supplicium post mortem

When I write the phrase little chat, it is usually in upper case, Little Chat. I think you already know what that means. It is probably time I attribute the phrase to its originator. Mark first used, upper case, early in our correspondence, but I incorrectly remember hearing it first in a vignette he wrote for me.

Our email correspondence (until he moved to Gotham) stretches to almost a thousand emails each, almost all of them saved individually in txt files with names like “fmark232.txt” [the 232nd email from Mark to me] or “tomark33″ [my 33rd email to Mark]. As you can imagine, it’s hard to find a reference amongst all that, especially 15 years after the fact.

Tonight I was searching for the text of this Little Chat vignette, which I did using the Search function on my PC. It turned up many emails, and the first one I opened turned out to be the one in which he confessed that he loved me. I barely remember this email, but encountering it again absolutely slayed me. I won’t quote it. My eyes are still swollen.

I did eventually find Mark’s vignette and have posted it below as well as under the Stories tab. The scenario was Mark and Casey at the Lewises. This was an alternate reality to Home School, one we only played a few times. The idea was that Mark and Casey had run away from the Orphanage and had been found and adopted by the Perfect People (Dr. & Mrs. Lewis). I later (or was it earlier?) wrote a companion piece to his vignette, which I also posted under the Stories tab. After reading them both, I feel his is much better: more direct, less fussy and complicated, more spontaneous and full of heart. Looking at both scenarios from far away, I would say that we never lived or much played the letter of them, but the mood and heart of them were a constant feature of our life together, especially Mr. Prior’s life with Casey.

Without further ado, then, here is Mark’s piece, Wednesdays.

Wednesdays

by Mark Hastings

Sundays are for Regulars, for weekly cleaning.  Sundays are always spent together, at the Lewises.  Casey and Mark go to bed sore and peaceful and clean and warm.  Whole.  Sundays are a deep rich blue, the smell of dark polished wood, a full stomach and a feeling of belonging.

By Wednesday, that’s worn off a little.  Mr. Lewis is fond of saying, as he shaves on Wednesday morning, that Wednesday is the worst day of the week. Equidistant from the comfort of weekend.  Neither the residual freshness of Tuesday, or the slight anticipation of Thursday.  Nothing but acres of dullness.  Mrs. Lewis has Commitments on Wednesdays, so supper is usually something cold.  Mark and Casey both have School things that they hate. For Mark, it’s morning gym, ninety minutes of effort with the school Sergeant’s swagger stick flailing its response to slackness, and the inevitability of at least one vault-horse caning, ‘poer incurriger les otters’.   For Casey, double Latin in the afternoon with the psychotically sarcastic Mr. Whitworth, whose greatest pleasure is to decline irregular verbs in time with his strap-strokes, and who makes a virtue of leathering girls just as hard as boys.  Out in front of the class, but facing towards your peers so they are spared the worst witness of unprotected strapping, and can better concentrate on construe.

Mark has learned to avoid the Wednesday vault-horse, and Casey the mid-week strap, because on Wednesday evenings they have their “Little Chat”.

The children do the dishes after supper, while Mr. Lewis goes to his study, and Mrs. Lewis rests up.  There is a sense of anticipation, although it isn’t the edginess of Sunday, before the Regulars, because often a Little Chat is just that.  Even so, the dishes get done well, and quietly, on the whole, on Wednesdays.  Mark and Casey smarten themselves up, and jaunt carefully along the downstairs corridor to the study.  Sometimes Mrs. Lewis joins them, sometimes not.

Little Chats are lucky-dippy.  In the months since Casey’s arrival they have ranged from a particularly uncomfortable interview over a broken ornament (Casey), cleverly replaced on its shelf (Mark) and not discovered broken for some time afterwards (Mrs. Lewis), to a riotous game of Racing Demon in which Mr. Lewis was heard to swear when Casey stole his Ace of Spades, was sent to the corner by his family and threatened with a very hard whacking by Mark if he ever did it again.  On average, one or both of the Lewises feel that one or both of the children would benefit from a little additional discipline perhaps one week in two.

