supplicium post mortem

Today is a very exciting day, but unfortunately, it isn’t the kind of thing I can celebrate with my mom. I’m telling you, it’s very hard to stop myself calling her up to say, Hey, Mom, a story I wrote is being published today!

If I did that, I’d have to explain further. Well, Mom, the book is called The Spanking Collection, and it’s an anthology of spanking stories written by 20 of the best spanking writers around. It’s edited by my friends Abel and Haron (some of the “writing friends” I’ve visited in the UK), and the stories in it are diverse and fun and moving and hot and–and, no, Mom, these people aren’t strange. They are some of the nicest, normalest people you could meet, and guess what? This whole book is for Cancer Research UK. That’s right. The contributors all gave their stories (or introduction or artwork) without pay (yes, me too, I know, Mom, but seriously, no one is getting rich writing short stories), Abel and Haron covered all the publishing costs as well as doing the editing, layout, Kindle-creation, and the rest of it, and all the profits are going to help people find cures for cancer. Yes, I know that cancer isn’t just one big disease like polio, but the point is that the people at Cancer Research UK surely know this too, and once they get the windfall from this book, they will know so so much more! Ok, but, Mom, you get the point, right? And, yes actually, I think you could tell everyone in your therapy group that your widowed, church-going daughter is also a published author of kink. They would cheer you on. This is New York, right? Please, I’m sure you’ve heard much more unsavory things from them. Right? Exactly.

Well, if you want to buy the book, you can get it in paperback here, and on Kindle here (oh, right, your Kindle died within the first month when your water bottle leaked in your purse, never mind), and for more links there is Haron and Abel’s blog here. I love how you always buy copies of my books, Mom. Thanks for buying this!

But, Mom? Even if you buy a couple of copies, ok ten, please will you do me a favor and just not read my story? No, it’s not shocking or anything, and, no, I am not the lead girl, Charlie, and no one in the story is you; it’s just that I’d rather you didn’t read it. Like, there’s nothing the matter with either one of us having sex, but it’s just better if we don’t share that with each other. No, Mom, there’s no sex in my story. There’s kissing, but that’s it. And, well, it’s a spanking book, so, well, but, the point is that my story is called “The Library”, so avoid pp. 110-122, and yes, I am Casey Morgan, and no, please don’t Google that, ever. Yes, that is the name I use for the blog I don’t let you read, and please, can we keep it that way?

No, this story isn’t on my blog, and as a matter of fact this book is the only place it will appear because all of us writers agreed to write something special and original just for this anthology and let it appear only there. So, there is nothing for you to see on my blog, nothing at all. And the point about my story is that I got the idea for it after taking a trip with my friend Emma Jane to the Trinity College Library in Dublin. (The Motherland, right? Top o’the morning to ya, my darling mother!) Emma blogged about it here, and that is another link I would like you please not to follow, but you can give it to the people in your group and they can see how much of the story is indebted to Emma’s imagination and not really mine at all.

Ok, look, if you have to tell them something, just say my story is about an English schoolboy and an English schoolgirl who kiss and get in trouble, and there is a library in it.

I am sure you are right that my story is the best one even if you never read it. Let’s just agree that it is, and you can order copies and give them to your friends from therapy and from the Village and never read mine and support Cancer Research UK and all will be right with the world. Great! Love you, Mom!!!

Dinner to celebrate? Sure! xxxxxxx me

Not cunt. I have no problem with cunt as a bit of anatomy. The c-word I can’t stand is the one with nine letters starting with c and ending in y.

Community.

This word acts like smelling salts on me. Possibly I am scarred by too much time in Quaker environments, but whenever people start talking about Community, or about The (Something) Community, I feel sure that a lot of sentimentality, censoriousness, and identity politics is headed my way.

But I can’t seem to find a better word to describe what I was hauled into over the last couple of weeks.

I’m sure readers of this blog all read The Spanking Writers, the only daily non-pro spanking blog on the internet (to my knowledge). So you will all have read in March about the anthology of spanking stories they are putting together. I was flattered last winter to be asked to contribute. I was less enthused last week as the deadline approached.

Why did I agree to this project? I wondered gloomily. I almost passed on it in the first place, because I am busy, because my desire to write about kink has basically shriveled up and died, because I have begun to feel I just write the same thing over and over, and who wants to hear it anymore? But then I had a chat with myself. Self, I said, you are a writer and you propose to turn down publication because you feel ambivalent about kink and because you are busy? Writers don’t do that, self. Get real! So in the end I said yes to Abel and Haron and promised to have a story to them by the deadline, June 30.

Over the last few weeks, the subject of SW stories began to turn up in my twitter timeline. Other people were working on them, too. Other people were chasing this deadline. Other people thought their stories sucked. I wasn’t alone.

Add to this the fact that my story had been inspired by my visit to the Trinity College Library with Emma Jane in January. Add also the fact that Serenity offered to trade edits with me, and with her comments gave my story the structural sorting-out it so desperately needed. Add the excitement trickling into the Twitter feed as people got previews of each other’s pieces. Finally it dawned on me: this was a community activity, and I was having fun.

