. The tube was so short his glans pressed permanently against the end plate, pierced by three thin bars that made even morning wood feel like crucifixion. A Prince Albert ring ran through the tip and locked to the cage so removal was impossible without cutting tools. Dao kept the only key welded onto a gold bracelet she never removed.
Urination was controlled. A catheter some days. Other days they simply made him hold it until he danced in place, tears running, begging in broken Thai. When they finally allowed release it was into a measuring cup held by whichever cousin felt like laughing that afternoon. If he spilled a drop, the chili oil came out again.
Sleep was four hours a night, chained on the platform, wrists still locked to the yoke, ankles hobbled with twelve centimeters of chain. Dao sometimes woke him by sitting on his face and riding slowly while scrolling TikTok. Other nights her mother used his tongue as a midnight snack. The brothers took turns fucking his throat when they came home drunk.
Money disappeared faster now. His remaining accounts were drained through ATMs (Dao holding the card, Nok or Nu holding the leash while he knelt in the booth, head bowed so the camera saw only shaved scalp). The last time he saw his balance it was 42,000 baht. Dao spent it the same day on gold for Yai Boon’s wrist and a new iPhone 16 Pro Max.
They branded him on a Tuesday.
The family gathered at dusk. A charcoal brazier glowed under the house. Lung Sit heated the iron himself: a simple circle with the family’s ancient cattle brand in the center (two interlocking crescents). They tied Mark face-down over a rice-sack bench, legs spread, ass high. Dao shaved the left cheek smooth, rubbed it with lime juice “so the scar stays pretty.”
The smell of burning meat was brief. The scream was not.
When they turned him over the brand was perfect, livid red, already blistering. Dao kissed it while it still smoked, then fucked him with the thick strap-on until the pain and the thrusting blurred into one long white wave.
After that, clothes were forbidden entirely. Even the short pha nung was gone. He moved through the house naked except for steel and leather and the brand that marked him as livestock. Visitors (neighbors, monks collecting alms, distant cousins) saw everything. Some laughed. Some looked away. The monks simply accepted the extra food Dao pressed into their bowls and walked on.
Speech was reduced. He was allowed Thai only, and only three phrases:
“Khrap pom” when spoken to.
“Khun khap pom” when asking permission.
“Phom pen thas khong khun” when punished.
Anything else earned the cane across the soles of his feet until he couldn’t walk for days.
Dao added one final refinement the week the rains came.
She had a steel plate welded to the underside of the veranda, directly above where the dogs used to sleep. A short pole rose from it with a ring at exactly the right height. Every night now, after final use, she locked his nose ring to that pole. He knelt facing the wall, yoke forcing his back into a curve, ass exposed to the open air and anyone passing on the dirt road. Rain sheeted down on his branded skin. Mosquitoes feasted. Dogs sniffed curiously and sometimes licked the cage.
Dao slept upstairs under a mosquito net in the air-conditioned room he had paid to install. Sometimes she came down at 3 a.m., barefoot, stood behind him, and slid the strap-on in without a word. When she finished she patted his head like a pet and left him dripping in the downpour.
One morning in October, six months after the passport disappeared, Dao crouched in front of him while the family ate breakfast above. His face was crusted with dried tears and someone’s come from the night before. She lifted his chin with one finger.
“Look at me.”
He looked. Her eyes were soft, almost loving.
“Do you know what day it is?”
He shook his head, the small movement the yoke allowed.
“It’s the day you stop counting.”
She reached behind his neck and unbuckled the collar for the first time in months. He felt sudden terrifying lightness. Then she replaced it with something new: a solid band of surgical steel, two centimeters thick, hinged, lined with soft leather on the inside so it never chafed. She closed it with an Allen key, the click final as a coffin lid. No buckle. No lock. No keyhole. Welded shut forever.
She showed him the mirror.
Around his throat, in raised Thai letters deep enough never to fade:
ทรัพย์สินของดาว — Property of Dao
Below that, smaller: บ้านหนองเม็ก — Ban Nong Mek
She kissed the steel, then kissed his cracked lips.
“No more games,” she whispered. “No more pretending you could ever leave. You are furniture now. You are land. You are the buffalo we never have to feed.”
Above them, Mae Ploy called down that the rice was ready.
