The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 12: Over 40 outstanding pieces of short erotic fiction (Mammoth Books)

by Jakubowski, Maxim

  The realization of this alliance will mark my rebirth, my accession to a civil status that abolishes the previous one, a status which is notoriously uncivil, wild. The obligations of this pentalogue exist only to facilitate our entry into a state of depossession, the sloughing off of our old selves, our old gods, so we can jump sex first into the dance of atoms.

  Please forgive, Mistress, my inserting here a plea on behalf of the revolutionary character of S & M contracts whose outward austerity is such that the observer may be deaf to the great song of chaos that they authorize.

  I, Anaïs, the undersigned in her own blood, hereby swear to become the exclusive slave of Mistress Czarina.

  CLAUSE 1

  Each morning, upon awakening, submissive Anaïs will draw a scented bath for her Mistress and cook her breakfast. Sitting naked on the floor, in a position of offering, she will lay out beside her a range of accessories – plugs, geisha balls, nipple clips, intimate jewellery. Czarina will therefore choose the instrument of subjugation for the day. Wearing a dog collar tied to its leash, the slave must eat on all fours out of a bowl bearing her name. If she should happen to soil the floor, a series of punishments will ensue, distributed by her Mistress over the next twenty-four hours. The latter will be free to choose any form of discipline she pleases, as to duration and severity: an immediate whipping, in the course of which the impertinent creature is to count aloud the lashes biting into her skin delivered with a bullwhip, a riding crop, or perhaps a cosh or a lunge whip; bondage with straps, hobbles and muzzle; electrified collar; humiliation scenario to be enacted in a special evening, in private or in public; crucifixion or suspension in a cage; candle-wax calligraphy on her body; serving as a table, a hassock, a urinal for the Mistress or her guests; parading the streets as a pony-girl in the middle of the night, etc. In addition to the tattoo which she will have redone every five summer solstices or in keeping with a timetable dictated by her Pharaoh, Anaïs is committed to wearing, from dawn at least until dusk, an emblem of her Mistress’s ownership, bitch-collar, O-ring, rosebud or nipple clamps . . .

  During the morning, her sex lined with geisha balls, the slave will be expected to perform fitness exercises for one full hour prior to donning her sexy maid’s uniform and turning her Mistress’s home into a miniature Versailles.

  Three afternoons each week Anaïs will be bound to make herself up as a bimbo to be tortured and fucked at will. Among the vulgar ploys required are hair removal, manicure–pedicure, tart-blonde bleaching and extravagant haircuts, teeth whitening, and other kinds of beauty-parlour care.

  In order to educate her submissive, and inculcate over the years lessons of deportment which will earn her the Nobel prize for slave-training, Czarina will dominate her physically and mentally for one hour each day. Should these sessions come to be a burden, Czarina may delegate the task to dominators of her own choosing.

  Any and every breach of discipline, impertinence, disobedience, minor or major transgression, will be punished with utmost ferocity. No limit will be placed on the cruelty of her punishments. To further chastise Anaïs, Czarina may hire out the bitch-whore to friends for a limited period of time.

  Whenever Czarina and her pet girl have an evening on the town (restaurant, cinema, dinner with friends, S & M parties . . .), Anaïs will wear a dog collar and a sexy miniskirt with nothing underneath. She must not at any time lose sight of her Mistress’s dark eyes and custom-made hats, on pain of being thrashed and left lying naked in front of some supermarket.

  At nightfall, Anaïs will perform a dance in the living room, serpentine, lascivious, followed, if Czarina so requires, by a striptease. In most instances, the routine will be decreed by Czarina’s plenary authority, and strict instructions laid down as to the scripts to be enacted and the appropriate finery to be worn. The basic cocktail of fantasies will involve Anaïs as a sophisticated vamp sheathed in leather or PVC, a Japanese Lolita with pink dreadlocks, an ancient regime chambermaid, a brothel star in heat, a doll stuck with needles, a gothic punkette with a screw loose, a young dude, somewhere between Genet’s Querelle and Jean-Paul Gaultier, a four-legged canine.

  During the evening and the night, after massaging her Mistress, Anaïs will be nothing but a sex toy, an erotic atoll offered up to Czarina’s carnal appetite, which she is bound to satisfy by means of her unequalled talents for submission and her erotic virtuosity. The slave will display no reluctance to comply with any of her Mistress’s wishes or whims and will thank her for every favour she is granted, from slaps to fist-fucking.