I know, alert the media.

So when I say I was hauled into the c-word, I mean that Haron and Abel, with their project, initiated the best of community building. They set people a task and let people get on with it. And even I—the girl who loves the sidelines, who has lost interest in blogging, who feels the deepest ambivalence about spanking, tgi, kink, and life itself—even I found myself engaged, boosted, enjoying trading stories, agonizing about deadlines, moaning about process, and knowing that Abel and Haron were reading our pieces and putting them all together almost as if we were part of a class, or a team, or a…

The word still sticks in my craw, but the thing itself is a blessing. So thanks to Abel and Haron, and to everyone else taking part. Sometimes you just need hauling into things.

We should’ve got up late. It’s a holiday, and although I had things to do, they weren’t until later. I should have woken up with him wrapped around me, his hand doing something to my nightclothes so he could feel my bottom. He would whisper into my half-asleep ear about Marky, how naughty he’d been, how TL ought to see him in the afternoon and do a proper uniform inspection. He’d whisper to me about Casey, too. RP and TL had decided that she had got out of hand. She hadn’t been misbehaving, though, I’d protest groggily. No, he’d agree, and that was a symptom of the problem. Things had been too hectic, and clearly she was in need of some quality time with Mr. Prior. Movies? I’d ask. Across his knee, more like, he’d say. I’d cuddle back to him, feeling him pressing against me. We’d carry on along these lines until the wolfhound came to the side of the bed and licked us, whining that we must get up. He should have taken the dogs out in the sub-zero morning. I would have made the coffee. He insisted it tasted better when I made it.

Perhaps we would have pottered around doing chores until my physical therapy appointment. It should have been a day when both Casey and Mark got seen. Mark would have reported to TL’s study, or the house-room. Casey would have been summoned upstairs to RP’s crimson study—the one I keep thinking I ought to use more as a writing space, but can’t. I should have told him about the dream I had the other night, in which I was some rebellious prep-school boy cornered by an exacting master, my nemesis. He was going to give me six, and they were going to hurt, a lot. He told me to bend over, and he produced a fearsome (and improbable) cane, rigid and ridged, rather like Abel’s walking stick. I/my boy avatar was scared. The master held the cane against my bottom and waited. I mentally prepared, told myself to breathe, not to clench, to stay down, that I could take it. Still, he waited. I trembled. The door to the study was open, and passers-by peered inside. Yes, the master said to the peeping boys, this is what happens when you break the rules. He lifted the cane; I inhaled; the alarm rang.

Today was the kind of day that could remedy interrupted dreams, though I wouldn’t fancy a RL encounter with that sort of stick.

In the real day, I dragged myself from bed when the wolfhound insisted. After throwing the ball around the sub-zero park, I dragged the dogs home and embarked on morning chores. I organized the chaos of unrecorded to-dos. I tackled some email. I went to physical therapy. I walked around the city by myself imagining tweets I would write if I had a smart phone, and things I would do if it were the day it ought to be. I went to Muji and found a pair of pyjamas that fit perfectly. They are what M would call whack-me pyjamas. I thought about how much he would like seeing Casey in them, and how cute she would be in them.

And I thought about how he was the one who really got ripped off, not me. I have more life to live, I have great friends, I am healthy, the rest of my family are all alive, I can pay the bills, I have great dogs and a nice place to live, a garden in summer, neighbors who look after me, the best church in the world, and the love of God whether I deserve it or not. He didn’t get to live more than 45 years. He didn’t get to see his son grow taller than him. He didn’t get to have children with me. He didn’t get to read the things I’ve written these last three years. He didn’t get to read the things I’d written when he was alive but hadn’t shown him yet. He didn’t get to see me Sunday night, at the story slam competition where I read After the Party, a little fantasy featuring someone like him; he didn’t get to see me wearing the tartan skirt I’d just bought; he didn’t get to see me win the competition. He didn’t get to grow old. He didn’t get to see his projects blossom. He didn’t get to be with me when I really knew how to love him.

It feels perverted—and by this I mean fundamentally unsound—to put on outfits that look cute when there’s no one around to appreciate them. The Russian lady who inflicts bikini wax (plus) on me insists that you do things only for yourself, my dear, not for anyone else, only for yourself. While there’s something comfortingly self-sufficient and feminist and self-actualized about that, the sentiment rings hollow somehow. Connecting with others, depending on others is part of being human. I tend to agree with R.R. Reno that the opposite of piety isn’t unbelief but sovereign desire. So perhaps I can be forgiven feeling unsound wearing cute outfits that he can’t see anymore.

And of course beneath my noli me tangere exterior, I secretly long for attention. I’m not exactly the kind of girl to ask for it, but I get jealous of other girls who garner attention. Having been round the houses with this once before—coming out of my twenties—I’d say my reticence is not coyness, but a kind of armor. I know I can’t have the sort of attention I really want, so rather than seek out something I think will frustrate and hurt me, I work on ideas like humility, on not looking to other people for validation, on being grateful for what I have, on getting used to the idea that this will probably be it, and that it’s enough to get through the day, and I’m not in a war-torn nation, not oppressed, not cancer-ridden, not a million bad things, so I need to stop feeling sorry for myself and try to be of use to other people.

