supplicium post mortem

Today I received an email from Chris Baty, Daddy of NaNoWriMo. Maybe you received one, too. Here is how it began:

I ran into your 2009 NaNoWriMo novel yesterday, and it said that you two are currently “taking a break.” I offered my condolences and mentioned that I’d probably be seeing you today. It quickly scribbled out a note for me to give you. The note seemed kind of personal, so I didn’t read it. Here it is!

“Hi! Come back to me. I’ll be better this time, I promise!”

Maybe Chris sent this email to every one of the 166,700 participants, or perhaps he limited it to the 32,000 ish “winners”. Whatever. He’s trying to encourage people to finish what they began. My book and I are indeed currently “taking a break” for the holidays, but it’s like the kind of break M and I used to have to take in the first year, when he was still living in Englandland. Anyone who’s ever carried on a long distance love affair will know what this feels like. Time is always your enemy. It’s forever and ever before you see each other again, and then when you’re together, time evaporates. Even after he had moved here and moved in with me, I would still feel traumatized when he had to travel, even for a short time like a week. On some level, I think, I couldn’t accept that I really had him–and since that sounds as though I considered him a possession, let me rephrase: I couldn’t entirely accept that something this good, someone this good, far and away the best thing that had ever happened in my life–that it was for real, and wasn’t going to be taken away like other good things. That I could rely upon it.

As I’ve written before, we got married after being together six years, and we were married for seven years before he died. I think it was really only towards the end of that, in the last couple of years of marriage, that I began to treat him–us–as a real, permanent, true, reliable thing. The rooms inside me that reserved themselves, reluctant to surrender to the good thing lest it disappear, even they gave in. When he died, I found I didn’t have anything reserved anymore. All of me was with him. We had become us.

I am thankful that I haven’t become the kind of person who is afraid to give in like that again. I want to. I need to. I was more myself then, more truly me than I’ve been before or since.

long winter, long path

We are knee deep in winter. I thought last winter was the longest winter of my life, but now, here is another one, no less cold, no less long. The thought of my book sending me a little note saying, Please come back, I’ll be better this time–it makes me cry because I love that book, and I haven’t left it, I would never leave it, and it doesn’t need to try to be better for me, because I love it in all its messiness, and it’s up to me to clear the beds around it so it can come up and grow right.

But if there was someone to take a note to that other shore for me, I would write the same thing to him: Please come back to me. I’ll be better this time. I promise. I won’t fight for so long. I won’t fight at all. I won’t work so hard at stupid things. And did you know, yesterday when I had the Host in my mouth, all I could think and feel was you, your tongue on my tongue, you inside me, and it felt like you were there somehow in that melting, wine-tinged substance in my mouth. If you would come back I would kiss you all the time. I would make love to you all the time. I want to touch your eyelids, your cock, your hands, your bottom, every bit of you, even where your hair is thinning and where the skin is red from your wrist watch. I’ve learned a lot, since you’ve been gone. I’m smarter now. I can do more things. I take up more of the bed, but I’ll move over again. Your son has got so tall.

Please come back. I’ll be better this time. I promise. I promise.

The dreams don’t stop. Neither does the hope that he’ll be upstairs when I come in the door, that I’ll hear his footsteps clumping along the floorboards and down the spiral stairs. It will be such a relief, as it always is when he comes home. Like stepping into air conditioning from a brutal, New York summer.

People don’t talk about him as much as they used to. Everyone else seems to have repaired the colossal tear in the matrix that his disappearance caused. His job has been filled. It is no longer tasteful to think on him.

I cannot tell you… I cannot tell you—anything. I know…I know. Everyone has part of their life which is now in the past. I am no different from any single person still walking this planet. I don’t like the word unfair. But how come I have to keep living when he didn’t?

The card I gave him on our last anniversary is still in the bedside drawer that used to be his, its message a kind of steganography:

xoxoxo me

h&l&nt & tc4mh, l&h ohbb uhc, h-h, & ont4cdm b/c sagg.