  Lastly, each week Anaïs will be weighed. If the scales show a weight loss of 500 grams or more, she will be obliged to ingurgitate three times a day a special pet food for girls and boys, she will be photographed in black and white to reveal her protuberant ribs and other signs of skinniness. In the event of a second offence, betraying a guilty tendency to undernourishment, she will be force-fed with a funnel like a goose. Cigarette burns, vaginal lips stitched together for a certain length of time, piercings, branding with a hot iron, needles, water sports, copulation with a dog, being chained into a kennel or locked in a dark cellar – these will not constitute a mere array of threats but an assortment of available punishments to be administered according to Czarina’s whim. Each day, upon rising or retiring, Anaïs must kiss the idolized hand which visits upon her the most piquant outrages and vintage specimens of the art of perversity.

  CLAUSE 2

  This clause of the contract can be implemented only on a rainy autumn or winter night, when the city is shrouded in mystery, asphalt glinting in the glow of the street lamps. Anaïs will submit unprotesting to a ritual of defilement motivated by a variety of offences, such as indolence, excessive chatter, failure to obey either a spoken order or some tacit precept requiring immediate compliance, as well as the memory lapses so frequent with this highly unpredictable female subject. But her Mistress’s desire to dirty her may also simply be a whim, prompted by her eagerness to preside at the wonderful rebirth that will follow the purification of her submissive’s sullied body, a ritual which often plunges Czarina into a state of erotic arousal.

  As soon as she has been harnessed to the powerful house dog, wearing his own leather harness, Anaïs will accept uncomplaining a close intimacy with Orson for a nocturnal run through the city scantily clad in a wine-coloured miniskirt and a sleeveless T-shirt clinging to the curve of her small breasts, with spartiates to match the harness and strap that will join her to her equipage. Orson, Czarina’s young Argentinian mastiff, coat as white as a Patagonian glacier, much prefers restaurant garbage to the contents of his bowl and the moment his Mistress removes his leash and opens the front door, he gallops off into the night, making straight for his goal.

  Orson’s gastronomic tour begins with a run through the puddles in the gutters, an exercise which opens his appetite and cools Anaïs’s long legs, gazelle running side by side with the beast, adapting her stride to the gallop of her merciless coach, headed for la rue des Écoles. At the end of what will at times have been a freezing baptism, Anaïs’s clothing, in the headlamps of the passing cars, will no longer conceal any part of her anatomy.

  The great gastronomic halt in Orson’s tour takes place a stone’s throw from the art houses of the Latin Quarter, closed for the night at this late hour. The rubbish bins of the Brasserie Balzar contain the remains of the capital’s most traditional dishes: blacksausage casings, grilled pig’s trotters, scraps of tripe-sausage and half-eaten Charolais rib steaks. Trained to haul and driven by a sense of conviviality acquired by frequently sharing his rations with the domestics at Czarina’s request, Orson will drag Anaïs smack into the middle of the food spread over the pavement, capering among the spaghetti, chips and ketchup; pressing his close-cropped coat against the belly of his companion in gluttony, steering her towards the choicest morsels with nudges of the snout.

  The next halt in Orson’s feast is the yard behind the McDonald’s on boulevard Saint-Germain, obligatory even if the dog is
already sated. Onions, vinegary lettuce and the remains of spongy burgers, devoured just for fun. Dragging Anaïs at his side, smeared with various putrid-smelling juices, Orson completes his invariable circuit, leading her to a tiny garden, open all night long, near the Cluny Museum. Scratching at the rain-soaked bed of medicinal plants, he rolls against her thighs, rubbing by turns his back and belly in the muddy earth, besmirching Anaïs’s dripping hair with well-fed enthusiasm, gratifying his partner with joyful licks of the tongue.