In the day that should have been RP would have had a chat with Casey about this attitude. He would have reminded her of her Four Things. He would have paid her several sorts of attention. In the evening M and I would’ve watched House on tv. Would he have liked Lie to Me, or would he have found Tim Ross a plonker? It would have been–should have been–the kind of day where you don’t mind that it’s winter, that the night comes soon and lasts long.

First, please know that I love my family very much and would be lost without them. They are good to me and stand by me and are nice to me and believe in me and would stick up for me any moment.

But here’s the thing: no matter how much you love them, at a certain point it’s healthy and right that you grow up and start your own life. You don’t leave them behind, but to some extent you escape that first family. I had done this. It took a long time for M to get me to see that we had a new family now. The parts of the old that weren’t so great—these we didn’t have to have. We could make our own traditions. Yes, we’d still put my childhood ornaments on the Christmas tree, but now on Christmas eve, he’d make mince pies and we’d listen to his Britpop Christmas CD. And yes, my parents will always be my parents and I love them, but in a way, I didn’t have to be that child anymore. RP was looking after Casey, so the old life was past, and the new, better, realer life was here. And I could love my sister and mother and all the rest, but with his help, I could take them with the right amount of salt, and when it was time to leave, we went home to our house that we had our way, to our dogs, to our bed, and to all the secret love we had together. At our wedding, we’d given ourselves to each other in Christ, and now this was my strongest bond. This was the new family, the new life. I wasn’t living in my childhood house any more.

Today I had Christmas brunch at my apartment for my mother, my sister, and my sister’s childhood friend. My mom had unexpectedly been staying with me since Thursday due to a minor medical emergency. Her difficult dogs had been in my way, frazzling my nerves, keeping me awake, and increasing my workload. I am coming down with a cold due to lack of sleep. We all had a fine time, I guess, but by evening, I really wanted everyone to go home. I had had visitors for 3 weeks and needed to spend some quality time with my dogs and do the zillion things I had to do to get ready for my UK trip tomorrow.

Except no one was going home. My sister and her friend were lying on my bed watching agitating videos on their phones. My mom was feeling weak and had gone upstairs to nap. It had become clear that she and her dogs were staying another night. I took my dogs around the block.

On a quiet, dark side-street, I leaned over someone’s wall, buried my head in my arms, and started to cry. I felt trapped by this family—a family I love but want to escape. I wanted my own family, with M, the one I thought I had, and I wanted the kids we were trying to have, the twins. I wanted it to be Christmas in the new life, with him and our children, and our dogs, and Casey and Mark and all the others. I wanted us to be able to come home from being with my mother and sister, but instead, my house was invaded by this old family. And no matter how much I love them, it just feels wrong in a way for them to be so much in my house and life—the house and life I should have with M.  My mom and sister think it would be fine, in the absence of a husband, to have a turkey-baster baby and bring it up all together in kibbutz. I feel physically nauseated by this idea. It is simply incestuous. But lacking a family of my own, now, I can’t seem to get them out of my hair.

It would be one thing to be a life-long single woman. But to have got used to the new family, and now be back with the old… I know it’s colossally ungrateful to say this, but it feels like getting rescued from the orphanage and then having to go back.  But I’m emotional, and I don’t really feel well.

There’s a blizzard headed into town when my flight to Englandland is due to leave tomorrow. My house sitting and dog sitting arrangements have grown inordinately complicated and unsatisfactory. My mom isn’t well and who knows when she’ll be better, or how much help she’ll need, especially with her horrible dogs. I am thinking this trip was a terrible idea. I should stay home, quit trying to make it happen, just take care of my mom and my dogs, and get some work done over the school break. It was selfish and stupid to try to make it happen. And kids in orphanages don’t get to go to parties.

I know I’m not being very rational. Things usually look better in the morning. I’m not a cynic about Christmas. I love Christ. And I’m so grateful for everything I have, and all the friends and family who love me. Still, I can’t say I’ve enjoyed today, except the part about turning out the light at the end.

Earlier this week I had a vivid dream in which I was a schoolboy being caned across the shoulders, á la Stalky & Co. It stung quite intensely in the dream, and over the next morning, I fancied I could almost feel it.

