SO...I'm still playing with AI image generation although this particular image is largely photomanipulation and only the heads arms and hands are AI generated...The arms, hands and heads are from an AI image sent me by a friend while the faces were generated by the AI platform I am using... The glass block widow I put in because the possibilities are so interesting...If it is really thick it is going to be just as secure as a barred window while not allowing any kind of meaningful view of the outside world and quite soundproof while still allowing some natuaral light in, but probaly not so much that the light can be turned off...BUT... It might be that the glass block wall is actualy just that - a wall. This could be anywhere in a house or other building, perhaps a loft or even a large basement split up into a series of rooms...The glass block walls, illuminated from behind and with that illumination periodicaly faded and brightend - and the room lights kept on 24 hours a day - would quickly destroy any real sense of the passage of time
Saturday 2 September 2023
Friday 18 August 2023
Wednesday 2 June 2010
Institutional and Domestic Discipline: An Illustrated Collaboration 3 – Further Evolution
Talking off inspiration: if you remember the piece I posted recently regarding my collaboration with the Stateside computer artist, ‘Snooze’ and the evolution of a particular illustration I demonstrated as an example of the sort of thing we have been developing you will probably be interested with this, the latest incarnation of that art work - compare and contrast with the earlier renditions posted elsewhere. There are many more scenes we are working on – some far more complex and detailed - but it would spoil the fun to give any further inkling of these – you’ll just have to wait until the new book gets finished, or more specifically, the illustrated version of it.
Monday 24 August 2009
A Bit of News - I'm Working for a Week - and a Lot of Reader Comments
Now some other news: I have finally at long last picked up some real work - around one week or so of desk research work, internet based! For that reason the likelihood is that there will be no more posts for around that period as the work looks quite complex and challenging. However; I have some rather interesting stuff lined up to celebrate my return upon completion. Meanwhile thanks for your comments and contributions - please keep them coming in, along with your ideas and inspirations for the upcoming volume and for volume 3 of INSTITUTIONALISED, when I finally get around to working on it again.
Tuesday 18 August 2009
A Strict Nurse in Uniform and a Girl in Medical Restraints
Wednesday 6 May 2009
A New and Intriguing Story to Check Out
Sunday 3 May 2009
A New Art Link (Bondage) by Coco & a Little Bit of Stranger than Fiction Inspiration
Meanwhile; I have just been sent a new link (for which, much gratitude) to the excelent bondage art of Coco (click on artwork above or on the title highlighted in blue to link - or check out the sidebar resource list over on the right). And on the subject of 'truth stranger than fiction' (and something that should come as a source of inspiration for 'Judith's Aunt' - a contributor from a while ago now and from whom we have heard little of late...hint, hint... as regards the disciplining of her niece) no sooner did I add a little descriptive work to a section of volume 2 dealing with a form of shame-dress discipline (you will see what I mean if and when you read it) then I came across the following text...And I thought I was being so imaginative!
"We sometimes wore itchy woollen combinations, which were really uncomfortable, with sleeves down to the wrist, and our Liberty bodices were fastened with buttons to our knickers, so that meant unfastening them every time we went to the lavatory! On top of the petticoats we wore cotton frocks in summer, or kilts in winter, and sometimes these long shapeless jersey dresses. I had a navy coloured reefer coat and we had to wear laced ankle boots because my mother believed they helped to strengthen the ankle. But my older sister made such a fuss about them, we stopped wearing them in the end. I had a straw hat for summer and a velour winter hat." "Many young teenage girls were still [kept in] corsets [then]: "[That] was before roll-ons and corselets became popular, and [teenage girls had corsets that hooked up at the side. We wore two pairs of knickers, with navy blue bloomers on the outside and a white cotton 'liner' on the inside and at school we wore a black alpaca tabard pinafore over our uniform dress. We had house shoes for indoors, and lace-up shoes outdoors and on Sunday we wore patent leather house shoes. {A tabard seems an interesting idea - lots of possibilities there! But I'm not sure about alpaca, though - Garth}
"At home we wore these ghastly knitted dresses, they were absolute horrors with a belt threaded through round the hips, just where we were fattest, at a time when we were at our least shapely anyway. These dresses were knitted for us by somebody, and they had absolutely no shape whatsoever, and we hated them." Quoted and adapted from http://www.aohg.org.uk/twww/clothes1.html).
Monday 5 January 2009
Labels and Tags and Botox Bondage (I'm Back Folks: Happy New Year)
There were quite a few messages of encouragement - and then there was a very interesting little thing from a contributor that featured some interesting ideas as regards the imaginative use of Botox - yes Botox, you heard right - as a bondage and humiliation tool. It is an insight of shear genius and together with a stimulating exchange of ideas, regarding institutionalised humiliation, has once again reignited my enthusiasm. Anyway, refreshed by the Xmas layoff and this wonderfully stimulating flood of ideas I have taken my life in my hands and, ignoring its bleating and repeated bleeps of protest, I have once more somehow forced my main machine into action.