I asked him if he understood, and he read the whole thing confidently aloud: hugs and love and nice things, and the cane for marky, long and hard on his bare bottom, ha-ha, and only nice things for casey because she’s a good girl.

There is no one to talk to this way anymore. Even the dogs don’t get it.

God, help me.

This really was a bumper crop for 3F. Don’t know if it is fall industriousness or the thrill of a hard challenge, but these writers deserve a big hand (won’t say what kind or where) or at the very least nice comments on their blogs. Read on, Macduff!

• Rafi
• Sandy
• Abby
• Nettagyrl
• PapaTomLA

It’s been a grueling week. First, a close colleague of M’s died suddenly and young, like M did. Same church, same requiem mass, even the same weather. So, last Friday I re-lived my husband’s funeral.

Then, my family came to town for my birthday. I love them. I’m hugely grateful for them and for the way they show up for me. But it all just made me want M and miss him even more. I have so many wonderful friends and kind, loving people in my life, yet I don’t feel any more attached to life than I did a year ago, for the most part.

The sermon on my birthday spoke of many things, but the one that struck me was the Rector’s exegesis on Take up your cross and follow me. Crucifixion is no longer a form of capital punishment, he declared. So what, he asked, is this cross? His answer: the cross is this mortal flesh, this mortal life. We are none of us getting out of this world alive, he said. And yet we are tasked with taking up this mortal life and living it, fully, faithfully, despite every attendant suffering. I want to do that. I want to be capable of doing that. I am always comforted and somehow excited—is that the word?—by the emphasis, at least at my church, that this life we are given is fundamentally and indispensably physical. We are not designed as ethereal, purely spiritual or purely mental beings. (Natty wrote a moving and theologically astute post about this a while back.) So on my forty-first birthday, I heard this instruction: take up your cross, your humanity, your mortality, your body, your sexuality, and your broken, empty, amputated heart, take it all up and follow me. I have ears to hear, at least.

In other news, my father was in a reminiscing mood, and for part of the weekend I was treated to stories of his wild 1950s boarding school days, when he would go with his roommate—Holden-Caulfield-like—down to Greenwich Village on the weekends, stay out all night hearing Beat poets and jazz singers, then repair back to the roommate’s family home in New England to sleep it off before returning to the dorm Sunday night. Needless to say, folks back in the industrial Midwest had no clue about his exploits, nor could they have understood them, probably.

Then today I hear from my brother that Dad had been reminiscing an entirely different chapter to my sister. This chapter plainly titillated and appalled the siblings, the gist of it being that my maternal grandmother apparently gave herself daily enemas for most of her adult life. The revelation that prim-and-proper grandma was perhaps a closet klismaphiliac caused quite a stir amongst my un-kinky sibs. I asked, bulb or bag? Bro didn’t really know the difference. They looked things up on the internet. I’m thinking, Yeah, I know that site but there are better ones I’d recommend…

And if that wasn’t enough, apparently grandma also gave enemas to her children (ahem, our mom) at times, and our late aunt was supposed to have done some paintings on the subject, including one of grandma self-administering. I’m thinking, Where the hell are these paintings?! but I say, That might be too much information, lucky they’re lost. Sis informs us that the DSM has Things To Say about giving children enemas. It can be a form of sexual abuse, she says. Anal violation. One track of my 8-track mind is thinking, Anal violation? Yes, please! Track 2 is thinking: What a big fucking deal social workers make of a simple home remedy. Track 3: Oh, bless grandma. That’s where I get it from. Track 4: You guys had better not look too far into the bathroom cupboards upstairs. Track 5: Maybe the DSM is right because it’s fucking hot. Track 6: Oh, but it can also be very calming, I can attest. Track 7: Have either of you ever had anything in your ass? Track 8: You really do not know me at all, do you?