Little Chat discipline is always the same – slipper, paddle or hand, administered in traditional manner, across the knee of the parent in the clock-ticky quiet of Mr. Lewis’s study.  It’s very different from Regulars. Canes, birches, crops and straps are banned.  Punishments are measured in minutes, rather than strokes.  Usually either a Quin, being–as Casey might explain–five minutes, or a Dix, being ten.  Mark hates Dixes, with a passion, especially when they’re paddle, and administered by Mrs. Lewis. Casey has mixed feelings about the whacking, but she loves the closeness and warmth of Little Chats, the fire glowing orange while the wind blows white outside on winter Wednesdays.

So, Wednesdays are made red, a smell of incense, a little adventure, and fun.

Think you?

Let me tell you about a friend of mine. This friend, like Abel (as he was forced to confess in his inspiring post on the same topic), was a teenager during the 1980s, and, also like Abel, is kinky today. (Imagine!) This friend of mine was raised by fairly straight-laced, waspy parents. Nudity was unknown beyond toddler-hood, and the facts of life were discussed in a way that tried to communicate neutral acceptance, as was the custom, but could never quite conceal her parents’ embarrassment and shame.  There was an excruciating episode–which I will not recount in detail because if you heard it you would have to pull out all of your teeth with pliers–surrounding her audition for a professional production of Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July. She was auditioning for the part of a pert, over-sophisticated girl whose lines included the words masturbating and cunnilingus. My friend’s parents didn’t really want her to say these words, so they talked the director into allowing her to substitute euphemisms (“Playing with himself” and “uh…..”). However, they also had to explain to her why this change was happening, and this involved explaining what those words meant. This is where I will draw a veil over the episode to save us all the need for Mind Bleach. Needless to say, although she made it to the final call-back, she was not cast in the role.

That was just background for you. I could tell you more stories along similar lines, but we do all need to eat today. Let me tell you instead about my friend’s first sight of a porn magazine. She was sleeping over at her best friend’s house (let us call this best friend Frances). This would have been around 5th grade (age 10-ish). Up at the top of the coat closet, Frances’s dad had a stash of Penthouse. My friend got only a glimpse of this periodical because she reacted pretty much as Poppy described here. (Such a great post, by the way!) This encounter with Frances’s dad’s Penthouse extinguished any interest my friend had in pornography. Thus, my friend looked to mainstream fiction, stage, and film for things to think about while falling asleep at night.

Fast forward to the late 1980′s when my friend was just starting college. Her mother was at this time going through a kind of rebirth, emerging  from a long, debilitating depression occasioned by divorce. As my friend discovered one day whilst poking through her mother’s bedside table, this rebirth apparently included a sexual revolution. Because in this bedside table, my friend found some extraordinary volumes. One, Anne Rice’s The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty. Two, a paperback called Venus in the Country, by Anonymous. There were a couple of other books along these lines, but my friend can’t remember the titles.

Now, you may well throw up a little in your mouth at the idea of finding your mother’s secret erotica stash. You might also writhe in agony imagining my friend’s discovery that her erstwhile euphemism-toting mama was a closet tgi enthusiast. But my friend, through some self-protective twist of psychology (or psychosis) managed to close her eyes to the source of these paperbacks and merely borrow them, one at a time, on the sly to peruse in her bedroom with the door locked. When my friend had to put the books back in place, she merely pretended she wasn’t doing what she was doing. Mentally, she went on a little vacation when it came time to borrow or return these volumes, which she did many times at the end of the 1980s. I guess she had a plentiful supply of mind bleach and no qualms about using it.

You may well ask why my friend did not simply jot down the titles and go buy copies for herself. Please understand: this would have been dirty. My friend would never have been able, then, to bring herself to purchase erotica in a store (Amazon.com did not yet exist). And to possess such books, to have them staring at her all the time from inside her own bedside table? Grody! Grody to the Max, in the parlance of the 1980s. My friend could only enjoy these books (thoroughly enjoy them) because they would not be there staring her in the face the next morning. She enjoyed them because they lived elsewhere.

