by April Hill
“The bedpost! God, Sam! Do you remember how much we paid for this cheap Sears and Roebuck bed?”
“I remember,” he replied. Sam had begun to look a bit cranky and deflated, now. “I also remember who got herself into this. How about if I find myself a big wooden spoon while I’m downstairs looking for that hacksaw? You’re never going to make it in the S&M business, by the way. I can’t remember when I’ve had a more inept sex slave.”
Carrie groaned. “Just shut up and get the damned hacksaw!”
When he returned with the hacksaw, it took less than a minute to remove the bedpost and allow Carrie to sit up and rub her manacled wrists. Sam sat for a moment and studied the mangled headboard.
“We’ll have to go downstairs to the basement get the cuffs off. I’ll need the vise.”
They were still discussing the details of this when someone began pounding furiously on the front door, leaning hard on the doorbell at the same time. Sam rose wearily, pulled on a pair of pajama bottoms, and went down to investigate. Carrie heard the door open, and seconds afterward, the pounding was replaced by a confusion of raised voices and shouted obscenities. Scrambling off the bed, she stumbled to the doorway and listened, but the chaos from below was hopelessly loud and garbled. Someone was shouting at Sam, and Sam was shouting back. Carrie began to get the very strong feeling that a full-blown catastrophe was in the making. Unless she was mistaken (and she was already fervently hoping that she was mistaken) her act of revenge had gone badly awry.
The shouting continued for several minutes, and then, the front door slammed. After that, there was dead silence—followed by Sam’s footsteps, coming up the stairs.
He appeared in the doorway a moment later.
“We had some company,” he announced. Sam suddenly looked very tired.
“At this time of night?” Carrie croaked, her throat dry with the effort of speaking. “Who was it?”
Sam leaned against the dresser with his arms crossed.
“It was Herb Dennison, actually. Angela wasn’t with him, though. She was across the street, hurling paving bricks at our minivan.”
“Paving bricks?” Carrie repeated.
“Well, at first it was paving bricks, until she ran out. Then she started throwing flowerpots and lawn furniture. Angela’s a lot stronger than I thought. And a pretty good shot, too, considering the distance. The windshield on the van went first, then most of the windows, and the roof’s probably got nine or ten good-sized dents. Mrs. Hardy, from down the street, dialed 911, but I called in to central and told them I was on the scene and handling it. When Angela finally went through all her ammo, Herb dragged her inside and shoved a couple of tranquilizers down her.” He passed a hand briefly over his eyes. “I don’t suppose you’d like to fill me in on exactly what happened before we left the party—or would you?”
What the hell, Carrie thought.
The telling didn’t take long, and Sam listened without comment as she described lifting the edge of the vinyl cover and dumping her two garbage bags full of smashed pumpkins into the Dennisons’ sparkling new hot tub, then watching as the mess bobbed and bubbled to the surface. “Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble,” she murmured weakly, hoping for at least a tiny smile from her grim-faced spouse.
Her big mistake had apparently been in dragging the garbage bags across the street and not carrying them. One of the bags had apparently ripped open on the cracked pavement, oozing a trail of tell-tale pumpkin slime from their house to the Dennisons’ rear deck. It didn’t take a trained detective to figure out the rest.
When Sam pulled a chair across the room, Carrie had a fairly good idea of what was about to happen, and when he drew the Vermont hairbrush from the top drawer, her worst suspicions were confirmed. “I see you’re all prepared,” she sniffed.
Sam nodded. “Do you want to say anything first?”
“Like talking will do me any good,” she growled. “You’ve already got your mind made up to make this into some kind of major event.”
“If that’s the way you want to put it, yes. A very major event. Maybe even spectacular.”
Perhaps because he was not in a frame of mind to have his very genuine and justified anger mistaken for anything else, Sam had already decided to make the spanking that was to follow a statement. A firm, no-nonsense declaration of intent. He loved Carrie more than his own life, but at thirty-eight years old, and after thirteen years of marriage, he was getting very, very tired of rescuing his wife from one calamity after another. This one was going to take a lot of rescuing, and a lot of money to fix. But first, there would be a spanking—a spanking unlike any that had gone before. A spanking to remember.
