Is It Me?

by Daddy X

Here’s hoping I convey the connections in this rambling piece.

Earlier this month, I gave notice that I would be stepping down from my position as editor at the Erotica Readers and Writers Association, where I have served for over five years. It was something I’d been thinking about for a while. Time for new talent on the lists to take over in the new year.

It isn’t really an editor’s job in the strictest sense, but more an acquisitions editor-cum-policeman. No pun.

Well, okay. Pun.

During my November watch, a non-erotic story was posted on the Storytime list by our old friend and subscriber Henry Corrigan. He had written Money in the Mail for a speculative fiction call. It was a well-written piece with such a dynamite delivery that I conscientiously wanted to acquire it, even though a mainstream piece. So I asked my fellow editors whether non-erotic works had a place in the Gallery. In my five years tenure, the subject had never, to my knowledge, come up.

My concern was for the greater reading public who would go to the ERWA website for their dependable monthly erotica fix and find a story unwankable. We compensated by creating a special category for non-erotic works.

Henry was happy to grant permission.

Conscience clear. Temporarily.

Another story submitted was a quickie of 800 words by a different author. It also was non-erotic and quite well written, but had an additional problem. It was resolved with a very Christian sensibility. Unlike other religious-themed entries posted over the years, there was no sense of irony about it.  The author had included a trigger warning for sexual violence, but should have included a warning one on full-blown, unapologetic religious zealotry.

Now here was a bigger dilemma. As I said, it was also quite competently written, both in style and power, especially for such a short piece. Did it deserve a place in the gallery as well? Would I allow my sense of repulsion to the subject matter guide my choice of whether or not to choose it for the Gallery? That felt unfair on my part.

So I consulted my fellow editors again, just to make sure that my hesitation wasn’t simply a personal issue and nothing more. Happily, the consensus was to leave it out. One colleague referred back to my original scenario—an erotica aficionado wandering in for their monthly heat—and now, not only finding something non-erotic, but also taking away an apparent attempt at conversion. She suggested that it would certainly compound the non-erotic experience: The specter that an evangelical group had taken over ERWA.

How absurd.

But it’s not like they don’t work that way. Years ago, when Momma X was on the local Sierra Club Executive committee, there was an under-the-radar right wing group that tried to insinuate itself into the environmental movement by claiming rampant population increase was a factor of illegal immigration. (Ironically they don’t mention their opposition to birth control.) They managed to pull the wool over enough eyes to secure a presentation meeting on their position.

One look at these guys said volumes. They were NOT environmentalists. They were obvious Neo-Nazis who even brought literature claiming dedication to population control and opposition to immigration. I caught one guy handing out pamphlets, got up behind him, leaned up close to his ear (I was much younger and imposing then, managing the toughest bar in the county.) and whispered, “Get your Fascist ass and your bullshit the fuck out of here.” I picked up his literature and stuffed it in his arms as he went out the door.

Well, the rest left the meeting (rather got run out) but continued trying to get someone into a position of power, not only the Sierra Club but other environmental groups as well. They insinuate themselves into a trusted organization then throw a monkey wrench into the works.

I’m not suggesting that the author of the religious piece had designs on a scenario like that. She seems like a sweet person and sincere in her beliefs. But there are times I will allow better judgment to override my sense of fair play.

Ignoring Your Conscience

I've been working on a few novellas with a friend of mine, Dominic Leblanc, and we've been flirting with moral and ethical boundaries, since our joint projects are erotica stories that take place between teachers and (legal-age) students. For this fortnight's theme of "conscience", I was reminded of a scene in our upcoming novella, Schoolboy Secrets, in which the teacher is battling with his own conscience. He knows what he wants to do is wrong, but he knows he'll also be better off if he does the wrong thing. Sometimes the right thing is not the best choice.

So, I thought I'd share an excerpt from that scene as my post.

To give you some context on the scene below -- Evan, the student, and Coach Miller, the teacher, had a hookup at a bathhouse the night before. It was in total darkness and neither one knew who they were having this encounter with until they stepped into the light and it was far too late to undo anything.

It's the day after the bathhouse and Coach Miller is prepared for everything to go pear-shaped. He calls Evan into his office for a chat, to figure out if he's going to go to the authorities or if they can just pretend this didn't happen. Though this was highly immoral and unethical, Even is an adult.

---

“Come in,” Stan called.

The door opened and Evan came in, looking sheepish. And looking fucking cute.

“Close the door and have a seat.”

Evan did as told and sat in the chair on the other side of Stan’s desk. He looked up and Stan was sure he could see that same mix of terror and desire in Evan’s eyes that Stan had been coping with all day.

“About yesterday...”

Evan held out his hands in a complacent gesture. “I haven’t told anyone. And I promised I wouldn’t.”

Stan considered Evan, staring at him as he thought through all the ways this could still go wrong. Finally, he sighed — there was no point in playing “worst case scenario” with himself as it would just keep winding him up. He leaned forward on the desk and clasped his hands together.

“Thank you, Evan. It was ... an indiscretion. I really shouldn’t have been there. And you shouldn’t have been, either,” he said, his teacher instinct taking over for a moment. “Look, Evan...”

“Coach Miller, you really don’t need to explain yourself. I was there for my own reasons and I’m sure you were there for yours. There’s nothing to explain.”

For an eighteen-year-old, Evan was certainly mature in his attitude. Stan forced himself to relax, to ease up on the boy. “So ... I take it you’re gay, then?”

Evan nodded. “Yeah. I’m not out, though. You’re one of very few people that knows. You’re gay, too?”