And oh, did she enjoy them. The Sleeping Beauty series took her already wavy imagination and twisted it into tight kinks. And the quasi-Victorian compositions by Anonymous, where to begin? A commentator on Amazon says this of Venus in the Coutry:

I have owned this book for years having stolen it from my father’s dresser when I was a teenager. It is full of non-stop sexual encounters which seem to focus on the need to educate young maidens in the ways of the world.

My friend’s memory was hazy (when I interviewed her for this post) about the plots of these books by Anonymous. She remembers one in epistolary form (possibly the aforementioned Venus). It featured a household where the mistress took delight in corrupting the young girls who came into her service. Their bedrooms were equipped with peepholes, and early on the mistress arranged to catch some young servant pleasuring herself. The poor girl was hauled before the mistress, who threatened to send her back to her parents with a full explanation of her misconduct. The girl begged mercy, and the mistress granted it, but on two conditions: one, that she submit to an exemplary chastisement at the mistress’s hands; and two, that she submit to regular inspection to ensure she never do such a thing again. The poor girl agreed.

The inspection, to save the modesty both of the girl and of the inspector, would be done anonymously. The girl would go into the cellar and bend forward with her head and torso inside the dumb-waiter. The hatch would be lowered and locked across her waist, holding her firmly in place. Shortly, someone would come along, adjust her clothing, and perform the necessary inspection, which more often than not became an opportunity for sensitizing the girl to all of her exposed parts. The girl typically found herself in such a state after the inspections (by she knew not whom) that she was forced to repair to her chamber as quickly as possible to relieve the tension (all of which the mistress observed, delighted, through peepholes).

My friend also recounted a most satisfactory scene in which the mistress permitted her close friend (and governor at a reformatory) to conduct the inspection. This scene involved use of “the school spanking strap” as well as buggery, and afterwords, the girl was taken away, destined for the reformatory or the white-slave markets, my friend could not recall precisely which.

Of course, in later years my friend became more comfortable with erotic literature and acquired a respectable library of her own, but, she told me, she mourns some of those volumes from the unmentionable bedside table, since she cannot recall their titles, and since Venus in the Country, at least, is not readily available.

I told my friend that such lost classics are the spice of life, even more delightful through the confusion of nostalgia and likely improved by the imagination. Upon reflection, she rather agreed.

What about you? What are your Lost Classics?

She locked the back door and heard the murmur of the television from the den. No voices, though, giving her hope, however faint, that the children were asleep. She tossed her coat across the table and kicked off her clogs.

“Hey.” Her husband appeared in the dining room arch, back lit from the den.

“Are the kids—”

“In bed,” he interrupted. “Asleep.”

“Wow. Did you drug ‘em?”

“I thought you’d be back by eight thirty.” His voice acquired that edge. She could tell he wouldn’t be babysitting again anytime soon.

“The train was delayed. We got stuck in the tunnel.”

He palmed the dimmer, and the chandelier blared alight. She squinted.

“The website didn’t say anything,” he said stiffly.

She shrugged. “I’m shattered. You coming to bed?” She asked, knowing that he wouldn’t. She asked for form’s sake, to maintain the illusion of civility. As she slouched past him, his hand snatched her above the elbow. “Hey!”

“You were with him, weren’t you?”

“Who?”

“You know who.  Wasn’t enough, I suppose, to flirt with him in the deli every day. To have drinks with him last Thursday from five to seven PM.”

“What the hell?”

“Oh, I don’t need to spy on you. Do you think everyone in this town doesn’t know everything. Do you think they wouldn’t tell me?”

“And what did the jungle drums report about tonight, then?” She wrenched her arm free, but still he blocked her path.

“I’m your husband. You owe me the truth at least.”

Something in his eyes, something she’d never seen before made her heart ricochet in her chest.

“What do you want to hear?”

“Everything.” He imprisoned her wrists in his hands. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt his palms there.