Dao clipped the leash to his nose ring, gave it a gentle tug, and led him crawling up the stairs on hands and knees, yoke clanking, brand throbbing with every heartbeat.
The rain had stopped. Somewhere a fighting cock crowed. The day smelled of wet earth and fish sauce and the rest of his life.
The Bun Bang Fai rocket festival arrived like a fever dream.
For weeks the village had been building enormous bamboo rockets taller than houses, painting them crimson and gold, stuffing them with gunpowder mixed by the old men who still remembered the formulas from their grandfathers. Every household brewed lao khao in plastic drums. Pigs were slaughtered. Speakers the size of water buffalo were hauled in on trucks. And in every conversation, the same delighted whisper: this year Dao was entering her farang in the slave auction.
It was tradition.
Once a year, during the wildest night of the festival, anyone who owned a “household slave” (debtservant, gambling loser, disobedient son, or in Mark’s case a farang who had once had a passport) could put them on the block. The auction was charity, everyone said. All money went to the temple roof fund. But everyone also knew the real point: to show who belonged to whom, and how completely.
The auction stage was erected in the middle of the football field, ringed by food stalls and carnival games. A wooden platform three meters high, floodlit by donated LED panels, with a red-and-gold auction banner that read (in Thai and badly translated English):
CHARITY SLAVE SALE
ALL PROCEEDS TO WAT BAN NONG MEK
ONE NIGHT ONLY – NO REFUSAL!
Dao spent the day preparing him like a prize bull.
At dawn she and three cousins shaved every millimeter of his body again, then rubbed him head to toe with coconut oil until he gleamed. They painted the family brand on his left ass cheek in gold leaf so it flashed under the lights. Fresh piercings were added: thick steel rings through both nipples and another through the skin of his scrotum so bells could be hung. The flat cage stayed locked, but she replaced the front plate with a clear acrylic one so the crowd could see his crushed cock perfectly.
The final touch: a tall headdress made of woven bamboo and rooster feathers (the traditional costume for the losing team in the village boat races). It forced his chin high and made him look ridiculous and regal at the same time.
At dusk they marched him through the village.
Dao rode on the back of her brother’s motorbike. Mark crawled behind on a long chain, naked except for the cage, bells, and headdress. The streets were already packed. Every step made the bells jingle; every jingle drew laughter and phone cameras. Children ran alongside throwing sticky rice. Drunk men slapped his ass in congratulations. An old woman he had once given money to for her sick buffalo now spat on his back and called him good luck.
By the time they reached the field, ten thousand people roared.
Fifteen slaves were auctioned that night. Most were local men who had gambled away their motorbikes or slept with the wrong wife. They went for ten or twenty thousand baht, rented for a single night of humiliating chores to the highest bidder.
Mark was last.
Dao led him up the wooden steps herself. The MC (the village headman, drunk and wearing mirrored sunglasses) grabbed the microphone.
“Ladies and gentlemen, monks and spirits, the moment you’ve all been waiting for! Direct from America, raised on hamburgers and freedom, now fully house-trained and temple-certified… the one, the only, FARANG DAO!”
The floodlights hit him like interrogation lamps. The bells on his nipples and balls tinkled in the sudden silence.
Dao circled him slowly, showing him off like a car salesman.
“Permanent steel collar, welded shut, no key! Branded, pierced, and shaved smoother than a monk’s head! Zero refusals ever recorded! Can carry fifty kilos, lick for hours, and still beg for more! Starting bid… one hundred thousand baht!”
The crowd gasped. That was a new motorcycle. A year’s rice crop.
A hand shot up in the VIP section (the raised platform where rich villagers and district officials sat with their mistresses and bottles of Black Label). It was the police captain from Nong Khai, the same one who had used Mark’s throat behind the noodle stall.
“One hundred fifty!”
Another hand (the ladyboy salon owner from Udon who had caned him at the market).
“Two hundred!”
The numbers climbed so fast the headman could barely keep up.
Three hundred. Four. Five.
Dao stood beside him, one hand casually resting on his head like he was a piece of furniture. Every time the bid jumped she smiled wider, eyes shining with pride.
At eight hundred thousand the crowd was screaming. Phones live-streamed to Facebook groups across Isan. Someone started a drumbeat. The rocket towers loomed behind the stage like judgment.
Then a new voice cut through everything.