Reality, I’ve never been caned anywhere except the bottom, and I consider this a hard limit. But Stalky was such a formative influence for me (detailed exegesis here); it obsessed me from the age of sixteen into my mid-twenties. It is responsible in large part for transporting my childhood tgi (orphanage & prairie focused) into my young adult tgi (English Public School focused). All the other English school literature that I read–and I have read pretty much all of it–I discovered after or through Stalky. For instance, when I was seventeen, I spent hours at the 42nd Street Library reading ancient copies of Dean Farrar (Eric, or Little by Little and St. Winifred’s, or the World of School) because the characters in Stalky mocked him so scathingly. Despite the eccentric (and to me entirely perplexing) fact that the Head in Stalky “licks across the shoulders,” I responded strongly to those scenes of punishment because of the relationship between the Head and the boys. The whackings, like all the stories, are under-written and vibrate with human tension and understanding. Because of Kipling’s obliqueness and the nearly incomprehensible world of the English Public School (to a teenage American girl pre Harry Potter), I found myself trapped in a kind of tractor beam with Stalky, utterly fascinated and attracted, yet grasping at meaning. I couldn’t, for example, understand how a person could be caned across the shoulders (or that this arose from the school’s military background) — wouldn’t you break a collarbone or something? I wondered. I had not yet encountered the species of light, whippy cane that could accomplish this task and yet leave Kipling’s heroes in once scene “within an inch of blubbing.” Generally, I pretended to myself that the Head was dispensing normal canings and left it at that. He wasn’t, though. And in my dream recently, I (my schoolboy avatar) was receiving just such a USC licking across the shoulders. It was all hot sting, no thud, rather like an intense and stripey sunburn. I’m sure that must be exactly what it feels like, lol.

And if this dream were not enough, last night I dreamed I was playing a school-like scene with John Cleese in academic gown. I was wearing blue-jean overalls, the kind I gave to Marky that first December we spent together fifteen years ago. (It was such a good December, and even though we had to spend Christmas apart, life carried so much goodness and hope then. Emotions ran high, low, and every complexity in between, but it was like eating and breathing for the first time, not having realized before that I was missing anything… turn back, o time…)

So there I was, and John Cleese was telling me to bend over. I gasped at the first stroke, more from surprise than pain. He carried on briskly, and while I felt them, they weren’t unbearable. I kept still and quiet, which I sensed was frustrating him. But seriously, I thought, does he expect me to howl the place down when he’s whacking at perhaps medium strength, over jeans and pants, and I’m not exactly a fainting beginner?

You can tell I was dreaming because in reality it’s been so many years since I’ve felt the cane that I might as well never have had it. Why caning dreams, though? I never dream of these things any more.

Yesterday while getting physical therapy on my elbow, I lay on a cot gazing out the darkened windows, thinking. Here I was in this dark, wintry, modern world, going about my affairs, while my characters waited for me in their English summer of 1926. My schoolboy protagonist, in particular, waited for me  to take him through whatever this fire was that he faced, to make him into the person he yearned to be. I thought of him in my dark, Gotham evening, but did he also sense me somehow from within that world where I long to be?

It isn’t just my characters that I carry around inside myself this way. There is M, and Marky, RP and all the others. I can feel them, too. Where are they? Where are they all?

It was Lessons & Carols at church, I’d been chosen to read one of the lessons, and I was trying to decide what to wear. My church wardrobe is limited—I wear a lot of black, though in the last year not exclusively. I’d chosen a black skirt, but before I knew what was happening, Casey was pulling her jumper, school blouse, and tie out of the closet and was putting them in the bicycle pannier with TL’s skirt and shoes. I wondered jocularly whether Casey was going to do the reading.

Casey said she should do the reading because she’d been promised a Lessons & Carols reading since that time before. She was referring to the time fifteen Decembers ago when we went with M, Marky, & RP to visit M’s Public School. The students were on vacation, so we got to tour all his old haunts,  including the chapel. RP said Casey was doing one of the readings for College’s ¹ Lessons & Carols, and he made her practice it right there in the chapel. Ever since then, she’s been expecting to go.

When we left the house, Casey’s smile seized my face, the shy but irrepressible little smile she has, because she had dug out her clothes and was taking over my reading. We rode to church and changed into this hybrid outfit, Casey from the waist up, TL waist down. Then the parish-house whirlwind took over, and I forgot about Casey. At least, I didn’t feel her anymore; I was too focused on where I had to go and what I had to do.

As I went about my preparations, I started getting compliments on my outfit. The Rector said good morning and then stopped as if something about me had distracted him. He said he liked my tie, and then he paused, searching for words. “You look like… a young Etonian,” he finally said. Her school tie, shirt, and jumper look nothing like an Eton uniform of any era, so why did he say that? It felt at that moment as if he had glimpsed something unexpected, yet entirely familiar, but couldn’t find a way to describe it adequately.

An unprecedented number of people commented on our wardrobe. They liked the tie. They liked the look. My mother’s friend said I looked “like a little schoolboy.” I looked “about twelve.”

I am over 40. My hair is shoulder-length and not at all boyish. I was wearing a 3/4 length black skirt and TL’s dress shoes. But these were the kinds of comments I got all morning.

My only conclusion—Casey is visible, and she’s recognized, if not by name. Apparently, it’s obvious.

Perhaps in contemplation of my New Year’s Anglo-Irish jaunt (weather permitting), last night I dreamed again of parties.

