The alley stank of cum, and of cheap sushi from the buffet at the strip club next door: a deep-grained stench the rain had barely made a dent in. The rainbow was sweating hard now, the lavender scent rising out of his body like steam from a manhole cover, and the smell of lavender and sushi and cum mingled into a harsh, strange perfume: discordant, yet heady, even intoxicating. The unicorn, intoxicated already, was overcome: his knees buckled, and the rainbow seized his advantage. He lashed a tendril around the unicorn’s cock, and squeezed. The unicorn flinched in shock, then smacked the rainbow hard, his hoof lashing a deep cut into his face. A gush of indigo blood leaked into the rainbow’s eyes. He grimaced. “Yes. Harder.”
The unicorn struck again, and again, as the rainbow tightened his grip on his cock and began stroking in earnest. “Yes,” the rainbow purred. “That’s it. Beat me down. Spank me like a bad, bad donkey.” The rainbow spread out his tendrils like an octopus, stretching the tips to tickle the unicorn’s balls, and clamp onto his nipples, and twine into his silvery mane, and sneak into his asshole. The unicorn was overwhelmed with sensation: his blows against the rainbow’s bloody face became staggered and irregular, like a heartbeat in cardiac arrest, and his cock throbbed like a bruise.
The rainbow suddenly twisted around. He bent sharply at the waist, and spread his green and blue tendrils apart, wrapping them to form a tight hole around the unicorn’s cock. “She’d never let you fuck her, would she? Well, fuck me now. Fuck me hard. Fuck all that pain and rage out of you. Bitch didn’t want you? Bitch didn’t deserve you. Bitch wouldn’t know what to do with you.” The unicorn screamed like a slaughterhouse, and came, spewing a fountain of mercury into the rainbow’s fuckhole and across the alley. He shuddered, and passed out, collapsing in a heap beside the garbage cans.
The rainbow took a quick glance to make sure the unicorn was still breathing, and that he was really out. Then he snatched up the unicorn’s satchel and rummaged through it. A few crumbs of pink cupcake. A battered copy of “Ender’s Shadow” by Orson Scott Card. A wallet. Bingo. The rainbow rifled through it. A ten, a few ones. A lottery ticket. A crumpled photo of a pretty blonde girl in a pink unicorn sweatshirt, torn down the center through the girl’s face, then taped back together with Scotch tape. The rainbow looked at the unicorn, passed out next to the trash cans, the tracks of his tears still silvery on his pale, moonlit face. He rolled his eyes, and put the wallet back in the satchel.
“It’s okay, pal,” he said. “This one’s on me.”
RELIGION
Christian Domestic Discipline
She sometimes forgets that this was her idea.
She’s getting confused about this, and she forgets that she’s the one who talked him into it. She forgets that she’s the one who found the Website, with the handbook and the Bible quotes and the stories: all that stuff about how God wants husbands to decide and wives to obey, how it was God’s will for a husband to physically chastise his wife, how it restored the natural order of a marriage for a husband to spank his wife when she misbehaves. She forgets how intriguing she found it: like an adventure in marriage, an exciting secret with God’s blessing. She forgets how eager she was to show him the stories: the devotion of the rituals, the constant cycles of defiance and penitence, the loving attention to the physical details of implements and undergarments and bare bottoms being revealed. All by command of the inerrant word of God.
His reaction to it—now that, she remembers. He was shocked: but not the way she’d expected. Not at the ideas or the stories. He was shocked that it was her presenting them. He kept asking her, “Don’t you know?” “Don’t you know what people think of this stuff?” “Don’t you know that this stuff is sick?” When she showed him the stories, it was like he’d been reminded of an unsettling dream he’d been trying to forget. And when she showed him the handbook, with its extensive explanations of why this sort of relationship was not only accepted by God but sanctioned and blessed by Him, he looked both relieved and ashamed, like he’d been given permission to do something he knew was sinful and terrible.