My interest in That Thing was adult onset. It was not employed in our house, except once (not to me) on doctor’s orders. I had scarcely heard of it in those years when my mind was glomming onto spanking and then to English schoolboys getting the cane. I must have been corrupted when I found the internet; on second thought, I think it could have been Anne Rice’s Beauty series. I believe that series is also what introduced me to the idea of anal play generally. I’m glad she didn’t return to the church before she finished writing those. Not—NB!—that a return to the church should necessarily preclude writing such awesome erotica, but in her case, I think it probably would have.

I am dying to know more about my grandmother. How did she self-administer That Thing? Was it really every day? Why? Did she enjoy it? How much did she take? What started her out? Unfortunately, I think it would be way too embarrassing for me to ask either of my parents for elaboration. I do know from my grandmother’s diaries (which I possess) that she had a very sensitive digestion and often had trouble eating. If she was having That Thing daily, though, I’m not surprised. That can’t be good for you. I do wonder if there is a genetic component, though. I am positive that there is one for spanking. Anyway, amazing what you can hear if you listen when family are feeling loquacious.

Did I see you at the pump yesterday, out of the corner of my eye? Your red Music Man t-shirt: “Trouble.” Your beat-up cargo shorts? How could I be sure, as I clenched the nozzle, that you wouldn’t emerge from the store bearing cheetoes and a cup of coffee, thick as oil?

I’ve pumped up seven bike tires, four inflatable mattresses, seventeen gas tanks. I’ve grown used to doing the driving, all of it, all the time. I’m used to walking the dogs, month in and out. I can handle all the chores, the garden, the grilling. I found the drill. I’ve grown used to having the bed to myself even if I still keep to my side. I’ve grown used to our rings on my right hand where they don’t belong. I don’t want to be used to any of it.

The footsteps in the hall yesterday sounded like yours. Even the dogs stood up to listen. They, too, wanted you to walk through the door. They wanted you to put down your backpack and your Post, lock the door, and say Daddy’s home.

Your shoes are waiting. Your shaving foam is waiting. Your bedside drawer is waiting. Even your dirty laundry is waiting.

He sounds like you now, my stepson, more every day. He jokes like you, reasons like you, inflects, strides, and dresses like you. He isn’t you.

I’m not me, either, but I’m living our life. Didn’t I see you yesterday, at the pump, beyond reach?

Dear me, sorry. And I was all ready to write a fun, sexy one full of lust for a hot young man! Then this happened. Oh, well, caveat lector.

Come write your own missed connection – real or fantasy, who will know? Post the link today (Wednesday) here or on Twitter (@caseydamnmorgan). What is Midweek Missed Connections?

Read other missed connections this week:

• PapaTomLA

I keep thinking of your face in the rain. Dripping, mud-streaked, flushed on the rugger pitch. Do you remember my hand in the scrum, that afternoon just before I charged you and wound up in the San with my arm in a sling? Everyone knows what goes on when the ref’s not looking, but I’ve always wondered if you knew it was me. I remember how your cock felt inside your shorts. I haven’t been able to stop thinking of it since.

Who was the one to show you what cocks are for? As our changing rooms are worlds apart, you never got to appraise mine. One doesn’t like to boast, but it’s worthwhile I’m told. Some rather incendiary reading material has come my way of late. I can’t seem to stop thinking of it, and you, and what would happen if the two were combined.

I watched you and Rees the afternoon before that night, though you didn’t know it. I still can’t believe it – not what you did, but that you did it with him. I never got to ask you what you saw in him. He’s such a dreary cold shower. The perverseness of it (if you’ll forgive my choice of words) has, since then, driven me slightly mad.

I want to forget your body when they carried you back that morning. I want to forget everything about you. It’s hopeless when I’m asleep, like now. Dreams are the most unforgiving of traitors.

Read other missed connections this week:

• PapaTomLA

She was a transparent liar. She never lied about things she had done, nothing deliberately mendacious, but she had trouble admitting what was inside her chest. She thought he had paranormal guessing muscles, but he could see it all on her face, in the blushes, the set of the mouth, the water in the eyes, everything.