“Do you want to hear how he took my hand?”

“How? The little punk.”

She met his gaze. He released her wrists. She took one of his hands flat between both of hers, and then brushed one protruding finger against her lip. He inhaled.

“Did you let him kiss you?”

Again, the look she’d never seen. Jealousy, but something more. “I kissed him.”

“You what?”

She ran her hands up his arms, over his t-shirt, and into the line of his disheveled hair. Then she pulled his face down and kissed him—lips, breath, tongue, teeth—as they hadn’t kissed in—

“What else did he do, the bastard?”

She moved his hand under her blouse. “This.” The other hand she led round to the back of her skirt. “And this.”

He pulled her close, stiff against her. “What else? I could kill him.”

Some time later they went up to bed, exhausted, sore, sated. She felt a pang of guilt, but fleeting. He wouldn’t have minded about the truth, a drink too many with her college roommate after the play; but the illusory lover not only proved incandescent, but it also guaranteed he’d babysit again soon, willingly.

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What is Secret Saturday? This piece was a little different than my usual fare. I suppose you can decide whether the change was for the good or the bad! My wildcard, like Emma Jane’s, was tunnel.

Check out the other excellent writers joining in this week:

• Emma Jane – injecting a special verisimilitude to hers!

Last week, the first round of Secret Saturday, was a great success because so many excellent writers accepted the challenge. May it be so again!

The challenge: write 250-500 words (fiction or non-fiction, who will know?) about a secret. Maybe your piece will reveal the secret. Maybe it won’t. Click on one of the three cards below to get your wildcard, which will be a person, place or thing for you to include in your story. You only get one pick, though, so you’ve got to take what you get.

Stories due before bedtime Sunday. Post your link in comments here or on Twitter @caseydamnmorgan. Have fun!

She first saw him on the stoop on her way out of the party. The streets were narrow, deserted, like London. The party had been tedious.

“Oh,” he said.

“Are you going up?” she asked.

He stood, flustered, grinding out a cigarette with his dress shoe. “I don’t think so.”

Her head spun, possibly from a sinus infection, possibly because he looked like a young Daniel Day-Lewis and sounded like a Public School boy once removed. “Can’t say I blame you.” She met his eye with uncharacteristic nerve and then stepped off the stoop into the blowing snow.

“You look like a schoolgirl,” he said with a slight smile. “Are you sure you’re old enough to be knocking about on your own?”

She didn’t move, but shoved her hands deep into her pockets. “Quite sure.” The wind cut through her tights and made her wish she was wearing trousers. “What’s your name?”

He turned up his collar and joined her in the street. “James. James Mercer.”

“That was the name of my third grade teacher.”

“Oh, yes?” He came alongside her and began to walk. “How old’s that, then?”

“Eight.”

He buttoned the top of his coat. “You haven’t changed much, then.”

She glowered at the cobblestones. “Do you make a habit of chatting up girls in foreign cities and calling them immature?”

“Who says this is a foreign city?”

“Do you live here?”

He suppressed a smile. “Do you?”

She surveyed the empty street. “Listen,” she said, “it was great meeting you, James, but this is my train.” She gestured with her head to the red ball a block away.

“Closed, I wager.”

She inhaled and nodded: “Goodnight.” And strode quickly away from him.

“Wait. Please?”

She did not befriend strange men. She didn’t befriend strangers period. But his voice hit her chest somewhere like memory, as if she had known it, or would know it. She turned, but kept her distance. The snow swirled around him under the streetlamp.

“I’m an idiot,” he said. “Give me another chance.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Please.”

Her eyes stung, suddenly. She wasn’t feeling well. She belonged in bed, alone.

He craned his neck to see behind her. “Let me buy you a cup of coffee.”

“It’s too late for coffee.”

“Chocolate, then.” He nodded at some florescent light down the block. Her stomach growled. Her chin was going numb in the cold. She shrugged and then strode towards the coffee shop. He caught her up at the door, held it for her, and before she could unwrap herself, he’d ordered two hot chocolates and was hanging up her coat. She threw herself into a booth and placed her bag firmly beside her. He slipped into the seat across.