But she forgets that it was her idea. She forgets how hard she pleaded with him to at least try it; how happy she was when he cautiously agreed; how excited she was the first time he told her that she’d been bad and he was going to do it right then and there.
She forgets because it’s hard. It hurts, and it’s hard.
Parts of it are okay. That’s part of why she’s confused. Parts of it are a lot like how she imagined when she first found the website. The shy excitement when she pulls down her panties; the thrill of fear when she refuses and he pulls them down for her; the rush of helplessness when he takes her over his knee; the struggle for power; the revelatory joy of giving in; the softness and openness and sense of rightness with God and the world when it’s over and her husband has put her in her place.
But when the hard blows are landing on her bare bottom, it hurts. Sometimes it hurts too much. Sometimes it hurts more than she can take… and it doesn’t matter, he’s in control, she has to take it anyway. The literature says that he doesn’t need her consent for this: the law may disagree, it says, but God has given the husband the right to discipline his wife as he sees fit. She didn’t take that seriously at first. Now, when she’s writhing and crying and begging for mercy that isn’t coming, she knows exactly what it means.
She’s read the literature. She knows that it has to really hurt for it to work, that it has to hurt too much. She knows that hurting too much is what takes a disobedient wife from protest to panic, and from panic to surrender and remorse and obedience. But when it’s hurting too hard, and she’s struggling and crying and begging him to stop… then she doesn’t know how this started, or where it’s going, or anything at all except panic and pain. The panic overwhelms her, and surrender seems a million miles away. She tries not to struggle—she knows struggling will just get her punished harder—but her reflexes kick in, and she fights it, outraged, terrified, desperate. When he pulls down her panties and punishes her hard, it feels like the hand of God is driving into her bare bottom. And she has no more power to stop it than she does to stop God.
So she’s confused. Her feelings about it are all mixed up, and she forgets that she set this into motion.
Plus she forgets because it’s changing.
At first, it was just like in the stories she’d read. He’d scold her and make her pull down her panties, or if she was sulky and defiant he’d pull them down for her. He’d spank her with his hand, or with her hairbrush if she’d been especially naughty. He’d make her say out loud what a bad girl she was, how sorry she was for disobeying him. And then he’d make love to her. It was a little difficult sometimes, but it was naughty and fun and actually pretty close to what she’d hoped for. An exciting secret that the two of them shared with God.
But lately, it’s been harder. He’s using all these different things—the instruments of God, he calls them—to punish her. She’s lucky now if she just gets the hairbrush. If she makes a mistake in the kitchen, now she gets the metal spatula. If she makes a mistake in the yard or the garden, now he makes her cut him a switch. If she spends too much time on the phone or the computer, he takes the phone wire, and folds it up several times in his hand, and whips her with that. And if she’s been particularly bad—or if he’s in a particularly wrathful mood—he gives her the belt. He seems to have special feelings about the belt. It’s starting to make her squirm just to see him wearing it. He wears it every day.
And lately, he’s been doing these… things. Things that aren’t in any of the stories she’s read. He’s been making her get into positions—awkward positions, humiliating positions, positions that make her feel like a whore or an animal—while he punishes her. He’s been making her say things while he punishes her: not just saying she’s sorry and begging forgiveness, but dirty things, things she’d never heard of until he made her say them, things that make her want to crawl in a hole just to escape thinking about. He’s been ma
king her get into positions, and then he’s been making her use her fingers to spread herself open, down there, exposing her privates for him to look at, while he punishes her.
He says it’s all part of the punishment. He says it has to be hard on her: if it’s not hard, it’s not punishment. He says he’s trying to punish, not only her body, but her soul. He says it’s not enough to make her suffer: he has to make her feel ashamed.
And then he makes love to her.
The literature says that marital relations will often follow a punishment. It assures her that this doesn’t mean anything sick, that it simply shows the husband’s natural eagerness to be intimate with his wife once his rightful authority has been restored and their relationship has been returned to God’s vision for marriage. But she’s starting to wonder. He never made love to her like this before they started the discipline. He whips her and humiliates her, and he pushes himself into her with passion and fury.
