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?

Daniel was a rebel. His jeans looked like he lived in them. His back pocket held a comb and a pack of Marlboroughs. He was sultry, sharp-eyed, a reckless driver, her brother’s best friend, and a shoe-in to Harvard. Tonight he was her babysitter.

She protested for form’s sake—eleven was too old for a babysitter—but her father was firm. She spent the afternoon deciding what to wear and settled on jeans plus the sweater her dad said made her eyes look green.

Daniel let her make t.v. dinners. He let her watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High but didn’t respond to her commentary on scenes she labeled “scary/personal.” Instead he pored over his physics notebook and chain-smoked out the patio door. When he went to the bathroom, she swiped his Zippo and a pair of cigarettes.

He returned and began to hunt for his lighter. She, pretending to help, went to the kitchen. The cigarettes were hard to light. He walked in before she’d succeeded.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he balked.

She grinned: “One for you, one for me.”

Grimmacing, he took the cigarettes from her hand, took a drag, and took her under his arm. Bracing his foot on a chair, he lifted her off the floor and over his knee. His hand hurt as much as her dad’s, more. “If I ever hear of you lighting up,” he said, “I’ll give you something to make this feel like pattycakes. Got it, kiddo?”

Another cracker week for 3F—well done, writers! Read the other folks writing this week:

• Rafi
• PapaTomLA
• S - welcome! (and a promising new blog)
• Graham
• Dominoxx

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.

Casey was turning nine, and at each birthday, memory grew fuzzy. If she had once been fifteen, or thirteen, or ten, recollections carried no more authority than a dream. Even if she protested (I’m eleven!), Mr. Prior dismissed such wishful thinking: Don’t be ridiculous. Casey is nine, full stop.

Now that she was nine, Mr. Prior said, she would be old enough for the cane. Only the junior cane, and only if she was very naughty.

I’m not naughty. I’m good! But I don’t care. And anyway, at least I’m too old —

She was not too old, he’d interrupt, for anything. Not too old to have her temperature taken that way, not too old for That Thing, not too old to be put across his knee, and not too old to sit on it afterwards.

Mr. Prior would never be in league with her false maturity, he told her, any more than he would condone her false modesty, false niceness, false anything.

She didn’t see why he bothered so much. He had his real kid to care about, his real kid to buy birthday presents for. Not her.

This notion made its way down the pike almost as often as I’m-too-old, and Mr. Prior afforded it about the same respect. You are my real kid; I love you as if you were my own. He would hold her, at times wiggling, until she gave up, gave out, gave in. Surrendered to a birthday, again nine, again his, still loved.

Read other folks writing this week:

• the marvellous Rafi
• the marvellous PapaTomLA
• the marvellous Nettagyrl
• a warm welcome to the marvellous Graham Grey

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

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will be sick to the back teeth by now of hearing about the great bookcase cleaning-and-reorganization of 2009. I was so physically exhausted yesterday that my legs and arms were trembling. Some of this was the exertion of assembling, moving, and improvisationally securing to wall of the newest overflow bookcase. But otherwise it was a day filled with lifting, reaching, humping, etc. The rule for the day was to finish everything I started, on the spot. I have a deep-seated habit of leaving things almost-done. I’m trying to retrain myself.

I never listen to the radio except in the car, but yesterday I put on WCBS FM and was treated to great music from “the sixties, seventies, and eighties.” The music plus the work took me back to all the move-packing I did in high-school and college, as well as memories of moving into my current home at age 24. I made myself throw away M’s scratched plastic sunglasses (which resided on the bookcase), and this only enhanced the sensation of living some past identity. I really do not want to go back to my 20’s, to that person whose “family” was my mom, brother & sister, dad & stepmother. You could not pay me enough money to relive ages 15-25. Yet here I am, as aimless as I was then, but with more responsibilities. Actually, I had more aim then. I was going to be a famous theater director. Then I was going to be a famous writer. The fact that these are no longer my aims does not translate to failure in my mind, but success – in escaping the grip of my childhood worship of Accomplishment. Today what I want is the Real Deal in my personal life, a family of my own, a vibrant spiritual life, and the space and permission to write all the books that are in me. To be honest, I wouldn’t mind being a famous writer, but the best kind of famous for me would be 1) making sufficient money from it; 2) being known and respected enough to be asked to read and speak places; 3) being known and respected enough not to have to shop my  projects around. I would not want to be famous like, say, Neil Gaimon and have a frantic, celebrity life that required an assistant. I would never want to be famous enough to have the media pry into my personal life.