* * * *
Carrie returned her Halloween costume the next morning, walking very carefully so the loose skirt she wore didn’t touch her scalded buttocks, which she had left naked, in the interest of comfort and not embarrassing herself unduly with random yelps of pain.
“That’s gonna be a hundred bucks extra, for damages,” the clerk said. Carrie simply handed over her Visa card, and didn’t bother examining the huge orange stains the irate clerk was pointing out on the Little Bo Peep dress. “What the hell kind of party did you go to, lady? A damned food fight?”
Carrie didn’t answer. She was already thinking forward, to the moment Sam opened the next Visa bill. The Vermont hairbrush could very well have an unfortunate accident before then, of course, like maybe a fall into the fireplace. It was a very long drive back to Vermont, after all.
There was always the Internet, though, she thought, her heart sinking. All Sam would need to do is type in a few words—like Vermontfuckinghairbrush.com.
THE END
“The Rise And Fall Of Spiderwoman”
I have always loved Halloween. Not so much the way it is in most American communities today, but the way it used to be, in our great-grandmothers’ time. I have some idea about what it was like, back then, because my own beloved great-grandmother lived to the age of ninety-seven, and liked to share with my brother and me hair-raising tales of her own Halloween exploits. Great-Grandma Helen grew up in the rural Midwest, during the Great Depression. She was the only girl in a family of six siblings, all of whom, if I were to believe her stories of juvenile mayhem, should have been tucked away in correctional institutions before the age of six.
Today, most kids spend Halloween night running up and down the streets, ringing doorbells in the hope of being rewarded with yet more unwholesome treats with which to rot their teeth and upset their digestive tracks. But in Grandma Helen’s day, the holiday was celebrated on at least two separate evenings. The second evening was for all the little kids in costumes, and for the begging of candy, but the first night of Halloween was devoted to youthful high spirits, sneaky and occasionally dangerous pranks, and—whenever the opportunity presented itself—to the destruction of private property.
Appropriately enough, this first evening was called Mischief Night, and the generally accepted purpose of the terror that occurred was to ensure a good haul of goodies on the following evening—trick-or-treat night. I often think of Grandma Helen and her siblings as a group of young Mafioso, learning their trade.
“We were usually all hoboes on trick-or-treat night,” she told me once. “Sometimes, a witch or a pirate. Those were the easiest outfits to put together. All you had to do was wear your rattiest, worn-out clothes and add a bundle on a stick, or a wooden sword and an eye-patch. If you were rich enough to have an old sheet, you could be a ghost, of course. Back then, though, none of us cared about how imaginative or cute our costumes were. What was important was to be in disguise, so no one would know who had soaped their windows or flung flour all over their front lawns. Most parents in those days believed that business about sparing the rod spoiling the child, so to be on the safe side, we all tried to dress as much alike as possible. Any kid unlucky enough to be caught could usually look forward to being dragged back home, getting switched or paddled the whole way. The boys, especial
ly, used to come to school the next day and brag about who’d endured the worst lickin’.”
Ah, those were the good old days. (Except for that last part, maybe. I was never spanked as a child, but as a married woman… Well, all of that will be explained later in the story.)
So, today, without a real taste for adventure, and ever mindful of switches and paddles and woodsheds, most of us simply go overboard on costumes and decorations.
My own four bedroom suburban home has a spacious attic, a full basement, and a two car garage, and all of these commodious storage areas are crammed from floor to ceiling with boxes, bags and bins of holiday decorations. Especially Halloween decorations. The collection has grown with every passing year, and since we’ve lived in this house for fifteen years, space is running out.
“Ran out,” Josh corrects me, not too politely.
Josh, my husband of seventeen years, is a cop, and he lives with me in this lovely, cluttered house, along with our charming, intelligent offspring. Eric is sixteen, and Jenny is six. If you’re wondering about the difference in ages, I should explain that while Jenny is the light and constant joy of our lives, she is also the result of a small mathematical error on my part. (I was under the impression that I had taken the prescribed number of little yellow pills that particular month, but the stork apparently calculated it somewhat differently.)