A war waged inside Casey Morgan, between what he wasn’t always sure. Between niceness and the truth. Between the cruel task-master and the little girl. Between the noxious demons he brushed, forcefully, off her shoulder – oh, he believed in demons. He knew their power, their seductive corrosion, their allure – between the devils at her ear and the huge, throbbing heart.

Counter-irritant: that’s what it was when he put her across his knee. There might be a bit of discipline, a bit of reassurance, a bit of atonement, and a bit of calming-down about it, but more than anything, the spanking drew the sting of a pain deeper inside, the kind he couldn’t salve directly. When she cried – whether after a long, hard slippering or a light application of his hand, which was what she needed most of all – when the tears issued forth, warm rain drops on the knee of his trousers, he loved her, so much that it hurt. She almost cried holes in his trousers that first year, so many tears so long held in.

God, could he not hold her again, that girl, that heart?

What is Flash Fiction Friday?

Read other folks writing this week:

• Rafi
• Melen’s Rayne
• Nettagyrl
• PapaTomLA

I saw you reading a magazine, your sleeves rolled up, waiting for the allergy shots to take, or whatever it is that they do. You wore black, your hair held off your face with sunglasses, cross visible when I looked too far down your top. You almost scowled at your reading, as is your fashion, even for glossy girl mags. Your skirt came just below the knee. I wanted to lift it, expose those legs of yours, and touch that bottom. Allergy jabs in the arm are tosh, as I’ve always said. A girl Casey’s age ought to have them in her bottom, and when it was time to have it looked at, the nurse would lift her skirt right there in the waiting room, and only return her knickers when everything was clear.

I saw you waiting at that Japanese massage place. Is that spot in your lower back still putting off enough heat to fry an egg? Oh, I know, you’re not tense; you’ve been carrying a heavy bag. Those girls can walk on your back all day long, but we both know something different is required to correct the holding in.

I saw you in the waiting room on that day you want to forget, waiting for that tosser of a social worker to stop diddling you about. I saw you even then. I see you even now. Don’t worry, Sweetheart, really…truly… Has anyone ever mentioned that you have the most beautiful nose?

Come write your own missed connection – real or fantasy, who will know? Post the link today (Wednesday) here or on Twitter (@caseydamnmorgan). What is Midweek Missed Connections?

Check out other missed connections this week:

• PapaTomLA
• Travis King

This has been a ropey weekend full of too much of my mother, too much nausea-inducing grief, and the strong desire to be dead. The weather has been made-to-order, cool, sunny, dry, lush. I brought the dogs up to my mom’s house (a.k.a. the house with the pink “whack me” pyjamas) and there was plenty of activity: attending a neighbor’s cookout (tiresome), buying plants and pots at 50% off (awesome), cooking (e.g. blueberry cobbler), watching stuff (Le Tour, Wimbledon, Johnny Depp’s Dillinger flick), hiking with the dogs (once getting lost and having to bushwhack), taking her wicked poodle out on the bike, trimming back her wisteria, and generally being fussed over and over-controlled by her.

Also, as she told me the story of her elderly friend who told the hospital their diagnosis wasn’t good enough and thus eventually got life-saving treatment for her husband, I spiralled off into a silent panicked freak-out. Because when they told me M was dead, I just stood there, trembling. I did not scream and raise the roof and say “That’s not good enough,” and demand to see their superiors and threaten to sue and insist they go back in there and revive him or transfer him somewhere that would. All this, I realized, he would have done for me. I did ask them if they were sure he was really dead, since he was still warm, but they told me yes, they were very sure, and I accepted this. He would have raised even Hell to bring me back, but I meekly accepted what I was told. Did I do this because I always suspected deep down that happiness wasn’t mine, that a huge tragedy would smite me because it always does when things are good? If I had known then what killed him (aortic aneurysm), I would have screamed and yelled and threatened and made their existence a misery until they sucked the blood out of the sac around his heart, put him on life support, and got someone in to fix it. Now, though, I can’t do this. I can never ever do this as long as I live. His body is ashes in the columbarium, and nothing can bring him back. I failed to stop the permanent ruination of his life and my own. And thus I want to go buy a bunch of sleeping pills and eat them. Really.