In this dream, I was visiting some friends, Mr & Mrs Lovely, before a party they were to give. Mr. and Mrs. Lovely were sitting on chairs, but another American visitor and I were lounging around on the floor. We were all joking and bantering. Mr. Lovely, American-friend, and I were sort of wrestling. Cheeky remarks and gibes were coming out of my mouth. He wrestled with us playfully, but he didn’t push it when he felt my uncertainty. American-friend wrestled differently, like she meant it, like she wanted to lose to him, like she intended to get herself smacked.

Soon the hangout dissolved, American-friend went upstairs, and it was time to get ready for the big party. But Mrs. Lovley was berating Mr. Lovely, telling him to figure out a way to get me to play. She felt it was his duty as a man to get creative and help me out, “so that she can get past this one place and start to live the rest of her life.” Mrs. Lovely had the idea that I was frozen about crossing this threshold, and that simply being able to play around at a party would draw me firmly into real living. She felt somehow that if I remained an observer at this party, I’d be missing a chance to stop being an observer of my own life. He, paterfamilias, needed to take initiative.

I’d earwigged their conversation and was burning with embarrassment. The thing was, I explained, I was deeply ambivalent about playing. Mr. Lovely was paying attention to me now, and the vague quietness I’d observed when visiting in the summer was now a kind of pregnant sensitivity. We faffed around in this uncertain tension until I asked if I shouldn’t simply list all my fears. Mr. Lovely said, “I think I’d concentrate on the possibilities.” So I picked the thing top-of-mind: Just who would be seeing little Casey?

To ask this question was already to have come a long way off the sidelines. To voice this question revealed that I was capable of imagining Casey being present. I was in fact already imagining falling into her, and into her clothes, and secretly inside I already was starting to feel like Casey. The question revealed, also, everything about how I play: in role. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say: wearing a costume so that other people can see what this inner me is all about.

I couldn’t endure the idea of playing as X (my real name) because X is a grown-up, pulled-together, balanced person. She isn’t especially fragile (though she isn’t the iron clad maiden she was in my 20s), and even though she manages a certain amount of frank vulnerability, it’s all on the verbal/literary level; it isn’t immediate or physical. There’s an adult distance about it all. To play, though, means to allow forward a part of myself that is not very X. This part I call Casey, and over the years with M, Casey developed beyond a label and into a full-blown person. ¹ To play as Casey, who is an extraordinarily vulnerable little girl, more so than when M was alive, is to make visible the psychological reality of playing itself.

So Mr. Lovely and I were pondering this question: who would be seeing little Casey, and why? I explained again, as if it needed explaining, that she was scared, bereaved, lonely; she would not be very robust. Yet, someone dealing with her couldn’t allow her fear and bereavement to dominate. The point, as Mrs. Lovely had put it, was to nudge her over a frontier. I don’t think she   would cross it willingly, but if she turned up to a scene, that would be consent enough. At the same time, if someone steamrollered her, or gave the impression that he didn’t understand her, or didn’t base his command on that understanding, then she would merely comply in a mechanistic way. It would be robotic, and not only fail to accomplish any threshold crossing, but it would scare her away worse than now.

Understandably, Mr. Lovely found this all a bit overwhelming. Mrs. Lovely and I went shopping for the party, and on the way back she almost ran over a bunch of schoolkids. I yelled and grabbed her arm; she swerved to avoid them, just. She was angry at me. I apologized for yelling and for touching her. She said that she was never going to hit them. I very much doubted it.

Back at the house, I hoped to find Mr. Lovely to talk. I was beginning to imagine a scenario—the very fact that I could imagine something seemed to be a hopeful sign. What if, I wondered, Casey had brought home a bad school report? It would be terrifically shaming for her, since she’s such a good student. She would have bollixed up the first term at her new school out of an inability to join in. The same reticence that kept me on the sidelines at parties would have caused every kind of problem at this school she was attending. She’d avoided homework and then avoided the consequences, she’d offended teachers with her silence, which seemed to them churlish and sullen. They certainly didn’t understand her, and this had made her worse. It was a train wreck.

A discerning interlocutor would be able to see what her teachers couldn’t see. He would realize that she didn’t need yelling at, that she was already ashamed beyond endurance, and that it was her sadness and this boil of emotions that needed addressing, not her homework per se. At the same time, she had not behaved as she ought. She had declined genuine offers of help. She had indulged in procrastination and avoidance. Most importantly, she had allowed herself to carry on until she reached the state which now tormented her. How could she treat herself like that?

It couldn’t be a guardian with a real relationship, because that would be fake. Casey has no relationships with anyone but TL. But what if it were the man of the house where she was staying over the holidays? He, perhaps, knew some of the staff at her school, perhaps her form teacher. In any case, he had her report in hand whether or not he’d any right to it, and as a grown up, as the best available representative of loco parentis she had just then—in that fleeting, un-ideal moment—he intended to have a word with her, even though he had no previous relationship with her, even though he would have no serious relationship with her beyond that holiday. He didn’t appear bothered by the unofficial, presumptuous character of the interview. He was paterfamilias, she was a child under his roof in need of guidance, he intended to provide it. End of story.