I couldn't resist sharing this with you in its entirety; I don’t think I have ever felt so invigorated let alone inspired:
In common with the aforementioned stammering study, wherein one participant was 15, there is mention of the involvement of teenagers and thus of young adults, allowing some latitude to the imagination. I am very keen to avoid any connection with paedophilia and also the characters I invoke, both in my private fantasies and more recently in my writing, are of necessity young adults. Sexual maturity is a must if the scenario is to be of any interest to me at all; devoid of any sexual element all one is left with is a disturbingly cold depiction of various forms of torture, both mental and physical. This could be said of all forms of S/M fantasy / writing wherein participation is not necessarily consensual - but in your mind's eye place in either of these situations a deliciously curvaceous and well developed young lady, perhaps a spoiled pouting and pampered princess of a girl, once the apple of her late father's eye and wanting for nothing but now left with the prospect of facing-off against an avaricious jealous young stepmother for every penny...a very clever, very inventive young stepmother.
What really most caught my attention in the article was, firstly, how easily the status of an institution could be changed overnight, from what could easily have been a shelter for young runaways (or - in an earlier era perhaps - a church-run home for young women likely to fall into moral danger) to a mental institution - and solely for financial reasons it seems. Secondly, the way in which, automatically, the way in which the status of an inmate could change along with the institution by default, despite her being perfectly normal in every way, to that of a mental defective or retard and her new status be recorded quite legally - with all the implications that encompasses. And, thirdly, the way an inmate's treatment might change commensurate with that new status, despite her normal disposition and good behavior, as the staff come to view her in a different light (there are possible parallels with the well known Stanford experiment here as regards the effect on the staff's behavior towards their charges). Finally: there is the implied long term psychological effects of the barred windows, sedation, straitjackets, humiliation and punishment; the possibility that an inmate could be changed so as to come to match the status imposed on her - so much easier to control a nice, quite, tamed mental patient.
The latter point echoes the aforementioned stammering study wherein, in addition to the provision of so-called negative therapy, the staff overseeing the subjects unwittingly reinforced the treatment by changing the way they were treating their charges in their day-to-day life once their status had been reassigned and they had been given the label; stutterer. Partly this was the way the staff had been instructed to behave, but partly it was also a subconscious response to the attached label.
I remember reading years ago about the shooting of the film of The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie (1969). Many of the cast and extras played school girls and had to stay in costume (a gymslip, blouse and tie ensemble) wandering around all day despite only being required on set from time to time. Shooting went on for many weeks and the cast began to notice more and more as time went on how studio staff, canteen staff for example, would treat them as children, despite their being in their late teens or even early twenties in some cases. What is more; they found that rather than complain about such off-handish and sometimes patronizing treatment, as they might ordinarily have done, they found themselves tending to adopt a rather sheepish stance of acceptance, thus reinforcing the staff members viewpoint, and treatment of them, still further, perpetuating the situation.
Thursday 6 November 2008
Admission Proceedings (Postponed) and Some More Useful Bondage/Spanking Artwork Links
Meanwhile as an emergency stopgap, here is a list of links to the work of various artists available on that Russian website I spoke about in an earlier post. It's pretty difficult website to negotiate unless you really are we all going or understand Cyrillic script and the links to various artist’s work that appear at the tops of the pages tend to do so randomly and without any discernible pattern. I think I've pretty much trawled all I can from that particular site at the moment and one great thing that I did come across was that Paula Meadows (Lynn Paula Russell) illustration that I talked about in the last posting - it's at the top of this entry, click on it to go to a couple of pages of her work. Have a read through my previous posting about it and see if you share my sentiment - I think it is the presence of the nurse that ultimately cements it altogether and tells the story.
When I have a little more time I will be putting all of these links, properly labelled and categorised, into the sidebar resource list - probably later today - and when I do I shall remove those links from this posting. It will free up a little for me to have a bit of a ramble about admission procedures later on this evening. Meanwhile I've got me some careful detailing and styling work to do on Lavinia's home uniform (figuratively speaking of course; it's a piece of quite difficult descriptive writing). It's a bittersweet confection of her aunt's own devising - and that woman is a stickler for all those tiny little details.