Which means that I have one kid longing for those long-ago mischief nights I’ve described to him, and another who demands increasingly elaborate Halloween costumes every year. (This year, it’s Shrek’s green wife.) Eric outgrew Halloween years ago, of course, and usually divides his time on Halloween night between watching the most horrifically gruesome movies he can rent, and trying to scare the you-know-what out of the innocent little trick-or-treaters who come tramping up on our porch in search of goodies.
My own favorite thing to do is to decorate, making our home a scary delight. Not too terrifying, of course, but definitely to provide the scariest, most imaginative display in the neighborhood. I wait all year for the opportunity.
And in this pursuit of excellence, ladies and gentlemen, I will not be outdone.
Unfortunately, Josh does not always see eye-to-eye with me on the subject of Halloween décor. He has always been more than generous about my expenditures for Halloween, but now and then, he does draw a line. He appears to believe that making the October mortgage payment and keeping on the good side of the electricity and gas companies are more important than dazzling the neighbors with our yearly front yard spook extravaganza. The competition is always fierce, and no quarter is given, particularly in the annual competition with my next door neighbor, to whom I will refer, in future pages, as the Wicked Witch of the Western Side of the Street.
Josh also tends to get a little testy when the preparations for what he refers to as “The Nightmare on Elm Street” invades the upstairs den. (Yes, we actually live on Elm Street. Is that perfect, or what?) He has even been known to place a strip of masking tape on the floor directly in front of the door to “his” den, with a stern handwritten warning that any further trespass will bring serious consequences down upon the head (or other vulnerable body parts) of the trespasser. My husband is basically a mild mannered fellow, so most of these threatened consequences consist of little more than a lot of bear-like growling. Now and then, however, the threats end with an impromptu but reliably painful trip across his knee, or over “his” desk. And while these events may be spur of the moment, he always manages to get the full value from each swat, by taking that extra second or two to get me naked from the waist down. Josh appears to believe that spanking his wife over even the flimsiest of undergarments is a waste of time and energy.
“If something is worth doing,” he reminds me, “it’s worth doing right.”
So, there you have it, folks. On occasion, I get spanked.
I’m not exactly sure when the entire “spanking arrangement” came into full bloom. It sort of evolved, over time, into what it is now. But I remember very clearly—and in exquisite detail—the very first spanking. It was, as the say, memorable. And it happened—maybe coincidentally—on our first Halloween together.
* * * *
We were celebrating our recent engagement with a long (cheap) weekend in the mountains. Josh’s partner, Phil, owned a small fishing cabin on the lake, and we had decided to spend a couple of days there, and come back to town in time for Halloween. (Halloween is a busy time for police, for fairly obvious reasons.) On the way up to the cabin, we stopped and bought two enormous pumpkins, to carve into jack o’ lanterns for the front porch of the house we were preparing to rent as a couple.
The first night in the cabin was wonderfully romantic. A full, harvest moon, crisp, clean mountain air, and time alone. I was still in college, living at home, and this was the first time we’d spent two days completely alone together. Like a honeymoon rehearsal, Josh laughed.
The problem was that Josh was—and still is—the neatest, most well-organized man that ever lived. I, on the other hand, am another sort entirely.
Poor Josh was about to find out that he was about to marry Swamp Thing.
It started on our first night, at bedtime, when I simply stepped out of what I was wearing and dropped everything on the floor, the way I always did. Josh hung up his own clothes in the closet, smiled a bit uneasily, and pointed to my stuff, scattered here and there around the room.
“Are you going to leave your clothes like that?” he asked.
My first thought was that he was joking. Here I was, stark naked, pink and rosy, and ready to fall into bed for a long, steamy night of unbridled lust, and he was worried about housekeeping? I laughed, but Josh didn’t seem amused. He didn’t sound angry, exactly. Just surprised, but my feelings were still hurt.