“One million baht.”
Silence fell like a blade.
The bidder stood slowly in the front row. It was Yai Boon, Dao’s eighty-three-year-old grandmother, tiny and stooped, leaning on her cane, red betel juice at the corners of her mouth. She held up a thick wad of purple notes wrapped in plastic (the entire savings the family had milked from Mark over two years).
The headman’s mouth actually fell open.
Dao bowed so low her forehead touched the stage.
“Sold!” the headman shouted, voice cracking. “To the honorable grandmother of the owner herself! One million baht!”
The crowd erupted. Fireworks shot into the sky (actual rockets launched early in celebration). Someone slaughtered a pig right there on the field and the blood smell mixed with gunpowder.
Yai Boon climbed the steps one painful step at a time. The whole village watched in reverence. When she reached Mark she reached up (had to stand on tiptoe) and tied a new white string around the base of his cock cage, right against the skin.
“This farang now belongs to the ancestors,” she croaked. “He will serve the family line until he dies.”
Then, because even grandmothers get to have fun, she grabbed the chain to his nose ring and led him off the stage herself. Ten thousand people parted like the Red Sea as the tiny old woman dragged the naked, feathered, million-baht slave through the dirt toward the family’s table.
Dao walked behind them, tears of pride running down her cheeks.
That night Mark served on his knees under the table while the family ate grilled pork and drank themselves blind on victory lao khao. Every few minutes someone reached down to twist a nipple ring or flick the bells between his legs. Yai Boon fed him scraps from her own plate with her fingers, the same fingers that had just paid a fortune for the privilege.
At midnight the biggest rocket of the festival (fifty feet tall, painted with the temple’s name) was lit. It roared into the sky in a column of fire and smoke, exploding in gold and crimson over the dark rice fields.
Mark knelt in the dirt, oil and blood and cum drying on his skin, bells jingling softly in the shockwave.
Dao crouched beside him, kissed the steel welded around his throat, and whispered over the cheering:
“See, darling? In Isan, even slaves can make merit.”
Above them the rocket sparks fell like hot rain, and for one brief moment the night sky over Ban Nong Mek looked exactly like freedom burning itself out.
Yai Boon did not take him home right away.
After the rocket faded and the crowd began drifting toward the music stages, she simply sat at the family table, sipping lao khao from a plastic cup, chewing betel until her mouth was crimson, and stared at her new property as if checking the quality of a water buffalo she’d just bought.
Mark knelt naked in the dirt beside her plastic chair, bells on his nipples and scrotum chiming every time he trembled. The million-baht wad had already been handed to the temple committee; the notes were locked in the abbot’s safe. Ownership was complete.
At two in the morning the old woman finally stood.
“Time,” she rasped.
Two cousins lifted Mark by the armpits and followed her. They walked through the dying festival (past drunken dancers, past teenagers vomiting behind speaker stacks, past rockets still hissing on the ground). Everyone who saw them bowed to Yai Boon and stepped aside. Even the drunks knew better than to joke in front of her.
They did not go to the family house.
Instead they turned down a narrow path to the old spirit house at the edge of the rice fields (an ancient wooden structure on stilts, black with age, draped in faded marigold garlands). No one had lived there for fifty years. It was where the family kept things they did not want the monks to see.
Inside, the air smelled of incense, rat shit, and candle smoke. A single bare bulb swung from the ceiling. A low wooden platform took up most of the floor, stained dark from decades of offerings (and other things).
They chained him to it immediately.
Heavy iron manacles, old and pitted, were bolted through the teak. Wrists first, then ankles, stretched into a spread-eagle so tight his joints sang. The yoke was removed for the first time in months; the sudden freedom in his shoulders felt obscene. A thick leather gag went into his mouth (one of Yai Boon’s old betel-chewing cloths, stiff with dried juice).
Then the family left, except for Dao and Yai Boon herself.
Dao lit three thick red candles and placed them in a triangle around his body. The old woman sat on a small stool between his spread legs and studied him the way a farmer studies soil before planting.
She spoke in the old dialect (so old even Dao had to lean in to follow).
“Farang think they come here to own land. Land always owns them in the end.”