The bookcase reorg. project had begun months ago, but yesterday I woke up to find that TL had written on the board, “Wednesday is Procrastination Busting Day.” Oh, brother. To hear her tell it, if you quit procrastinating, things take a lot less time than you feared. In reality, the bookcases took a lot longer than I feared, which – Newsflash TL! – is why I procrastinate in the first place. But here’s the kicker: I’m in the shower at 9.30 pm after 13 hours of work, hardly able to stand up (pity party!), and there’s this voice saying, Ok but you still haven’t made any progress with the book project (a typesetting job that has nothing to do with the bookcase reorg). And as much as cdm would like to whine and say this voice belongs to TL, it really doesn’t. In reality TL was saying: Well done, Casey. Things look great. You worked so hard today and I’m very impressed with your determination. Ice-cream tomorrow! Casey did not hear this, however. Casey only heard: You’re still not doing enough. It was this same, sinister voice, I suspect, that panicked us as we tried to fall asleep with worries about what on earth we will do when one day we have to pack up this whole house and move somewhere else.

RP and M were onto this demon, and managed Casey with it in mind. Hence rules #2 and #3. Casey’s four rules, by the way:

1. Be honest about feelings and needs.
2. Be kind to yourself.
3. Do what you want, not what you should.
4. Ask other people what they feel, don’t decide things for them.

Yesterday, I was capable of identifying that demon, intellectually rejecting the way it wanted to poison a day’s hard work, but I wasn’t able to dispute with it vigorously, as RP could. I had no sword, no chariot, no bow. I had no one valiant on my side.

I did come across some very old dockets. I think these were something M produced before we got the docket book. They date from the first autumn of his residence here in Gotham, my first as a full-time teacher. What they were doing tucked away in the memoir of a neurosurgeon, I have no idea. Seeing his handwriting, even only his initials, is worse even than seeing his photograph. Why should his writing persist when he can’t? Clearly, I am nowhere near being ready to tackle the Basement Reorg. or the Man-closet Cleanout.

The last docket appears to have been issued by a choleric and muddled member of staff at St. Mary’s. Click to see the back. I don’t remember the story behind this one, but I think RP ended the escalating drama by informing Casey he’d called Miss K, sorted her out, and would now be sorting Casey out, ha ha. I like his little “as discussed” on the back.  November 6, 1996 looks to have been a train-wreck of a day. Eventually, RP stopped biting at things like a pile of dockets and just did what was required to stop the downward spiral. Sigh.

I had poster’s remorse as soon as I clicked Publish last night. A murder of worries descended: in clearing up my nationality, have I become less appealing? Less mysterious? Less interesting? Or, more to the point, less authentic?

My father, a son of the industrial mid-west, has always been scathing about posers. You should hear him excoriate his cousin (my “aunt”), who raised her children in the UK and whom he accuses of being “a big phony” and “more British than the British.” By confessing my American upbringing, have I made it impossible for people to read my UK-set pieces without thinking, faker?

The subject for today’s exegesis (Quick! Click away!): How to regard being drawn to an alien thing that on some level you feel you are? In this case, let us speak of the English schoolboy. To persist with writing them would appear to be monstrously inauthentic. How dare an American girl pretend to know them? Yet, they have been with me more than half my life.

Cue timeline of my tgi imagination: Little House on the Prairie (which debuted when I was 5), followed by the Orphanage (after seeing Annie at age 9), eventually succeeded by the English boys’ school (zapped whilst watching Stalky & Co. at age 16). There were of course other influences, then and now, but the imagination has moved on little since eleventh grade.

David Parfitt & Robert Addie as Beetle & Stalky

Cue, perhaps, digression into the idle coveting of my brother’s willy, on the grounds that it would be so much less effort to wank with it. This was before Judy Blume or whoever informed me of erections. Before I blundered onto English schoolboys (perhaps not incidentally after achieving my driver’s license – “You’re becoming a tiger!” my driver’s ed teacher exclaimed with relief after weeks of me driving like an agoraphobic mouse), before that moment of gazing, slack-jawed at Robert Addie on A&E, I disliked boys as a category. Boys were bad, noisy, dirty, perverted, insensitive, got into big trouble deservedly, and made life a lot less nice when they were around. (Note: crushes, and boys with whom I was momentarily “going”, though not kissing, were excluded from this estimation.) Boys, in short, scared me, especially their sexuality, though I couldn’t have put my finger on that. I did know, in high school, that boys only wanted one thing, and on some level I thought that if I kissed a boy, that meant I was agreeing to sex. My junior year in college, on the eve of my first kiss, I asked my wild roommate if that was true. She said, Of course not! but I didn’t quite believe her. Later, having discovered a.s.s. but not yet M, I assumed that letting a man spank me was tantamount to saying, You may fuck me, or at least grope me. What a relief to learn that this need not be so. Of course, back then my mind labored to Discover the Rules, rather than to articulate my own boundaries. Sigh.