“Don’t worry about it, “ I snapped. “My maid will be here in the morning.” I was beginning to feel extremely cranky about Josh’s priorities. In the movies, when the beautiful heroine is overcome by passion, she always leaves an untidy trail of filmy undergarments in her wake, right? Of course, my trail consisted of some well-worn jeans with a hole in the seat, a stained Rutgers sweatshirt, a pair of panties of indeterminate color after too many laundromat washings, and a bra with a safety pin in the left strap. And muddy tennis shoes and socks. Jean Harlow, I was not.
Josh shook his head. “I guess that sort of wrecked the mood, babe. I’m sorry. I suppose I’m a little uptight about things like being neat. “
The moment might have passed and been forgotten if he hadn’t bent down, picked up all my things, and folded them neatly over a chair. For reasons I can’t explain, I promptly went ballistic.
“I can’t believe you did that!” I shrieked. “My God! I’m marrying Captain Queeg!”
At this point, he turned logical on me, and if there’s one thing that drives me up the wall, it’s someone attempting to be reasonable and logical when I’m doing my best to behave like a raving lunatic.
“I was afraid we’d trip on all that stuff in the dark,” he said, referring to the fact that our wonderfully romantic mountain cabin came equipped with some very unromantic outdoor plumbing, which was located outdoors, twenty yards from the back door.
And so, determined to make my point, whatever it was, I stormed out of the tiny bedroom and into the kitchen. Once there, I spent a miserable night crying, swilling down a third of a fifth of vodka, and carving up two jack o’lanterns that both came out looking like Chairman Mao with gas pains.
The carnage Josh found in the kitchen the following morning was pretty much what you’d expect from a drunken, sleepless pumpkin butcher. Dried seeds, clumps of guts and strings of orange slime adhered to every surface, and the copper sink was clogged with the fibrous chunks that wouldn’t go down. The wooden floor was impassable, despite my half-hearted attempt at cleaning up the mess before I gave up and fell asleep on the couch. One glance around the kitchen, and my fate was probably sealed.
A brief testimonial, here, about fly swa
tters. Not the old-fashioned wire mesh variety, but the new plastic ones. They’re fairly lightweight, and deceptively fragile in appearance. Why wouldn’t they be? All you’re trying to eliminate is a small, annoying insect, right? There were several fly swatters in our romantic little cabin getaway, hanging on nails here and there around the premises. No one had bothered to mention that our adorable love nest was apparently infested with insects, flying, crawling, and otherwise. All of the flyswatters were in various neon colors, were plastic, and were made in China. Josh’s partner either had really tacky taste, or a droll sense of humor, because each of the swatters had a monstrous plastic insect or amphibian attached to the back. In the living room alone, we found a giant neon green frog swatter, a bright red ladybug swatter, a lizard swatter in livid purple, and a garish pink butterfly swatter.
I’m not absolutely sure that Josh intended to use the flyswatters the way they eventually got used, that morning. He claims that his first concern was me, since I was sprawled on the couch, looking very much like the kitchen did. When he tried shaking my shoulder to wake me up, I apparently snarled at him, told him to go away, and burped very rudely. So, then, like the good cop he is, he tried to get me on my feet, which was when I snarled again, and whacked him in the right eye with the handle of the butcher knife I had broken off while carving my two pumpkin masterpieces.
That single act of inadvertent violence truly sealed my doom.
At this point, Josh says ruefully, he saw only two choices. He could make a pot of coffee, and try to make me drink it or he could bend me over the arm of the couch and whale the living daylights out of my bare ass with a neon green frog flyswatter. Knowing that I’m not a real big fan of coffee, Josh went for the second option.
I had never been spanked before that morning, and I was still a bit fuzzy, so any evaluation I made at the time about the severity of my very first spanking would be little more than a guess. But now, after some years of experience, I would say that on a scale of one to ten, that morning’s flyswattering was a solid eight. It was hard enough to leave some intriguing marks, a six-hour residual sting, and a very disagreeable memory.