The dream ended before anything could happen, before I could even speak to Mr. Lovely again. We were in a building high up in the Gotham skyline, almost as high as the Empire State Building (where M and I met). A storm came upon our skylighted room, blowing rain in the cracks. I woke up.

I overthink. I overimagine. I rehearse excessively in my mind. But it was always this way. M and I wrote over three hundred long emails each before meeting. We, especially I, explored tgi and ourselves from every possible theoretical angle. I can’t endure reading the correspondence, in part because it’s too grievous, but also because it’s so very tedious with all of its intellectualizing. I hope I’m not intellectualizing that much now. But, as I live alone with my dogs and my computer, words, dreams, and thoughts remain my chief vein of experience. And I suppose this kind of rehearsal is preferable to an impetuous, confused, disaster of a real-life play encounter.

Of course, party play isn’t the same as deep play, and role play as other people know it is, I suspect, a distinctly different activity to playing Casey. I don’t know, yet, if there is anyone amongst my acquaintances capable of playing with Casey. Besides, being on the sidelines of parties isn’t a bad thing. At least it’s being at the parties.

And—just as I was bringing this to a close—let’s not leave before putting under the microscope the glories of my reserve. If I stepped off the sidelines, it would mean sacrificing this quality of mine—that I don’t play, that I am charming and nice and only a visitor from afar, that I am not a pawn in gossip, not an adherent to one side or another in whatever drama is unfolding, that I possess a lofty wisdom born of distance and of not having a horse in the race. Why should I want to give any of that up? Then I would be just like everyone else. I would be part of everyone else. Feuds and tensions would involve me. What I did and said would start mattering to people personally; I would start offending people on more than an intellectual level.

And—this is the heart of it, isn’t it?—I would grow attached. My massive, neglected needs would come out of the deep freeze, and then where would we be? I will tell you: in torment. I would have allowed myself to need these people to the core (with Casey even!), and then I would be all alone again at home in Gotham.

Also, I know my heart. It is essentially monogamous. Certainly it has room for friends, deep true friends, but that is distinct from its central longing. Which is a way of saying that even if I did live in the land of parties and could join in on equal status as everyone else, I would still be…well, wounded after an honest encounter via Casey. Wounded in the sense of having undergone a surgical procedure.

People talk of sub-drop, but this is more serious. Sub-drop as a term implies a neuro-chemical depression after extreme stimulation. Like a hangover or a post-cocaine crash. You did something very intense on a physical and emotional level, so you felt “high”, you “flew” as some people like to phrase it, and now, as a prelude to normality, you have come down from that high, a disagreeable descent.

I’m not looking for a high. I’m looking for a Real. I’m looking for a breath of real, intense air on this planet where I have not been able to respire. You flew, you dropped—a normal course of things. You finally breathed, now you must again hold your breath—not.

If I was still 26, if I had never lived a real life, this would not be so difficult.  But I have. I know what I’m toying with. I know what kind of heart I have. I know how it feels to live, how it feels to be a phantom, and how it feels to long for a life I can’t have. Of these three, it’s the last I dread most.

I’m the same as everyone else: I look at people on the train and think things about them. Most of the people I see on Gotham trains do not inspire me, especially not the men, and most especially not the boys traveling to and from the hip banlieu where I live. Every now and then I’ll see a man who looks promising, someone who has given some care to his presentation, someone tall perhaps. I’ll wonder how he speaks and how he’d sound getting a little severe, how strong he is, and what kind of glimmer can be got out of his eyes.

Few of the boys out my way believe in anything but their uber-evolved and studiously casual lifestyle. These boys turn me off. Sometimes, though, I’ll see one with a certain potential and think: you, young man, can have a wash and a shave and a haircut, put your uniform back on, and report to my study, thank you.

I think they were Camper--these!

Tonight a different kind of boy sat opposite. He was in his twenties, rather slight, and too fastidiously dressed to be straight. In fact he wore a tiny, demure stud in his right ear, but other than that, no visible piercings or tattoos. He was shaven, and his hair had an appearance of brill cream. He would have been at home in a costume out of Downton Abbey. He wore gray flannel trousers, a neat coat, a collared shirt and a brown scarf of British wool. On his feet he wore some dorky yet fashionable blue desert boots that seemed German, possibly Camper. Despite the careful appearance, he was in no way queenish, just rather sensitive and tense. He pored over a slender intellectual book. I fancied the pants off him. But not that way.

It was one of those occasions when you see a boy and you lust after him as if you were a boy yourself. I wanted to seduce him as a slightly older boy at university might seduce a newcomer. I wanted a real cock of my own, so that I could use it on him. I longed to see how he looked when brought near the edge and then–despite his dignity–forced over it. I wanted to see that delicate face seized with animal pleasure. I wanted to see the submissive adoration in those eyes of his, to surprise him with what my cock could and would do, to overwhelm his pleasure, and to make him suffer, a little. I wanted to see him have to put those clothes of his back on again after having spent the evening unclothed; for several hours his body had felt to him sufficient as it was made, but now he would suffer the embarrassment of re-dressing. Those clothes which had seemed so particular and attractive to him now only reminded him of the length and breadth of what he had done without them. I longed to make him want me, to make him adore me, but as a young man wants and loves a mentor a few years his senior. I longed to be that older boy, able in every way to captivate a slender, sensitive, careful boy like him and to blow his mind.