“Now,” he said, his voice more chocolaty than any chocolate possible, “what’s this all about?” His irises were green with flecks of brown in them. Her throat ached. Her eyes started streaming.

“That wasn’t my teacher’s name,” she sobbed.

He put his hands on the table, palms up, and smiled. “It isn’t mine, either.”

---

What is Secret Saturday? My wildcard, like Haron’s, was Third Grade Teacher.

It’s a thrill to have so many great writers joining in this first week. A big welcome to all of them. Check out their pieces!

• Haron
• Emma Jane
• Scarlett
• Nettagyrl

OK, kids, we have been idle long enough. The twelve days of Christmas have not yet passed (as Adele will attest), but by now we all ought to have recovered from our New Year’s hangovers. Thus, flushed with resolute zeal, here is a new writing game for comers new and old:

Write 250-500 words (fiction or non-fiction, who will know?) about a secret. Maybe your piece will reveal the secret. Maybe it won’t. Pick one of the three cards below (click on it) to get your wildcard, which will be a person, place or thing for you to include in your story. You only get one pick, though, so you’ve got to take what you get. Peeking at the other cards is cheating, kids, and we all know what that gets you. (Hint: whack-whack-whack)

Stories due before bedtime Sunday. Post your link in comments here or on Twitter @caseydamnmorgan. Have fun!

Welcome to Flash Fiction Friday. Come write a 250-word story (erotic? tgi oriented?). Start any time Friday, finish by 6pm PDT Saturday. Post the link to your story in the comments below or on Twitter (@caseydamnmorgan). Try to include the wildcards. Thanks this week to @asparkle2 @sandy_radbabe @masterretep, whose tweets supplied the wildcards.

• allegiance
  
• minor bump
  
• dock-leaf
  

Spread the word, and have fun!

p.s. As previously discussed, I may not be able to write for 3f this week myself, due to NaNoWriMo, but if I don’t, I’ll link to other 3F writers here by the end of Saturday. Write on, kids!

He watched her whirl about the apartment, in what he called her Tasmanian Devil state. There were so many things to do she couldn’t draw breath to count them, and there he sat on the bed, stripped down to boxer briefs, flicking channels between the baseball and Househunting Wales: Denbighshire.

“Come to bed,” he said gently, settling further into the pillows. She declined in a bugger-off tone and strode to the kitchen to initiate another task. The crockery on top of the fridge needed putting away. She dragged chair across tiles and climbed up with the ugly plate their neighbor had given them for their wedding.

Then, the chair was skidding out from under her and crashing to the floor, shattering the plate and slamming her knee against the counter. And he was there, lifting her from the scene of the accident and pointing to the dressing room: “Go.”

Tears threatening, she did as he said. After sweeping up the shards, he waited for her, then led her to bed. He resumed his spot and pulled her by the wrist to sit between his legs, her head against his chest like a pillow, his arms wrapped around her from behind, muscles like the statue of Youthful Hercules she’d seen at the museum, his lips brushing against her ear, her cheek, her neck, watching the sheep in Wales, running his fingers through her hair until everything wrong was right again and she could call off the archers, put down the stick, surrender.

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What is Flash Fiction Friday?

Read the other folks writing this week:

• Marie
• Rafi

Welcome to Flash Fiction Friday. Come write a 250-word story (erotic? tgi oriented?). Start any time Friday, finish by 6pm PDT Saturday. Post the link to your story in the comments below or on Twitter (@caseydamnmorgan). Try to include the wildcards. Thanks this week to @violaotley @lemonyhead @elianech, whose tweets supplied the wildcards.

• Denbighshire
  
• muscles
  
• bugger off
  

Spread the word, and have fun!

p.s. As previously discussed, I may not be able to write for 3f this week myself, due to NaNoWriMo, but I will link to those who do here by the end of Saturday. Write on, kids!