http://www.bdsmonline.ru/g_pichard1.htm
http://www.bdsmonline.ru/g_coco.htm
http://www.bdsmonline.ru/g_sardax.htm
http://www.bdsmonline.ru/g_stanton.htm
http://www.bdsmonline.ru/g_jito1.htm
http://www.bdsmonline.ru/g_tarsis1.htm
http://www.bdsmonline.ru/g_paula.htm
http://www.bdsmonline.ru/g_loic1.htm
http://www.bdsmonline.ru/g_voge.htm (Art by Remy)
http://www.bdsmonline.ru/g_3d1.htm (3 D rendered bondage)
http://www.bdsmonline.ru/g_serajat.htm
http://www.bdsmonline.ru/g_willie1.htm
http://www.bdsmonline.ru/g_bish1.htm (Robert Bishop)
http://www.bdsmonline.ru/g_alaz1.htm (Paul Alazar)
http://www.bdsmonline.ru/g_bilbrew.htm
http://www.bdsmonline.ru/g_steel.htm (Ferdinand Vogel Steel)
http://www.bdsmonline.ru/g_sorayama1.htm
Garth
Wednesday 5 November 2008
Inspiring Illustrations; I Search for a Paula Meadows Pic and Find a Source of Fine Bondage
I've at last again been visited by my muse, after an extended period of lacklustre drive during which my writing pretty much stagnated for while INSTITUTIONALISED volume 2 is coming along apace. I have to transcribe onto the computer the stuff I wrote while out yesterday but I have so many new ideas buzzing around inside my head at the moment that I can't wait to again put pen to paper. What this all means is that I am fairly loath to interrupt the creative process while all is going so well so as far the blog is concerned, for while I'm going to restrict myself to updating links to various picture resources. Although this does mean of course that I will have to take time out to search the net I can do so in very short bursts, particularly as I've yet to fully trawl through the Russian website I reported earlier. But having said all that, part of what has reinvigorated my writing is having revisited the work of some of those great artists out there many of which were responsible in one way or another for inspiring to write in the first place; you know the sort of thing, you see a picture or a series of pictures and wonder…what is going on there, really? What is really been said?
In terms of the crystallisation of the ideas that eventually became INSTITUTIONALISED volume 1, at least in so far as the institutional scenarios depicted, one of the most informative works for me was an illustration by the great Paula Meadows, as was, that I had in my collection as a scan but have somehow mislaid. Basically it involve a young girl being punished in a very sparsely furnished, spot-lit and very institutional looking chamber - one just knew by looking at it that even after the miscreant is finally removed from that very secure-looking room she will be no less under lock and key. There is no ‘outside’ here for her, just layers of security nested matryoshka*-like. Unseen, but written into the atmosphere of the picture, as least as far as I was concerned, the feeling that here was a secure chamber residing within a high security area, itself residing within some high walled secure institution… it's all in that feeling of hopelessness again.
Anyway, thinking back to that image has got the creative juices working again and since I feel I have to dredge up some artwork links any way, I am hoping to rediscover the aforementioned illustration on one of my, necessarily short, exploratory expeditions… be assured that you will see it here just as soon as I can get my hands on it.
Meanwhile I've come across in a source of bondage images should bondage be your thing as it is mine, albeit not as an end in itself. I'm not really a bondage fetishist per se, you see; all those complicated arrangements of ropes, chains and things, taken in isolation, do little for me.
An INSTITUTIONALISED 2 Update, Some Problems with My Spanking Artwork Links and a Solution
Moving on, I have been back in the gym and an beginning the process of fighting back to full fitness and also put aside a little time to search around the Internet for things to inspire me. Talking of the latter, I came across a nice little site that appeared to be Russian but was chock-full of all sorts of corporal punishment, discipline and bondage artworks and drawings by such as John Willie, Bishop, Paula Meadows, Ashley et al. I will be posting links to each artist's work in the resource list in the sidebar in the very near future and I may add a couple of pictures to this posting later in the day with links to the relevant pages.
All of which turns out to be very timely because when I went to check my list of art resources in said sidebar - to compare the content (I try not to duplicate resources and content) - I found that many of the links that connected via a common site no longer worked as that site appears to be down or no longer exists. I have just this minute removed all the broken links from the resource list and I shall endeavour to find sources for any artist whose work I cannot find on the aforementioned Russian language site. For starters and to get you into the site here is a typically cruel Ashley illustration - there are three pages of 'em there (a lot of his stuff used to appear in the old Justice Magazine in the 1970s/80s, incidentally). Simply click on the drawing on the left to view Ashley's work or the one on the right to view Cato's drawings and then you can find your way around the rest of the site when you get there, although I will be posting up individual links to each artist's work that is featured there because quite a lot of it has inspired my ideas in the past and undoubtedly will continue to do so in future. Keep your eye on the sidebar. Incidentally, the site is called bdsm on line and has a Russian URL (the home page address is http://www.bdsmonline.ru) but I can't help wondering if there is an English-language version out there somewhere hidden away. But who cares anyway - pictures paint a thousand words whatever language and there is a wealth of art work there...free, gratis and for nothing - grab 'em while they're hot!
Monday 29 September 2008
A Bit About Face Slapping & A Very Short Extract from Susan's Cell - A chapter from the upcoming Institutionalised vol 2: Confined in the Workhouse
“ S,s,sorry n,n,nurse, I,I m,m,mean th, th, th,ank y,you n,n,nurse.”
Wednesday 23 July 2008
From Behind Stained Glass: Meredith's Tale - Part 2
Meredith lay lost in her thoughts, quite literally petrified and frozen in place, the bondage of her nightmares seemingly mirrored by the immobility of this new reality. This was how it always was, the dreams, the nightmares, then the awakening.