So she’s confused.
The pain and the shame are hard. And they’re getting harder. They make her feel frightened, and small. She jumps at the sound of his voice now: desperate to please him, terrified that she’s let him down. She used to feel easy and relaxed with him; now she feels like every day of their marriage is Judgment Day.
And yet, it also makes her feel… she doesn’t have a word for it. Not a nice word, not a word she could say when he isn’t whipping her bare bottom and commanding her to say it. But she feels that way all the time now. Not just when they’re making love. When she cooks with the metal spatula; when she brushes her hair; when they go over the bills together. She thinks about his wrathful hand coming down on her bare bottom, and the crude, shameful things he makes her say, and her bottom glowing and tingling when her punishment is over, and his body looming over her as he spreads her apart and forces himself into her. It makes her feel… her mind flinches away from the words for how it feels, but it lingers on the feeling itself.
And she’s not even sure anymore which parts she likes and which she doesn’t. The pain is hard: but after a while it makes her feel rapturous too, the way the martyrs must have felt when they mortified their flesh for God. The shame is hard: but it also makes her feel wide open, like her walls have come tumbling down and she’s completely vulnerable and available. The pain and the shame are starting to feel like more than a means to an end. They’re starting to feel like the point. When she’s being chastised, the pain and the shame are how she feels the hand and voice of God in her husband’s hand and voice.
She doesn’t know if she should feel this way. She’s confused. But if he’s confused, he’s not showing any signs of it.
He is strict and unyielding, just like the literature says he should be. He says that if he lets her decide when she should be punished, and how, then he’d be letting her have control of the marriage, and that’s not what God wants. He never shirks responsibility, never throws it in her face that she’s the one who started this. He took the reins with some trepidation at first; but he is gripping them more firmly every day, and is showing no signs of letting go.
But she’s confused. So she lets him keep deciding. She is confused and weak, the way God created women; and he is strong and resolute, the way God created men. And she knows how she feels when she’s melting in his arms after he’s punished her and made love to her. She’s confused… so she’s going to keep letting him guide her and decide for her. She’s going to keep putting herself into his hands, and thus into God’s.
She’s thinking about all this as she cooks Sunday breakfast. He walks into the kitchen. “Hurry up,” he insists. “We don’t want to be late for church.” She jumps at the sound of his voice, and scratches the pan with the metal spatula.
Inspired by the Christian Domestic Discipline website and fiction.
Penitence as a Perpetual Motion Machine
“I’m here to see Sister Catherine.”
“Yes. It’s nice to see you again, Mary. Please have a seat. Catherine has just finished up with another—visitor. Why don’t we take care of business now. She’ll be with you in a moment.”
Mary Elizabeth nods. She hands the woman behind the desk four hundred dollars in cash, and sits, keeping her coat on and her purse clutched in her lap. She tries not to look at the lobby: the garish red and black decor, the velveteen curtains tied back with steel chains, the worn spot on the black leather sofa. It makes it harder for her to think of this the way she needs to think of it. She sits, and stares at her knuckles gripping the handle of her purse, and waits.
“Mary Elizabeth. Please come in.”
Catherine has stepped into the lobby. She is dressed, as always for their meetings, in a modified modern habit: the knee-length gray dress, the heavy hose and sensible shoes, the small, unimposing wimple. She has carefully wiped all traces of makeup from her face.
She takes Mary Elizabeth by the hand, and leads her to the now-familiar room, the one fitted up like a schoolroom. An office or rectory would have been better, but this was the closest they had.
“Sit down, Mary. We have to have a difficult conversation.”
Mary Elizabeth—formerly Sister Mary Elizabeth—left the convent a little over two years ago. She left, more in need of penance than when she arrived. She left, unwilling to let the Church ever tell her a blessed thing about right and wrong again. She left, desperately needing somebody to tell her that she has done wrong, and to administer justice for it. So she comes here.