He died nine hundred and twelve days ago. Oh, dear Lord, that looks like such a very long time.

Today I’m up at my mother’s house. Casey’s bear “RP” is doing all right after the break-in, by the way. I’m sitting by the fire, in the chair he used to sit in. A few minutes ago, it seemed like I could see him in this chair, wearing the gray pullover and fleece hat he liked to wear up here (probably in one of the drawers upstairs I haven’t been able to clear out yet) and banging away at his old laptop. He was intense when he worked, and it wasn’t always possible to interrupt him, even for hugs. I can see his jeans, his old running shoes, and his unshaven face.

Is it that memory that is real and this life a type of perverted reality? Or was that life more like the substance of the stories I write?

Slight variation on the He’s-Back dream last night: He was back! I had plans to go to a tgi party in New Jersey, but now that he was back, I figured I’d bring him along to meet my friends. I thought it might be fun for him, and maybe he’d like some of them. I was booked to take a bus out there with a group, and so I was calling the organizers to see if there was a spare seat he could have.

And as I was talking with one of the organizers, I referred to M as “my guy.” But wait, I hesitated. He was more than my “guy”. He had been my husband, and now that he was back, it meant he was my husband again. I had a husband again! Except I wasn’t wearing my wedding ring. I went to my drawer to get my ring and his. Had he noticed already that I wasn’t wearing my ring? Would he feel hurt by my bare finger? What about my wardrobe? It is ordinary now. He wouldn’t know from looking at me that I’d worn all black every single day for more than a year, and only black and gray for two years, that I had only branched into mild color recently, that only last month did I put on the jeans I’d been wearing the day he died. (I still haven’t put on the shirt, and I gave away the bag I’d been carrying.) But he could only see me as I am right now–non-ring-wearing, average wardrobe, no visible signs of being yet attached to him, of considering him my husband.

Nine hundred twelve days later, I still do. Who is this other person living inside my body, going around without rings, attempting to cultivate connections to this empty, bleak, and cruelly beautiful world?

A long time ago, I promised Mija a story. You may have noticed it hasn’t appeared. This, I assure you, is entirely the fault of the story itself and no fault whatsoever of mine. I started this story soon after promising it to Mija, inspired in part by her forays into calligraphy and in part by an old story idea about a girl educated both as a boy and as a girl. So far so good, but this story quickly developed ideas above its station. Before we knew where we were, this story began whispering of its ambition to be a novel.

I told the story to get a grip. Stories were just that, short prose compositions to be read in a single sitting with a beginning, middle and end. The story listened patiently, but then gave me that look–the look that said But I really really long to be a novel. It is my heart’s desire. I am passionate about my novel-hood and long only to develop myself over a hundred thousand words. Anything less will stifle my glorious potential.

Even though the story was looking at me in cliches, I realized I had a rebellion on my hands. Fear gripped me.

I consulted the twittisphere and received wise counsel from the likes of Adele Haze, who advised me to force it into a short form and then lie to it and say it might grow up to be a novel one day. I tried this. My story pretended cooperation, but I think it saw through my ruse and decided to persist secretly in its ambition. And so we contended, this story and I, on an off over the months between The Promise and now.

Procrastination and incomplete projects weigh heavily on my conscience. They inspire me to hate myself, and they suck my energy like vampires. I’m old enough to realize that the to-do list will never be empty, but I am nevertheless trying to clear the decks for NaNoWriMo, which begins Monday. Yes, I am doing it again. Yes, once again I propose to be a NaNo Rebel (don’t faint from surprise). I’m planning to continue and try to finish my current novel, roughly from the point I left it after last year’s NaNo. If you check back in a few days, hopefully the Nano widgets will be working and you’ll be able to monitor my progress.

All of which is a long way of arriving at this confession: I am not currently capable of making Mija’s story into a proper story. So instead of hang on to it indefinitely, I have decided to give it in its current fragmentary form. Naturally, this feels awful, but TL says it is salutary to submit to human limitations, and good preparation for a month of daily humiliation in pursuit of 50,000 crappy words.

Right, navel gazing over. National Novel Writing ahead. Non-novel below. Mija, sorry it isn’t quite as promised.

Georgie/George

© Casey Morgan 2010

The Baron poured out the brandy for himself and his visitor, drawing his own chair closer to the fire against the bitter winter evening.

“I suppose,” the visitor said after tasting the brandy with approval, “this is when we ought to discuss what we have so assiduously avoided discussing.”

A tension left the Baron, one only palpable in its departure. Delahay had not changed after all. “You’ve always been ruthless in the face of delicacy,” the Baron said.

“And you’ve always appreciated it,” Delahay replied. “Well, almost always.”