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility. The motto of Peter Donne’s confessor when he entered the monastery, thirty-nine years old, hot-headed, clever, bereaved.

The Abbot at Lunsford had taken particular interest in him, as perhaps he ought, Peter being his nephew. He had persuaded Peter to come to Lunsford and then assigned him Barnabas for his confessor.

“He’s tried to harm himself,” the Abbot told Barnabas.

“With intent?”

“I fear.”

Barnabas intertwined his fingers and exhaled. “Will you permit the Norwich Discipline?”

The Abbot hesitated, a qualm for his nephew, but then nodded, recognizing what could be the only hope for his novice.

Days for Peter began an hour before anyone else rose. Barnabas woke him and supervised his milking of the cows. In that bleary-eyed hour, Barnabas exacted a kind of confession as he demanded an account of the night’s dreams. Confession and discernment of spirits, combined with milking—the ultimate monastic efficiency, Barnabas claimed.

“I saw her again,” Peter said one dark morning—his third month? thirteenth? what difference, really?

“Yes?”

“Her body warm and unclothed against me in our bed, soft, so alive…”

“Yes.”

“I knew she was dead, that this was a visit from beyond the grave, but her arms wrapped around me so…”

“Did you make love?”

“Not this time. But…I asked her to use her magic eyes, to… bring something good to me. ‘You can’t want me to live my whole long life without you and alone,’ I said.”

“And now?” Barnabas asked. “Mind the bucket!”

Milk sloshed across the dairy floor. Peter winced, knowing his confessor’s answer to inattention at milking.

“We’ll deal with that later,” Barnabas said dryly. “For now, finish, please. Your report, and your cow.”

“There was a later part, in the refectory here. I had just arrived, with the boys.”

“Your boys, or the boys you used to teach?”

“A blending, I think. I was worried over what they would eat and was bustling about trying to find them what they’d like. Then the Abbot reached over my shoulder and dropped two pieces of toast on my plate. They were hot, hot enough to melt the butter between them, and it was toast with the kind of bread she used to make, the best bread, the best toast.”

“Perfect toast.”

“Yes. And I wanted to blub because of the toast, and because of the fact that he’d been watching me all along, when I’d been busy with the boys, and he’d taken it upon himself to drop on my plate–no word, no fuss–the perfect toast.”

Barnabas nodded but said no more until later that morning–after Matins, after morning work, after Peter’s particular exercises–when Peter stood before him in the confessional cell, struggling as usual with the submission his confessor requested. Barnabas waited, as usual, without speaking, without removing the birch from its bucket until Peter had prepared himself. When the time came, he applied it with the force of radical mercy, until the fight left, and a bit beyond.

After saying the absolution and allowing the novice to rearrange himself, Barnabas fished a tin from his habit, an incongruous, luridly colored object containing ginger pastilles. He opened it and held it out to Peter Donne, who seemed to regard it as a sinister trap.

“Go on,” Barnabas said.

Sweets of all kinds were forbidden at Lunsford, and almost every other indulgence forbidden to Peter under the Norwich Discipline.

“No, thank you.”

“You’re afraid, aren’t you? Afraid of what will happen if you have it.”

Peter braced himself to deny it, but then shrugged.

“You aren’t the author of your life,” his confessor said.

“No,” Peter replied, as if he were only just realizing it.

“Someone else is writing your book.”

Peter frowned as if he had received crushing news.

“Someone who watches you. Someone who, unbeknownst to you, has taken time to prepare perfect toast, from perfect bread, and to drop it on your plate.”

The novice fell back to his knees, tears pouring suddenly from his eyes: “Please, Father, change me. Make me a man who no longer asks to have her back.”

Barnabas rested a hand on Peter’s head. “He is changing you. Your book is being written, even now.”

“And what does it say, this page?”

“This page?” Barnabas placed the open tin on the kneeler. “So I did sit, and eat.”

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What is Bookends?

Note: Bookends will be suspended for the month of November due to NaNoWriMo, as explained here.

Read other folks writing this week:

• PapaTomLA