At Sister Catherine’s gesture, she sets down her purse and takes off her navy blue coat. She is dressed, as always for their meetings, in a Catholic schoolgirl uniform. A real one, ordered from one of her own convent’s suppliers, the ones for the older girls fit her awkwardly but adequately. She sits, her hands behind her back, shaking. Knowing, in a general way, what is about to come, and being terrified of it anyway. Not knowing, specifically, what is to come, and being more terrified of that. Sister Catherine begins.
“So, Mary. I think you know what we’re here about. The incident at school yesterday. One of the girls was badly hurt. I know that you weren’t one of the main girls involved, but I know you were there, and you didn’t stop it, or tell any of the sisters or fathers about it. This is a serious matter. Two other girls have been expelled, they may even be arrested. But you have a good record, and you weren’t as deeply involved, so I have persuaded Father Dominic to let you stay on, with a less severe sentence. I have told him that I would handle your penance.
“We will start simply. Bend over this desk. Raise your skirt, and lower your drawers.”
All of this part is scripted. All of this part—the lecture, the position, the implement—is the same every time. The content of the lecture isn’t perfect, but it’s the closest she could come to what really happened without saying too much. It took Mary some time to find a… professional… who was willing to work with a script, even a short one. But Sister Catherine seems to have some genuine affinity for the script. She says the lines with passion and intensity; she wields the implement with grim determination. And Sister Catherine seems also to appreciate the free hand that she has with Mary once the scripted part is completed. Sometimes, she seems to appreciate it rather too much. Mary always pays for two hours: the scripted part is usually over in twenty minutes. Sister Catherine never has trouble filling the rest of the time.
Mary complies at once with the instructions. She is praying that it won’t be too hard. But she is also, deep in her mind, praying that it will be. She is thanking God that she was caught. She is wracked with guilt over her crime, and the guilt is stronger than the fear. She immediately bends over the desk and raises her skirt to her waist. She lowers her underwear, more slowly, reluctantly: still, after all these times, feeling the shame rise up in her body with the lowering of the fabric and the revelation of her naked flesh. When her underwear has finally been lowered, she stretches across the desk and clutches the edge… praying that the punishment will be hard, viciously hard, unbearably hard, so her guilt
will be cleansed, and she won’t have to feel the way she feels.
The first stroke of the cane lands on her bared bottom like the fires of Judgment. Mary screams. She always thinks she’ll be ready for this, and she never, ever is. Her scream seems to inspire Sister Catherine to greater wrath, and the next blow lands harder.
She has asked Sister Catherine never to tell her how many lashes she’s going to get. If she knows how many, she knows she’ll hang to the last one like a life raft. She doesn’t want to do that. She needs to drown. She needs the pain to feel like it might never end. Sister Catherine is happy to oblige. She is happy to let the rising pitch of Mary’s screams be a signal, not that she should slow down, but that she should turn up the volume.
It works. The guilt begins, ever so slightly, to break up inside her. The first lash on her naked backside breaks off a piece of her guilt, like a chunk of ice breaking off of a glacier. The lashes that follow crush that chunk into smaller and smaller pieces: pieces that are small enough to melt and spill out of her body.
It works. But there’s an obstacle: an obstacle that arises every time she lowers her panties to receive Sister Catherine’s judgment. An obstacle she should have expected, given her history, but one that she nevertheless doesn’t know how to handle.
The obstacle is that, on the days before she meets with Sister Catherine, she is filled with a gruesome excitement. She remembers or imagines the lash of Catherine’s cane; she remembers or imagines her helplessness and shame, her position bent over the desk with her backside exposed, the other—things—that Sister Catherine has made her do… and she touches herself. She imagines the things she’s afraid Sister Catherine might make her do next time… and she touches herself. She touches herself, until she finds release. On the rare occasions that Sister Catherine has forced her to masturbate as part of her penance, she has obeyed, with a familiarity and a lack of reticence that she knows must be a dead giveaway.
Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More Page 9