FYI for you, the first days I spent with M on his first visit to Gotham did involve kissing and a few other activities that would have shocked my teenage self (though not fucking); however, this did not mix with tgi. M and I may have made out on the futon, but Marky and Mr. Prior were scrupulously chaste. I got all those bruises with only 12 strokes of the cane through Calvin Klein boxer briefs and school trousers. RP only touched Casey to pull the tail of her shirt out of her trousers (a purely dramatic gesture, as it makes zero difference re. padding), and to shake her hand afterwards. I don’t think they were even on hugging terms then.

M did later introduce me to the workings of the male anatomy, and to a delight in dirty English schoolboys. His was an unrepressed, joyful sexuality. Sex was Fun and Nice, a Nice Thing. He loved his willy, and if other people wanted to look at it, it was no surprise to him. This, you might imagine, was alluring and foreign to my mind.

This mind – to insert yet more exegesis – had by age 26 become so thoroughly warped by the toxic combination of WASP prudery and Ivy League feminism that it had imprisoned me in a complacent academic aloofness guarded by sheer unconscious terror. (See Equity Day Off, the dialogue with Judy, ha ha). My party line was that I was All For Sex, any sex (so long as it was Safe); in all likelihood, I thought, I was even bisexual. Sex was No Big Deal; it was a choice, a creative expression of my most actualized personhood. I liked wanking, therefore I must want wild sex, like my friends and fellow peer-counselors in college. This particular peer counseling group was for sexual concerns. We did all-night shifts manning a phone line where people would call to ask about condoms, or to chat through the dilemma of having a crush on their roommate. We led them through being Straight, Gay, Bi, or Questioning. If I had gone to school a little later, the whole universe of Queer would have necessitated a longer training course, ha ha.

McTurk, Stalky, & Beetle

The point is I talked a good talk, but – gosh – I just couldn’t manage to get any guys to like me as anything other than a friend. Maybe you’re starting to get the picture. The narrator in Equity Day Off is a pretty accurate portrait, except that I never in college got anywhere near to admitting my real interests. My obsession with England was, at best, picturesque and Anglophile. My obsession with English schoolboys (being them, loving them) was too puzzling and unnerving to contemplate with my full mind. Hence Gender Politics, Feminist Theater, Cultural Discourse, blah fucking blah.

After spending a lot of time in England (biking, hiking, writing for a travel book), some of the attraction became clearer. There was a way that English people’s neuroses were like my own. I understood them instinctively in a way I didn’t understand Americans back home. It was like discovering a whole life I’d forgotten about through amnesia.

It would take a book, or more, to trace my love and hate affair with England (+ Scotland, Wales, Ireland). And the thing with being married is that to a certain extent you become merged with your spouse. Not just in sexual intercourse, or in name (actually I kept my surname), but in vocabulary, habit, and so many, many things. So, in ways intrinsic and extrinsic to that marriage, I have absorbed many things English, words being only part of it. Certain pronunciations, for instance, send shudders down my spine: our pronounced are rather than hour; wrath with a flat, twangy a vs. a deeper sound rhyming with Roth. Also, arse pronounced properly (soft r) turns me on like no tomorrow, whereas ass leaves me ice-cold. FYI for anyone attempting to talk dirty to me, ha ha.

All this exegesis and still, perhaps, I come off as an Anglophile fraud. Know that I am no Anglophile. I  detest the English on many grounds. I possess no twee, cultish fascination with tea and scones and things that are “so British.” Ugh.

What, then? Is it an attachment to the home of the English Vice? And overdose of strong literature at an impressionable age? The lingering effects of marriage? Or is it in some fashion the English schoolboy stowaway in me, recognizing scents of home when the sea winds blow that way?

What is it about a day at the seaside that sets the scene for tgi? Is it the baldly Swinburnian experience of being knocked about in the surf, flogged by the wild sea, half-drowned and scraped to bleeding by breakers? Is it the sensuousness of full-body exercise in the water coupled with languid sunbathing, the salt baking into your skin, your hair drying as it will, in twisty, windblown curls? Is it sunburn, the dog’s bite of sunbathing? Or is it simply the lack of clothing?

I can’t remember the last day I spent at the beach. Today – 80 degrees, low humidity, steady breeze, cloudless sky – was the Arcadia of summer sea days. You might not think we have beaches here in Gotham, but they can be found. The beach today reminded me of my seventeenth summer. We had just moved to Gotham, and I was enraptured with Stalky & Co, in particular the descriptions of (nude) bathing off the Pebble Ridge. I longed to swim to exhaustion like those boys, to feel my skin salt-encrusted, to succumb to torpor during afternoon-school, and to suffer the consequences of falling asleep on the wrong master. I had not yet discovered Swinburne, but once I did, my ocean fantasies broadened to include the flagellating sea, and the desperate bravery of one captivated by the wild, living water.