  Upon Anaïs’s return, covered with refuse, Czarina will take pleasure in imagining the vicissitudes of the odd couple’s tour, written on the flesh and torn clothing of her submissive as if on the pages of an open book. A soon as she is freed of harness and strap, Anaïs – normally clean and carefully dressed – will perform a languorous striptease, dripping water on the tiled entrance, her rags clinging to her skin as though they were the most expensive finery. After the thong has been discarded, Czarina will enjoy carefully washing Anaïs in the swirl of the Jacuzzi before carrying off to bed her renovated prey, a body whose miraculous rebirth and infinite gratitude will excite her enough for immediate consumption in its plain nakedness, breasts and rump offered up to her hungry fingers, with no need for complementary artifices of any kind.

  CLAUSE 3

  From June to September, after a good downpour and if Czarina so desires, Anaïs will cycle to the Bois de Vincennes, carrying in the bottom of her little basket a pair of short red leather gloves, a canteen filled with water and a roll of aluminium foil. She must find and pick stinging nettles, moisten them immediately and wrap the stems in foil so that the green leaves of those urticant plants may grace Czarina’s champagne bucket in anticipation of the evening of the following day.

  At the beginning of the nettle season, Czarina’s wildest friends gather in the basement of her building for the nettle-fête, which will have five instalments throughout the summer, according to Czarina’s whim. Leather and rubber gloves will be stacked in Anaïs’s basket next to the champagne bucket planted with the splendid ceremonial bouquets.

  Each guest signs the magic slate hung by the entrance to the cellar before the nettle-fête begins. Their written commitment will prevent some overexcited guest from lashing Anaïs’s face in the heat of the action.

  Guests of every persuasion will have a whale of a time taking out their aggressions on the bare, wriggling body of Anaïs, wearing only a red thong and collar, skipping about from the sting of the nettles, squealing like a panic-stricken doe, unable to escape for one second from her fervent pursuers as they chase her around the cellar. From the long legs to the small of the back, from breasts to belly, the bunches of nettles rub and whip her translucent skin till the beaten-earth floor is covered with shredded leaves and only the bare stems are left in the gloved hands of the guests.

  When the party is over, Czarina promises to anoint Anaïs’s body with Elizabeth Arden’s Eight-hour Cream so that her submissive will be fit to be seen in a day or so.

  During the height of the nettle season, the various seats on which Anaïs never has permission to sit – ordinarily obliged as she is to live at floor level with her bowls of food and water – will be lined with fresh nettles for her. There she must sit through dinners and home-projections with friends, encouraged on arrival to appreciate with their fingertips the sting of the leaves. Were Anaïs to moan or complain, she might well be whipped over her welts, especially in the crotch, the crease between thigh and sex, and even the cleft between her buttocks.

  CLAUSE 4

  On a fine day in the country, the Mistress may wish to go for an outing on the river, in which case Anaïs will have the task of rowing. Wearing a knee-length tunic of fine white cotton, and once seated between the oarlocks, she will be fitted out with tiny rubber-lined clips so that Czarina may regulate the pace. Clamped onto her slave’s nipples, concealed beneath the tunic, these breast clips will be attached to a second pair fastened to the labia, this providing an additional and equally invisible element of control, the two pairs of clips being manoeuvrable together or separately from where Czarina sits on a cushioned plank. In the event that another boat should pass them by, Anaïs must display a permanent smile, even if Czarina, in a fit of ferocity, were to tug viciously at the clips to try and make her lose it.

  In order to develop her muscles sufficiently for a long boat ride and a picnic, Anaïs will practise rowing for an hour or two with the rowboat moored to the riverbank, while the sun is still low in the sky, this in the event her Mistress is not in a mood to dream or to dominate with the flow of the river on that particular day. This training is meant to ensure Czarina’s safe return, when her submissive will have to pull hard against the current. And this solo exercise must take place at least five times before the season’s first boat ride. Anaïs will wear the nipple and labia clips, gradually tightened after the second session to develop the endurance required of her when hordes of tourists come flocking down the river in their rented canoes and kayaks.

  CLAUSE 5

  When Czarina is out of town, she will lock Anaïs in the cellar and have friends feed her and use her as they wish. In this windowless dungeon, she will wait for random visits from her jailers who will bring her food, basically dog biscuits, and chain her inside a cage if she shows signs of rebellion. No more will she resist the particular penchants of substitute master no. 1 – beating her to within an inch of her life with whatever incongruous object comes to hand, forcing her to perform the Carnival of the Animals – than she will shrink from the favourite scenario of no. 2, Mistress “Torquemada”: a re-enactment, scene by scene, of The Story of O. Her torturess will have orders to play on Anaïs’s phobias, to relish her fear of the dark, of asphyxiation, and of the canine race. In order for Czarina to enjoy the spectacle of her whore’s debasement, key moments of the above will be photographed and filmed: Anaïs’s striptease, her promenades on all fours at the end of a leash, with harness, feathers, animal skin, tail and muzzle, her acrobatic suspensions, ceremonial flagellations in the manner of the Inquisition, savage rapes and other gang bangs which leave her shattered and gasping for breath.