I am not doing this, however, because I believe it’s a sin, perhaps the only sin I’m unwilling to commit. And by sin I mean an active, willful rejection of and separation from God. So, to my atheist friends who silently wish I would get over my God delusion, know that God is the only reason I have not killed myself.

Today I drove by the house we were thinking of buying when he died last year. Someone else owns it now. We don’t. We aren’t raising our first child there. All the good things we were working to make happen are off the menu, for us, for me.

I’ve been reaching out a little bit to people in the tgi world (otherwise known as “The Scene”). I’m planning to go to the SSNY party next weekend, which will be the first event I’ve attended (save a brunch, with M, about ten years ago, hosted by a different organization). So, if you are going to the same party, find me and say hi! By all accounts, this is a nice group of people whose focus is old-fashioned spanking, which is pretty much my style. Reading Radagast’s recent posts about the nuances of communication with people in the scene (here and here) awakened all my social anxieties and insecurities. I think that at heart I believe that no-one decent would ever find me appealing and want to play with me. Certainly the only person who could ever love me is dead.

I’m sorry—I really am—for all of the depressing self-pity in this blog. I try to hold most of it in. I am certain it is unappealing to read. I wouldn’t want to read it. However, maybe there is someone who finds, or will find it helpful, for some reason. They say widowhood is the club you never wanted to join. I was not supposed to be this person. But since I am, friends (I can call you friends, can’t I, if you’ve read this far?), this is my dispatch from the edge. You don’t need to come here yourselves. I’ll tell you everything you need to know. And what you need to know is this: Love your people while you have them. Love them. Love them. Nothing else matters very much.

Was I ever married, or was it all a brief, tender, perfect dream that I woke up from a year ago, this hour?

He woke up as usual that morning. He hadn’t been feeling well for a few days – chest pains. We’d been to the ER four days previous, and they had cleared him on every count. He worked out 7 days a week. He looked fine, they said. It was probably costochondritis, a painful but harmless inflammation of chest cartilage that would go away on its own. He was frustrated at being restricted from full workouts by the pain. He was frustrated that it interfered with wanking while sitting up. He was cranky. That morning, I got up after he did and approached him in the kitchen, me groggy, he dressed for work. “Don’t be anxious,” he told me, putting his arms around me and embracing me. I felt his green scratchy sweater and smelled his aftershave. He was having lunch out, he told me, so he might not want much dinner. It was an annual lunch he had with two colleagues at which they celebrated their AA birthdays, the anniversaries of their sobriety. He was sixteen.

“All this,” he told me, meaning, I supposed, his general mood, “is just getting used to what can’t be changed.” I can’t remember his exact words, but that was approximately it. We kissed each other goodbye, and off he went to work.

I talked on the phone to my mother that morning, complaining about what a terrible patient he was, how you couldn’t tell him anything, how annoyed he got when you fussed over him. I was trying to detach.

I was expecting a student at noon. At 11:25 the phone rang. It was his gym. He’s passed out while exercising, they said. He was in an ambulance headed to the hospital. I hung up, called my student’s mother to cancel, said I thought it probably wasn’t serious. He had costochondritis, I told her. He’d over-done it exercising. I wasn’t having it any more.

The subway to the hospital took a long time. I got there around 12:30. There was a lot of confusion at the desk. He wasn’t there. Hadn’t been there. I eventually got the ambulance on the phone. They’d taken him to another hospital. I got in a cab and in a few minutes, was there.

Inside, they let me go right back, as if they knew who I was. A guy shook my hand and introduced himself, a social worker. He took me into a tiny room with two chairs and a side table. He told me to wait. My heart started to beat hard, deep, fast. Why would I be greeted by a social worker? That was bad, right? But it couldn’t be that bad.