She reached into a woven basket and took out a small clay pot sealed above the rim with wax. When she broke the seal, the smell hit like a fist: nam phrai (ghost oil), made from the rendered fat of a woman who died in childbirth, mixed with graveyard earth and herbs only the old mor phi knew. Forbidden. Powerful.
Yai Boon dipped two fingers and began drawing on his skin.
First the steel collar: a circle of script that meant bound forever.
Then across his chest: the names of every ancestor back seven generations.
On his belly: the symbol for rice that never fails.
Finally, with deliberate care, she painted a perfect circle around the head of his caged cock, then drew a line straight down to the brand on his ass.
“Tonight,” she told Dao in modern Thai, “the land drinks him.”
She produced a thin silver knife (ceremonial, centuries old). Dao’s eyes widened; she had never seen it before.
Yai Boon sliced the pad of her own thumb, pressed the bleeding cut to the center of Mark’s forehead, then to the cage, then to the brand. Three red prints.
After that she stood, joints cracking, and nodded to Dao.
“You may begin.”
Dao undressed slowly. She wore only a white pha sin now, the traditional one grandmothers wear for ceremonies. Nothing underneath. Candlelight painted gold across her small breasts and the curve of her hips.
She climbed onto the platform and straddled his chest, facing his feet.
For a long time she did nothing except breathe. Then she leaned forward and began to lick the ghost-oil symbols, slow, deliberate, tasting iron and death and betel. Every stroke of her tongue felt like fire. Mark screamed into the gag; the sound came out wet and useless.
Yai Boon watched, eyes glittering in the half-dark.
When Dao reached the circle around his cock cage she paused, unlocked it for the first time in ninety-four days (she had been counting), and set the steel aside. His cock sprang up, purple, monstrously swollen. She did not touch it. Instead she painted another symbol directly on the head with her grandmother’s blood.
Then she lowered herself onto him.
No preparation. No mercy. Just the slick heat of her and the ancient wood creaking beneath them. She rode slowly, eyes closed, palms flat on his thighs, chanting under her breath in the old words. Every downward thrust drove the air from his lungs. The candles flickered each time her ass met his hips.
Yai Boon began to sing (a low, cracked lullaby from before electricity came to the village). The sound crawled inside Mark’s bones.
Dao’s rhythm never changed. Slow. Deep. Relentless.
When she finally came it was silent, just a long shudder that rippled through her whole body. She stayed seated on him, grinding, milking the last pulses, then leaned forward and bit his nipple until blood ran.
Only then did she rise.
His cock stood untouched, aching, shining with her juices and the old woman’s blood.
Yai Boon took a small earthen bowl from the altar, filled it with cold cooked rice and a splash of lao khao, and set it on the floor beside the platform. She removed the gag.
“Eat,” she said.
Mark turned his head. The bowl was just out of reach.
Dao laughed softly, pushed two fingers into his mouth, and scooped rice onto his tongue like feeding a baby. When the bowl was empty she wiped her hand on his cheek.
Yai Boon stood over him.
“You will stay here three days,” she told him. “No food. No water except what the spirits give. On the third morning, if you still breathe, the land has accepted you. Then you come home.”
She blew out two of the candles. The third she left burning at his feet.
Dao kissed his forehead (tender, almost loving), then followed her grandmother out.
The door closed. The bolt slid home.
Outside, the festival music thumped faintly. Fireworks popped every few minutes. Somewhere a rocket misfired and screams of laughter rose.
Inside the spirit house, Mark lay spread and painted and bleeding, cock still hard, bells silent now.
The single candle burned lower.
On the altar, the shadows of old photographs (ancestors long dead) seemed to lean forward, watching.
Waiting to see if the farang would last the night.
He lasted three.
On the morning of the third day Dao returned alone. She unchained him, wrapped him in an old pha biang that smelled of mothballs and incense, and led him crawling back through the village. People were sweeping up rocket debris; they barely glanced at the naked, filthy slave with ancestral script flaking from his skin.
At the house Yai Boon waited on the veranda with a bowl of warm rice porridge.
She fed him herself, one spoonful at a time, while the family watched in silence.
When the bowl was empty she patted his cheek with a hand that trembled from age and power.
“Good buffalo,” she said. “Now you truly belong to the dirt.”
That night, and every night after, when the family locked him to his ringbolt under the house, they left the third candle burning on the ancestral altar.
Just in case the land ever got hungry again.