Always it felt as if a new reality had been built around her, a false reality, an illusion, a reality in which her helplessness was almost indiscernible from and as complete as in her nightmare world. Always, as if for the first time, she would glance down along her prone body and the shocking understanding of the nature of her hopelessness, the origin of her immobility, would bear down on her like some dead concrete slab. Arms set in plaster casts, modern soft resin-based casts, could do nothing but disobey her, lying straight and at 30° to her sides. Legs, similarly encumbered, rested angled toward the bed's lower corners. Even her fingers were held, each individually wrapped in its own cast, splayed out, fan-like and useless.
Memories spilled and unfurled like discarded spooled celluloid; edited dadaist highlights of confusion inter-cut with fantastical images of sojourns in some grotesquely abusive world, seemingly plucked from the mind of Poe and realised in the inflamed-red and bruised-blue pallet of chastised flesh.
Meredith Hewson; known as 'mushroom' to friends and acquaintances both, a tiny squeaky little thing – bouncy and bright as a gambolling lamb and with a smile like summer breeze nature had destined her for more. Yet, a Shropshire lass with a less than agreeable home-life to look back on, it was a somewhat hackneyed tail she had to tell.
Of course it would be simplest to lay the blame at the faux glamour portrayed in all those television shows, drawing her in, spiralling with moth-like lethality. The trends and bright fashions of Camden Market, the bars and bistros of Covent Garden; aspirationally bright beacons of such irresistible brilliance, far too dazzling for one of her innocence to see the darkness behind, far to beguiling.
To many she had been the welcoming smile behind the horseshoe bar, pulling pints with child-like wide-eyed glee; those tiny hands as pale and as perfect as porcelain - like that of the hand pumps her fingers failed to quite curl around, with their country scene decoration, all hunting pinks and running foxes.
She had brightened the day of many a jaded pen-pusher – her short stature obliging her to stretch for the ale-pumps, the effort causing those pert breasts to be thrust forward, the flesh bouncing, the cleavage distinct to the most bleary of drunken eye. Her pretty unworldly features would be moon-mist lit by the shafts of diffused sunlight filtering through the curling fern-like motifs of the Victorian acid-etched glass – the traditional public house windows and glass partitions had been retained here, along with the worn, once-red, leather seating.
She had been flirtatious, ever-smiling – then she was gone; a lover's tiff an ill-advised dalliance with her manager at that, forcing her flight.
Suddenly the London streets had not seemed so welcoming – not without money in her pocket, not without a place to call home; the accommodation had come with the job, you see…
Her mind ran back to the very first time, her first awakening to this world; it was a birth, or rather a rebirth, at least that was how it seemed now...
“The crash, sweetheart, surely you remember the crash?” The nurse's, concern had been palpable, her brow furrowing. Yet as insistent as the woman had been it had felt as if she were seeking to convince while, in some way, being unsure of her own sincerity.
Try she might she could recall nothing at the time; her immobility had almost seemed comforting in its familiarity yet otherwise there was nothing, just nothing. She could remember nothing still, at least of her history as they outlined it, nothing, that is, beyond the abuse, the beatings, something about a social worker, a friend, a young woman sworn to extract her from that hell.
Yes, the social worker; she had seemed so approachable, a woman who might care, who might believe her, who had seemed to care. The woman with the car, the woman who had promised to take her away, promised to save her from him. There was something else... what was it? A drink, a drink proffered from a flask, warm cocoa... that can't have been it! What possible significance could that have?
“You remember the crash, surely?”
In truth, she could not. There were fragments haunting her though, fragments of recollection or what seemed to be recollection; a jumble of shards, just as easily the constructs of imagination as bearing any relation to reality and feeling more like memories of what she has been told than of the actual events.
Feeling as if deceiving herself she nevertheless nodded in the affirmative; to do otherwise, to question it, would have been to risk being left starkly alone, ignored. This she had experienced many times before, being left ignored, isolated and alone in the silence of her curtain-enshrouded bed. Her inability to recall appeared to really irk the staff and as for her nightmares, her delusions as they referred to them, the merest mention was enough for the nurse or doctor or whoever was attending her to simply up and leave and many were the times she had found herself missing her next meal or diaper change after that.
And yet it was those dreams, those nightmares, that were the clearest representation of reality to her, her reality; certainly they seem more real to her than her present surroundings and the fuzzy pseudo-memories filling her head. There was a certain vivid and unmistakable clarity to their recollection, the clarity of truth and conviction.
Deranged? Deluded? Well, such were the murmurings, the whispered accusations that, on occasion, came to her from beyond the protection of her curtains, times when they were certain she was asleep and beyond caring; “…such a shame, quite deluded, poor girl”.