The social worker came back, but he wouldn’t tell me what was going on. I asked if M was dead, and he didn’t give me a yes or no answer. Shortly, the surgeon came out, and after some verbiage describing what they’d tried, said, “I’m very sorry your husband has passed away.”

I wasn’t the kind of person whose husband passed away. I used, often, to fear he’d die, usually in a plane crash. Sometimes I’d dream he had died, but when I woke up, he was there, most merciful reprieve. Whenever I went out – to a friend’s play, to a party, to a family gathering – I always felt such relief that we had our life to come home to. This was the real reality – him and me and our dogs and our apartment and Casey and Mark and RP and TL and the others. The world was just so much noise, not a real thing. My family I loved, but this was the new family. We were making the new family. We were trying to have children, too. The old, sad, long life was over; the new life was underway. At our wedding, and in a print over our bed:

Rise up, my love, my fair one
And come away!
For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and done
The voice of the turtle is heard in the land

I had never dated. I would never have to date – thank God, I thought. I never wanted to date. He was flawed, terribly flawed, and so was I, but I didn’t want anyone else. When I would dream of the end of the world – a nuclear bomb, say – I would, in that dream, only want to get home to him, to be with him to the end.

Imagine a giant eraser wiping away the present and the future.

In the emergency room, he had a tube in his mouth, but he looked just like himself. He looked like he looked asleep beside me in bed. I’d never seen a dead body before. I touched him. He was still warm.

I wasn’t crying, not yet, but when I tried to dial the phone to call someone (the church, my mother, my sister), my fingers were trembling too much. This, I thought, was curious. Did I ask a nurse to dial for me? Or did I just redial until I managed it?

By 11pm that night, my whole family was in my apartment, some from as far away as California. My mother made toast and tried to get me to eat it. I took a bite, but it was like dust in my mouth. I sat on my dog’s bed with her and fed her the rest of the toast. My sister slept in my bed with me that night. I took one of M’s sleeping pills and crashed. In the morning, I got up before everyone else and walked the dogs, sobbing in the sunshine, praying with every breath for help. On the way home, part of the sidewalk had just been redone. Barely dry, some of it covered over, but right in the middle: Love from marky.

Back at home I got in the shower and suddenly fell on the floor, water pounding over me with the realization: RP is dead, too. What about Casey? Funny how you don’t realize everything at once.

It’s 365 days later. They say a year brings relief. It’s an ancient prayer practice, the Year’s Mind. They say it’s easier, having lived through every day of the year without them.

It isn’t easier.

Was I ever married, or was it all just a wonderful dream I woke up from a year ago this day?

His office door opened with a skeleton key. Inside, dark wood paneling, lead-paned windows, plenty of room to swing a cane. Corridor stone, cool, bringing music and the lingering remnants of incense.

His study at home opened to a knock, dark-wooden floorboards, maroon wallpaper, leather couch chosen for its arm, which could be bent over. Wood everywhere: desk, bookcase, file cabinet (one drawer holding a slipper), hat-stand with canes, prie-dieu, and cross.

He usually dealt with Casey across his knee on that couch. When he wanted to make a point, he’d unbutton his shirt-cuff and roll up his sleeve, to show he was ready for strenuous punishment. The last time he dealt with her, she was across his knee and the door opened, revealing the darkened guest-bedroom. He stood her up and strode to the door:

“Matthew, what is it?… Not now.”

Matthew was six, one of The Others, those people who lived with us, though not corporeally. They’d never opened doors before.

He walked the dogs every morning except Sundays. He took charge of the garden. He carried things up the rickety basement steps. He did the grilling. He signed Casey’s permission slips. He put her across his knee. He snored.

The last morning he hugged me and said, “Don’t be anxious.”

At the interment, his voice in my head, overpowering everything else, saying, “Take care of little Casey. Take care of little Casey.” Over and over, his voice so close, so tender, so alive.

Check out other FFF entries from this week:

• PapaTomLA