They shared a smile over the memory of their encounters, many years before, at school. The Baron (then known simply as Merlingham, or Basil to his intimates) had first encountered Paul Delahay at their Public School in Hampshire. Delahay was some five years the junior, and their relationship had its roots in that of prefect and “difficult” junior. Many years had passed since then, many experiences on both sides. Delahay’s physique displayed those years less plainly than the Baron’s. His ash-blond hair showed no signs of the gray which streaked through the Baron’s. Both men were fit, but Delahay’s figure cut the sportsman. While fate had been kinder to Delahay in looks, it had smiled more warmly on the Baron in fortune. Delahay’s ascendancy at university had not been followed by material success. He now found himself nearly forty, childless, widowed, and between appointments as a tutor. It had taken little to persuade him to accept an invitation to the Baron’s chateau in Switzerland to offer consultation on what the Baron termed “an awkward project,” no further explanation forthcoming.

“You remember my sister, Miranda?” the Baron essayed.

“How could I forget the delicious harpy?” Delahay revealed a smirk at the reference to one summer holiday spent at Merlingham Hall. The Baron had only been present for a week of it, but he was fairly confident Delahay had seduced Miranda (a year Delahay’s senior) as well as their brother, Tom (two years Delahay’s junior and his close associate at school).

Over three brandies, the Baron recounted Tom’s death on the autobahn; Miranda’s marriage, estrangement from the family, and disappearance at the hands of South American dictators; and, finally, the existence of a niece, whose sole relation the Baron had proved to be. This niece was in fact the awkward project. Orphaned for all intents and purposes, mis-educated, difficult, thirteen years of age.

Delahay’s eyes betrayed curiosity . “Mis-educated how?”

The Baron summarized the month since his niece had arrived. She was the product of ludicrous parents. They had carted her around the globe on a feverish career of Jellybyism, educating her (if indeed their methods merited the term, which he doubted) in a way that made the Baron want to fall upon them with fisticuffs, if they had been within thrashing distance. She spouted a disconnected jumble of history, politics, and folklore; she read voraciously and uncritically; she knew little of mathematics, something of modern languages, nothing of Latin or Greek, and while she cut a figure in verbal debate, her skills with pen and paper could most generously be described as primitive.

“She can’t write?”

“Not that one can decipher.”

Delahay’s face assumed the expression of a professional who knew his work: “In short, she is intelligent but undisciplined.”

“Quite.”

Delahay’s gaze drifted to the fire. “It does sound a desperate case,” he said. “Unfortunately, I am a tutor of boys.”

“Exclusively?”

Delahay hesitated. “She’s thirteen, you say?” The Baron nodded. “Girls that age belong with other girls, with schoolmistresses, or at least governesses. Not with tutors who specialize in preparing boys for Public School.”

“That’s the thing of it,” the Baron said. “The child has had a most unconventional upbringing. Conventional strategies are, I fear, useless.”

“Nevertheless,” Delahay began, but the Baron interrupted him in the blunt manner he once employed in the face of Delahay’s thirteen-year-old cheek:

“Do you imagine I haven’t tried all that?” the Baron demanded. He went on to narrate the disaster of his niece’s two-day attendance at the nearby school for young ladies, as well as the rapid departures of the governesses he had subsequently engaged. In the Baron’s untutored opinion, his niece was yet too uncivilized for female society. It was as much as he could do to keep her in a frock. He had come to the conclusion that nature ought not to be fought as much as engaged. And it was his fervent hope—his only hope—that Delahay might accept that engagement.

Delahay finished his brandy in silence, contemplating the Baron’s account. “My methods,” he said at last.

“Are quite traditional,” the Baron rejoined, “as my correspondents attest.”

“Correspondents?”

“You don’t imagine I’d attempt to engage a tutor I hadn’t thoroughly researched?”

“Ah.”

“I’d have thought, Delahay, that you would recall my thoroughness, if nothing else.”

Delahay had the grace to blush at the memory.

“I grant you a free hand,” the Baron continued. “If you’ve any qualms dealing directly with my niece, perhaps you will feel freer addressing yourself to my nephew.”

Delahay blinked, and continued to blush. “There’s a nephew as well?”

The Baron rang for a servant, who quickly appeared. “Bring Georgie here, please.” The servant bobbed and departed. The Baron refreshed their drinks. He said nothing further, but shortly the library door banged open, admitting a child flushed from the outdoors. The child looked to Delahay in the neighborhood of eleven. It wore wool trousers, layers of wool jumper, wet boots, as well as muffler, cap, and mittens covered in snow.

“Gracious, child, what do you call—”

“Rose said you wanted me at once,” the child interrupted.

“Have you only just returned?” the Baron asked, concerned. “I thought I made it clear you weren’t to be skiing in the dark.”

“It’s only just got dark,” the child retorted.

This was not quite true, but the Baron declined to pursue the matter. Instead he drew the dripping child over to the fire. “Say good evening, please, to Mr. Delahay.”

The child removed a snow-caked mitten and extended a cold, pink hand. “How do you do?” it inquired, with almost repugnant self-confidence.

“Quite well—”

“Delahay,” the Baron interrupted, “please meet my niece, Georgiana.”

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