Yet it was all so real, so detailed, so, so clear to her: first there would come the probing wiggle of an investigative forefinger, then the thickly- gelling lubricant, ice cold, the digit urging in an out, in an out, twisting and turning, embedded to the knuckle. Then would come the sensational of building warmth, blood-flow stimulated by the mild irritant mixed in with the gel. Finally that podgy finger would be withdrawn and the first taunting rubber-touch of the nozzle would announce her imminent violation.
Every few weeks there would come the added discomfort of the first use of an increased diameter; in time she would become acclimatised, her sphincter gradually stretching to accommodate it, then would come another increment, then another and another, each adding to the soapy humiliation of the laxative the piquancy of torment that came from the knowledge that any improvement in her comfiture came only at the cost to be surely levied her in the future by way of the legacy of her stretched and weakened muscles and that it was all for the benefit of him, for his perverted pleasure.
Every detail was present there - if only in the world of dreams, if only the manifestation of her delusion, then from whence came the design, the knowledge and experiences that could make manifest the physicality of the illusion with such convincing Technicolor realism. What could a girl of her sheltered background know of such things? How could, even in conjecture, she conjure the sensation of a gently rounded belly, swollen with foully-cramping fluid, of youthfully elastic skin stretched paper-thin, of softly urging latex-covered, podgy, farmer's-wife fingers massaging, compressing, squeezing as if to exude the decoration for some filthily perverted demon cake or, perhaps, was it in some exaggerated parody of milking the beasts she once had the duty to? Then the was the voiding into the metal pail, the metallized ringing imparted to the initial fluidic-splattering fall of her wastes, the stink in the compacted surrounds of the room, the tiny skylight could not be opened to improve the ventilation, the cramping stomach muscles and twisting-agonized bowels. Finally it was she herself she saw carrying the bucket through the house so that all and any might see, she herself who would have to scrub it back to the pristine sheen of its manufacture in the yard outside in full view of the household.
He had absolutely despised the way she had been dressed, the way they were always dressed, her type, the young tearaways, the runaways that hung around the stations and the bus shelters on the cold winter nights. And it had been the coldest night of the coldest snap that most could remember, she had seemed the most desolate amongst gathering huddle, the most destitute, desperate bedraggled and forlorn. Then there were her looks, the pretty elfin face, the slight build, the short stature, the childish yet maturely curved frame, small breasted yet with hips and buttocks promisingly swelling and rounded with chubby resilient youthfulness. The denim, though, he just hated; women in trousers just left him cold, let alone jeans. He couldn't abide by anything that suggested other than sheer soft femininity, the slightest hint of boyishness in dress was an anathema to him; it is all to the more curiously contradictory and contrary therefore that the wretch so often bent and sobbing before him no longer possessed the cascades of wavy light brown locks she once had to hide her tears behind but rather a short tousled pixie cut. The latter styled around her ears and tightly tapered into the nape of her neck; the intent most clearly being to enhance that childish elfin look, the side parting, seemingly inadvertently, introducing an element of boyishness beyond anything that might be brought by even the most masculine of jeans or dungarees - such irony
The jeans and the rest of her outfit of that time had been most easily dealt with; his housekeeper, possessed of a rather traditional, if old-fashioned, outlook herself in such proceedings and not being exactly enamoured with modern attire of the like, was quite comfortable with the idea that they might simply fail to resurface from the launderette having become ‘lost’ as unfortunately things sometimes were. Mrs Veronica Merryweather-Cortez, a remarkable woman of an equally remarkable name. Herefordshire born and bred with broad hips and a buxom maturity of frame clearly at odds with her claimed thirty eight years of life and possessed of the ruddy apple cheeked complexion of a country woman, her coarse russet hair kept, on the main, beneath a plain, ‘sensible’, headscarf, she looked to more likely belong on some remote outlying farm as within the confines of the parsonage.
An ancient carved black oak chest dominated the vestry's end wall, squatting all but forgotten, despite its substantial bulk, in the dusky shadows beneath the tiny Norman-arched stained-glass window. Strictly speaking an oak coffer, it featured quite beautiful carved and arcaded front panels, each having an intricate inlay detail of flowers picked out in a variety of different woods, rarely appreciated, being near permanently under a thin layer of dust and tinted by the patina of age. The iron banding running around the sides and over the curving hinged lid was pitted and, blackened with age, was as dark as the wood itself; to the front a typical hand-forged mediaeval tongue clasp was secured by a very modern and substantial padlock.
It was from the latter, rarely visited, cache that Mrs Merryweather-Cortez was able to conjure up her singly peculiar solution to the problem of clothing the girl; if only as a temporary stopgap, for with every will in the world even she, with her archaic views, could hardly have considered such dress appropriate for, nor acceptable to, a modern girl of Meredith's age and background. It had been extracted and selected from a pile of ecclesiastical vestments dating back to perhaps the 1950s or early 1960s, if not earlier, to more prestigious times for the little parish church, to when congregations swelled to the rafters with uplifted voices and on occasion spilled out into the churchyard beyond, to when it had accommodated its own choir.