Being fair-skinned, the risk of sunburn pervaded my childhood. My mother was always slathering me in sunscreen and berating me when I got burned. She never did more than scold, but managed to make it sound as though I’d recklessly contracted cancer. I prefer in my mind a more detached approach; as in, little girls who get sunburned can be put across someone’s knee until their bottoms match the offending shade, ha ha.

Today I swam a long time in huge surf, and in struggling to exit found myself knocked upside down and dragged along the shell-studded sand, leaving me with bloody scrapes on my shins and bottom. I felt butch. I felt like Bertie in Lesbia Brandon, the salt water stinging the scrapes in a way that felt salutary. Later, at home, my body ached from the unfamiliar exercise, and I felt dopey in a sun-drunk or post-massage way.

Stretching across my towel after the first swim, rashly allowing the mid-day sun to dry my back and limbs, made me yearn rather for the birch. Not to have just then, but later, perhaps, after returning home, to atone for skiving off to the sea, or getting sunburned, or swimming out too far. Something of that order.

And in the surf I remembered the first time M and I went summer camping in the Virgin Islands. We arrived at Cinnamon Bay (St. John) late one night after a day of travel. The campground was dark. A note had been left directing us to our site. Sweaty and fatigued, we pitched the tent and went down to the beach. The moon hid behind some clouds. We stripped and went into the water. It was mouth warm, clear, calm, and full of phosphorescence. We’d never swum naked together before. We kissed in the water and held each other. The surprise of this beautiful, empty, sparkling water and the primal, sensual pleasure of floating in it together – I’ll never forget it.

I miss him in so many ways. Today, his touch, his mouth, his cock, and the company of his imagination on a made-to-order seaside day.

The Rector had dug up a friend of Uncle Maurice, but after ten minutes with Mr. “Call-Me-Frank” Carson, Casey knew that her godfather could never have liked the man. Call-Me-Frank worked in “the arts”, wore a turquoise necktie, and certainly played for Uncle Maurice’s team. He was probably one of those tragic, bearded hangers-on Uncle Maurice always described so witheringly.

After a headache-inducing lunch and three improving hours in the museum, Casey thought she’d faint from the strain of politeness. Every ironic remark eluded Call-Me-Frank. Her attempt at wandering off only elicited suffocating concern and his sweaty palms cupping her cheeks. At least they’d hitched onto a tour led by a fanciable young man, the kind Maurice would have had eating out of his hand in five minutes. Call-Me-Frank was standing embarrassingly close to the guide and showing off with words like “hagiography,”  “polemics,” and “problematize.”

She wanted to rip the ugly paintings off the wall and kick them in. She wanted to show off her age-inappropriate vocabulary and embarrass Call-Me-Frank into the ground. She wanted to punch people.

Uncle Maurice would have let her walk a knife-edge of cheek all day, then afterwards put her across his knee, firmly but genially. There would be ice-cream. Her father always criticized Uncle Maurice for “swanning off” to his next destination. She thought she’d suffer a month of Call-Me-Franks if it would make Uncle Maurice swan back.

She hated people. All people. They didn’t swan. They didn’t do anything at all.

Read other folks writing this week:

• Travis King
• Rafi
• rayne
• PapaTomLA
• and vanimp

The wind blew from the golf course across her pink bedroom as Bad Timmy faced a disgruntled Father in the piano room.

“Casey?”

She jumped and, heart pounding, peeked around her dollhouse to see a man, wearing a tweed jacket. His furrowed brow softened.

“You look like your picture,” he said, his voice a tenderness she had never known.

“Who are you?”

“You can call me Mr. Prior. We haven’t much time.” He beckoned to her. She dropped Bad Timmy and emerged from behind the dollhouse, smoothing her grey linen Little House on the Prairie dress.

“A fondness for costumes already, I see. What were you doing back there?”

She blushed, thinking of Timmy’s impending spanking. “Nothing.”

Suddenly, he stood before her, cupping her face in his hands. “Naughty,” he admonished.

“I’m not! I’m good!” Her heart thudded with a sudden air of emergency.

“Nice, Casey, isn’t the same as good.”

“I’m not bad!”

“You just fibbed to me, didn’t you?”

Fear hovered. She didn’t even know this man, yet she dreaded him thinking her bad.

“And did you have permission to take that Twinkie from the bread box…? I thought not.” He put his arm around her and hugged her hard. His jacket blew backwards as if tugged by strings. “I’ll be back,” he said. “You won’t always be alone.”

She grasped him without knowing why. He was fading – melting? – now almost gone, his English voice a whisper in her ears: “Tell the truth, little Casey…always love…”

Apologies to Audrey Niffenegger for this one. I was in mind of her Time Traveler’s Wife. The picture Mr. Prior refers to is currently my Twitter icon.

Check out other stories from this week:

• vanimp
  
• Thursday’s Child
  
• PapaTomLA
• swimnaked