  Apart from her educator’s periods of absence, Anaïs will be handed over to other dominators on a variety of pretexts: as punishment for some serious breach and lack of docility, as a reward for having surpassed herself in servility, or merely on her Mistress’s whim. High priestess of all these ceremonies, Czarina will orchestrate from afar each session and demand from Anaïs a detailed account of the punishments she has undergone, to be written with a fine paintbrush protruding from her sex. Manoeuvring her whore by remote control, she will dictate special punishments and humiliations that the masters will implement on request, she will specify the type and also the style of exemplary mortifications and abjections to be inflicted on her doll-baby. Penetrated at every orifice, transpierced, dildoed, fisted, abused, savagely fucked, insulted, slapped, spanked, strapped, gagged, cross-dressed, packsaddled, pilloried, straitjacketed, suspended, bound, diapered, electrically tortured, stable-milked, ridiculed, mortified, exhibited, impaled, the slave must cooperate with any and every idea that comes along. She will be spared nothing, in order to push her to her outermost limits so that the little sexual guinea pig which she has become will be conditioned to live henceforth only under her Mistress’s rod. Her accepting and indeed requesting things that had once horrified her will attest to the success of the training. If Anaïs were to show the least sign of rebellion, Czarina’s friends will bring her into line by crucifying her like an owl to the strains of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle or Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, with an eye to improving her musical education. Mistress Czarina will demand absolute inflexibility of those in charge of defiling the submissive’s body, for if Anaïs has violated her sovereign’s law, she must be shown no clemency. They are not to be moved by any display of tears, any bitch’s entreaties. Step by step, Anaïs will come to cherish her chains until she cannot live without them, will belong to
Czarina, body and soul.

  Venus in Edinburgh

  Pat McStone

  When I was thirteen, back in the seventies, I was sent to boarding school in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was a shock in more ways than one. I’d never been to the UK before, having spent my childhood in Bombay, location of the biggest hotel in my father’s luxury chain. My mother, who died when I was four, was Scottish and I was sent to her home city, I’ve since realized, as an act of homage. I rarely saw her family, who weren’t openly racist but had no interest in welcoming me to their home. Even light brown skin like mine was too much in the New Town’s tall houses. Then there was the weather. I froze that first winter, the school seeing no need for heating in the dormitories. And there was the food. I was used to European cuisine from the hotel, but the slop we were fed would have tested the stomachs of the beggars back home. Then there were the prefects, older boys with something close to the power of life and death over us younger ones. Then there were the girls . . .

  The school, one of those that the British call public, but which are in fact 500, had never accepted girls before. That year they’d decided to allow two members of the opposite sex to join the sixth form, though they didn’t sleep in the houses. Think of it: 500 boys whose trousers almost permanently sported pyramids in the groin area, and two girls. Actually, one of them was not very attractive. In fact, she was tall, gangly, horse-faced and flat as an ironing board. I’m sure she still provoked a fair number of nocturnal emissions. The other one – let’s call her Mary – was a stunner: of average height, with crinkly blonde hair that just reached her shoulders and well-proportioned legs (on the days she chose to tantalize us with knee-length skirts, minis no doubt being banned). What really turned our eyes were, surprisingly, her eyes. They were dark blue, piercing and ray-gun powerful. If her gaze settled on you, knee trembling and armpit drenching were immediate. All right, there was also the large matter of her bosoms, as my father used to call those glands. Mary’s were big. Not water melons, but definitely decent-sized fruit of the yellow-skinned variety. There were days when she dispensed with a bra, the news flying round the school instantly. Lines of us would stand outside the dining room waiting for her, jaws slack and underwear concrete. She would smile regally, her shoulders back, and walk rapidly to afford maximum movement. Mary was definitely into adoration.