The princess-line dress she selected, despite Meredith's obviously small stature, had not appeared to the girl at the time to be the smallest there; she had felt certain she had seen at least two or three of a smaller size glanced at and then rejected while the woman was rummaging. She had stood there shivering in the thin cotton nightdress they had given her, grateful to receive anything that would provide some warmth and, more importantly, cover, even some ugly church dress as long as it was to be only a temporary arrangement. And ugly it surely was: featuring full length sleeves with overlong cuffs at the wrists, each fastening with three buttons, it was ‘easy fit’ in the extreme; indeed, it fairly drowned her small figure in its heavy black fabric.
An embroidered gold metallic Latin Cross decorated the region roughly corresponding to her left breast and was one of the few features allowed to alleviate the jet-black severity of the thing, the others being an arc of short stiff white frills around the top of the mandarin collar, matching sprays of frills around the cuffs that extended down to the upper parts of her hands when she was standing with arms to her sides and a large white button oddly sited to the rear of the collar. The latter’s function, enigmatic at the time, was to become clear in time and perhaps would have been so more immediately had she noted the matching buttonhole at the dress’s hem at the rear where it was picked out in white thread as if some proudly decorative feature of design.
Thickly-draping folds, the wetly-puddled shadows lying between even darker and serving to underline the gloss of the fabric where the light shimmered off its surface like moonlight of a black sea’s swell, hung and spread out from a point approximating her waist to the hem swinging barely clear of the floor. Once clear of her bust’s perky overhang the front hung straight and true with barely a hint of any contact with the form beneath, giving scant regard for style or flattery; seemingly dozens of small, tediously and unnecessarily fiddly, black-satin covered buttons, in reality sixteen in all, fastened it from her throat to her ankles.
The fabric, while as smooth as heavy black satin should be, concealed an inner lining of another material entirely, this having a texture approaching that of a rather coarse velvet, and therein hung the seed of another problem; not only was the whole loose-fitting ensemble ugly, heavy and hot to wear but the constant prickly-heat sensation of the inner lining quickly came to make its wearing intolerable. To her chagrin the material seemed particularly coarse in the region over her nipples and the latter's hardening in response only served to further augment their constant teasing.
She had winged and whined and bitterly complained; it had felt as if the constant grazing irritation, the prickling and the brushing back and forth, would serve to drive her quite insane, or so it had felt at the time, although she was later to encounter challengers to her sanity that would all but drive such concerns from her recall. Finally, her patience pushed to the limit, it was Mrs Merryweather-Cortez who was to yet again to save the day; it was simple, one of her own old cast-offs, a full-length slip in white nylon and as smooth as the girl's own skin.
Panelled and darted, with a seemingly hopelessly narrow waist and a pronounced tapering, beyond the curvature that allowed for the swell of the wearer's hips, so as to terminate at knee-length with a tightly-circular hem, the impression was of a garment of the early 1960s and designed to be worn below the pencil skirted fashions of the time. It clung to her hips and thighs like a second skin, the tight hem coming to rest tightly girdling her legs just above her knees.
The effect, whether intentional or not she had no idea, was to restrict her once tomboyish stride to a somewhat sedate and femininely-gentile shuffling gait that could not but reinforce the image of docility they were clearly striving to achieve for her.
Then there had been the question of underwear. The best that they had had to offer in terms of ‘underpinnings’ as Mrs Merryweather-Cortez was apt to quaintly describe the more intimate of garments was a pair of that woman’s own rather elderly cast-offs; a pair of white rayon directoire knickers, the waist far to large for her petite frame and, having been washed and re-washed into submission long ago, their waist-band had been left completely devoid of any residual elasticity in any case…
To be continued
Copyright (c) 2008 Garth. P. ToynTanen
Friday 18 July 2008
From Behind Stained Glass: Meredith's Tale - Part 1
Anyway, I hope you enjoy it, and if so, and even if you didn't, please let me know: your feedback is essential and much valued either way (I'm a big boy now, I can take the criticism... I hope. And even if I can't, well...there's always a few more pints waiting down at the pub to rub away the pain).
As always; all characters and situations are fictitious and any resemblance to anyone living or dead is purely coincidental.
…Crrrack! Crrraack!
…Arrrghhh!!!
A young woman screams; she can hear his ancient laboured wheezing, mummified and dust-dry, behind her, can smell his sweat, feel the brow-shed spray settling on her back like a fine rain of passion. He pauses, as much to allow for the blaze to spread across her buttocks as to regain his own breath; the exertion of swinging the supple, heavy-leather tawse through the sticky, heavy air of the little garret room threatens to finally bring about the coronary that she has so often prayed would one day free her. Elfin and petite, Meredith Hewson lies motionless and sobs heart-brokenly; she knows it won't be today, it never is.
How he loves this little room, the shelter he has so thoughtfully provided her, tucked safely away under the eaves; the tiny steel-barred skylight its only natural light, the narrow bed and chamber-pot-commode its only furnishings, besides that is the thickly-leather-upholstered bench-come-horse over which she is presently thoroughly and very professionally immobilised.
Neatly-bare arching ballerina’s feet are set widely spread with toes flat on the dusty grubby floorboards and heels hovering above. Calves, finely sculpted by nature in any case, are masterfully finished in perspiration-glossed elastic tension. Thick, broad, red-leather straps encase exquisitely-formed slender ankles, run across soft-backed knees and sweep around the very tops of her soft, white, quivering thighs, the uppermost edges of the latter bonds lying obscured in the shadowed heavy-overhang of buttocks perhaps best described as generous but in truth over-chubby. Despite her eighteen years the puppy fat still lingers, and lingers there most of all; youthful, roundly firm, elastic and resilient, it taunts him, drives him, veritably invites the three-tongued kiss of the tawse... and the next and the next...
She is bent tightly at the waist over the curving lip of the purposely designed horse whereupon a fifteen centimetre wide soft leather band is tightened down securely across the small of her back. The only movement permitted her tautly-rounded, reddened and abused cheeks is to be seen in the rippled-waves of flesh bouncing and reflected to and fro across each globe as each dances in turn to the rhythmic tattoo of pliant leather most expertly applied.
Whereas the side against which she stands rises perpendicular beneath her abdomen, the far side falls way at 45°. Thickly and softly padded it has formed its surface as a counterpart to, and around, the feminine contours of her torso under the persuasively secure down-force of a further set of restraints. A band of leather, a full twenty-five centimetres in breadth, runs across her upper back and shoulder blades. Her head lies, turned to one side, facing a large ornately-wrought gilt-framed mirror, the latter tilted with apparent carelessness against the attic’s sloping dusty-grey wooden side-beams. A red band of leather, of a breadth as if chosen to be the measure of her forehead, encircles her hairline, passing just clear of those sweetly-tipped pixie ears, lest she should be distracted from the appreciation that such a passionately-iconic spectacle so richly deserves.
She lies saintly; a martyr to lust and temptation, to one man's sexual repression, to an antiquated religious dogma so self-righteously-twisted as to translate and translocate the shame of one onto the blame of another with terrifyingly justified ease. She lies with arms secured back along her sides, broad leather bands encircling thin wrists and elbows and with the crown of her head angled down into the filth of the boards, the fungi-musk of dry-rot a bass note to feminine perspiration and the more metallic lingering relic-tang of his earlier abuse of her person.
Crrrraack! Yet another slap of the intolerant leather leaves its imprint, the three flesh-tanning tails of the tawse each sharply resolved in bruising red-blue relief. In the reflection before her the mouth agapes anew in a long and silent scream. A searing white flash blinds her thoughts, shatters further, and again scatters, the shards of personality she scrabbles, still, to gather to her.
More tears fall. A muddy grey mire of dust and decayed pigeon droppings, further diluted, spreads its margins and deepens its incursion into the arid underfoot dirt, fated to retreat in drying; only the brown tide ring will remain to tell the story, it and its myriad brethren lying around and about.
The mental scars run deeper of course, crisscrossing well-rutted through thoughts and memories, worn deeper still and added anew with each abusive act performed upon her, and the subsequent beating it naturally earned her.
It wasn't even sex, not as such, not as she understood it to be. If he could only bring himself to ‘use’ her as nature and God, surely God, intended. It would be just as abusive, it would be rape just as certainly, she found the old man repulsive after all, and certainly she would earn just punishment for her tempting of him just the same, it was the devil's flesh, she understood that now, but it would be a natural act for all that. She might have been left with some semblance of self-respect, some sense of pride in her femininity, at the end of it all. And, yes, perhaps she might even be granted some modicum of relief from the eternally nagging frustration that accompanied her every waking moment, and her dreams too, those twisted phallic-daemon landscapes from which, pursued by yearning, she would again and again be chased, slithering drenched in sweat back into the darker reality of that dingy little attic and the unending hours of enforced Bible study - all that she might be purged of her sin.
And she would be purged in a different way too, before his every visit. She was no stranger to the Bardex nozzle, having to lie facedown on top of the little bed with knees drawn tightly up and buttocks pushed invitingly skyward, the latter naturally parted by the enforced position yet parted further still by the latex-gloved hands of his housekeeper.
Crrraaack! He has switched sides, the strike comes across the opposite buttock cheek; the silent cry comes again dryly in her throat, little more than a hoarse squeak now. She is cried out now, finished, yet the beating continues; it has to, it is an exorcism more than a mere punishment. And he has to exorcise the devil from the two of them, drive out the beast from within himself as much as from within the miscreant lying before him.
Always he has one eye on the roof beams above; he is, after all, a man of the cloth, he knows well the symbolism of the roof, the symbolism of charity, that which covers a multitude of sins. His other can't avoid contact with the origin of several of those sins, he has violated her there, mere moments before, and his thick seed trickles now from between those deliciously fleshy peach-mooned buttocks, yet if there should be some penalty, a penance demanded, then it is she who must pay; it is the girl who must be punished for the possession of that puckered rosebud, surely the devil’s-embellishment, that it should have driven such insane lust into God's own servant. This it had, time and again, demanding that she be chastised time and again; those once perfectly flawless globes were now marked and marred by countless strappings, canings and horsewhipings, just as that rosebud, set between, stretched and distorted by countless repeated and persistent violations, seemed plundered of its dewy youthful innocent freshness.
Whhhoosh! She cringe is in her bonds, nerves tearing, shredding, expectantly waiting the impact, the strike that never comes.
WWhooosh! Whhhoosh! Whhhoooossh! The stagnant, heavy atmosphere is rendered again and again and again, the three leather tails forcing still-air through turbulently splitting and twisting paths and each offering up its own whistling overtone to the diabolical aural assault; mere practice swings, nothing more.
Time and time again her buttocks tense, attractively dimpling; she tugs impotently at her bonds, her eyes squeezing tightly shut as if she might cower unseen behind their wrinkled shuttering.
Behind her, unseen, he is pirouetting around with surprising agility and a lightness of foot belying his age. He is exploring the cramped space beneath the tent of angled roof timbers with the tawse's backswing, seeking to best accommodated its arcing envelope, optimise his degree of freedom in wielding it, maximise the inertia imparted the flailing leather.
Whhoosh! Whhhoooossh! Whwhooosh! Still more practice strokes: he is twisting his body, shifting his weight from foot to foot and swinging the leather strap first this way and then that, exploring ever-increasing sweeping arcs and looking for all the world like some daemonic tennis professional.
Her nerves are stretched to their tensile limit, fraying, splitting, failing - she cries now as she never has before, screams her near-silent squeaking, hoarse, scream as if in pain beyond the mere psychological, as if each blow were indeed landing.
For an infinitesimally short, infinitely long, heavily-pregnant moment there is silence - all is still, deftly still... then... then...
The moment is irreversibly shattered: Ccrrraack! Crraaack! Cer,rrraack! Cerrr,rrraack!!! Forehand, backhand, forehand, backhand. Right buttock, left buttock, right buttock, left buttock: a never-ending staccato rain of flesh-searing pistol shots, going on and on and on… Her eyes are wide open now, bulging, her mouth gaping in eternal mindlessly-soul-wrenching scream.
He is shouting, hollering in punctuated rhythm, red-faced, demented by anger, a strange anger, an anger born of confused and displaced guilt.
“Unholy slut! Harlot! Devil-spawned temptress of filth…”
Cerr,raack! Cerra,aack! Crrrrraack! Cerrr,rrraack!: forehand, backhand, forehand, backhand. Pain flashes across her eyes in electric-white bolts, unimaginable pain, pain beyond enduring, then slowly, ever so slowly, begins to recede, fading along with his accusing, cussing voice, swirling and spiralling down into the welcoming arms of the abyss, the safety of the darkness. She is losing consciousness, blacking out as she has so many times before, so very many times, blacking out…blacking out… blacking… out…...
...White! All white! Everything! Everything is white!
White curtains are drawn around the bed, a common-or-garden hospital bed albeit with the chromed sidebars and grey metallic framework safely sheaved in soft matte-white plastic.
Through sleep-bleared eyes and blinked back tears the ceiling above defies focus, a depthless expanse of nothingness, a glance to the left and the right providing little beyond a glimpse of featureless walling and an obtusely-viewed misty day-white rectangle perhaps a meter to her left, the window somehow reassuring in its presence.
She has been tossing and turning fitfully for hours, her head swinging left and right then left again across the pillow, trickles of saliva left as traces of her distress upon the soft latex.
Soaked in sweat, the rivulets trickling down under the latex covers, her dark brown eyes had startlingly snapped open, gazing wide and uncomprehending from beneath curling dark lashes before just as suddenly disappearing behind defensively collapsing eyelids. Then slowly, ever so slowly, those lids had lifted again, fluttering, flickering, uncertain, those big brown velvet eyes swinging back and forth scanning for any hint, any clue that might separate dream from wakefulness, the normality of the situation seemingly too abnormal to fit her rational of reality.
The nurse leans over from the right-hand side, her smile friendly and welcoming yet tainted mildly with concern, a hospital nurse, a quite conventional hospital nurse, her white plastic apron softly crinkling over the perfect polyester-white of the uniform dress beneath: “ welcome back”, the words whispered in consideration of her patient’s alarmed state.
“…Wha…wha…where?”
“It’s okay, honey…everything’s all right now; we’ll look after you. You're in hospital, dear, a very special hospital. You’ll be quite safe here, quite safe now. Quite, quite safe….”
To be continued
Copyright (c) 2008 Garth. P. ToynTanen