“Yeah. Sort of in a relationship. But we’re on a ... we’re on a break for a bit,” Stan said. “Sorry, that’s not really something I should have shared.”

“It’s okay,” Evan said. “Maybe that was what you needed ... you know, to get back on track with your partner.”

“Maybe.” If only it were that simple, Stan thought. Unbidden, the fantasies he’d had in the last twenty-four hours came flooding back to him, of Evan on his knees right here and now, sucking him off. He felt his cheeks warm with a blush; he was ashamed for still having these thoughts.

“Coach Miller...?”

“Yeah?”

“As weird as it might sound,” Evan said, looking down at his hands, as he fiddled with his thumbs, “I think it was a good thing I ran into you at the ... at the bathhouse. I could’ve easily gotten with the wrong guy and things could have gone wrong.”

“It can be risky sometimes, yeah,” Stan said. “As long as you take care of yourself, though, you should be okay. You’re a smart guy.”

“But...” Evan looked up at him, his crystal-clear blue eyes staring right into his. “I was wondering if ... if we could do it again. But, like, in a safer place than the bathhouse. I really want you to show me how to be with a man.”

Stan did his best to suppress a groan and he discreetly pressed the heel of his palm against his raging erection. I can’t go along with this, no matter how much I want to, he told himself. Yet, another part of him said, But you’ve already done it once ... what’s the harm in doing it again? For the sake of his on-break relationship, it was probably better to do it discreetly with a safe guy like Evan than to do risky shit like going to the bathhouse, being seen by random people and potentially being put at risk of disease.

“Evan, you know we can’t.” It almost hurt Stan to say that.

“Please, Coach Miller,” Evan leaned forward in his chair, bringing his gorgeous face closer to Stan’s. “It’s either you ... or I go back to the bathhouse.”

Fuck. Him going to the bathhouse is as bad as me going to the bathhouse. Some punk there is going to take advantage of the poor boy.

Evan slid forward some more, bringing his ass off the chair and sliding down to his knees in front of Stan’s desk. “I’m begging you.”

Stan tried to fight the crumbling walls of resistance, to firm them back up and say no to the boy. Instead, he found himself saying, “As long as we’re both discreet.”

Cameron D. James is a writer of gay erotica and M/M erotic romance; his latest release is Dominating the Freshman. He is publisher at and co-founder of Deep Desires Press and a member of the Indie Erotica Collective. He lives in Canada, is always crushing on Starbucks baristas, and has two rescue cats. To learn more about Cameron, visit http://www.camerondjames.com.

Going Postal

Sacchi Green

I'm going to cheat on this one. My story is more about guilt than conscience, wallowing in guilt at having followed your conscience, but apparently not well enough to prevent disaster--and then enjoying being punished. This is quite an old story, about 12 years old, but remarkably timely.

                                                            Going Postal

                                                             Sacchi Green


     "Hey, are you all right?" She rang the bell again and knocked, hard. I couldn't seem to move. What was the point? What was the point in anything? The world was going to hell, with my own country toting the handbasket.
     "Lynn! Ms Rackliffe!" She pounded until I could feel the vibrations through the floor. I pictured her big, strong hand, knuckles reddening at the impact with my door, a hand I'd imagined so many times impacting other places... Some part of me stirred, though not, as yet, the parts that could move me out of my huddle on the couch.
     "Look, I know you're in there. The lights and TV go on and off, but you haven't picked up your mail or UPS deliveries in three days. If you don't tell me you're okay, I'll have to either notify the police or break down the door myself."
     Three fucking days--no, fuckless days--of despair. The bastards had won. In spite of the exit polls, known voting irregularities, and statistical impossibilities, no recounts in Ohio or Florida were going to make any difference. The voters had cast away all reason, and, in the states where gay marriage rights had been trampled into the dust, all sense of human decency as well.
     Not that decency in the conservative sense had ever concerned me much. What the hell possessed people, anyway, to be so obsessed with the kind of sex other people were having? And so unconcerned about their own government's campaign of war, destruction, arrogance, and downright stupidity?
     She knocked again. "Last chance," she called sternly. Her tone of voice had begun to play tricks on me. If I'd been standing up, my knees would have wobbled--which suddenly made standing up a more appealing prospect than it had been in a while. "Looks like some galley proofs in the mail," she added. "Are you such a hotshot writer your editors will let you blow off deadlines?"
     I tossed off the quilt and shuffled around for my slippers. She must have heard me, because she waited silently on the other side of the door, all imposing, silver-brush-cut, six feet of her. I realized suddenly what a mess I must look. Well, why not, when the future looked even worse?
    Time was, my mother used to say, when your postman knew everything about you short of your underwear size. This one had been delivering my mail for only about three months, but she already knew my politics, my taste in porn, and the publishers who were buying (or rejecting) my work. She'd asked me to autograph an old copy of On Our Backs a couple of weeks ago, and since then I'd been doing my best to make sure that even my underwear size was no mystery to her.
     It had been a game, inching along toward something major-league. She'd been playing along by knocking and hand-delivering all my mail, even if it was only pizza coupons, trying to suppress her amusement and maintain the official role belied by the gleam in her eye. I'd been planning, if all went well, to dispense with the underwear altogether and appear at the door on the day after the election attired in nothing but a map of the country drawn across my torso, with the blue states colored in. Maybe the whole thing could have been tilted to make a bright blue Florida jut downward in its most interesting possible alignment, pointing the way to glory.
     But all hadn't gone well. For the past two days she'd rung my doorbell, and I hadn't responded, unable to face the world except through the furious online filters of Atrios' Eschaton, Daily Kos, Buzzflash, Agonist, Fuckthesouth, until even the bloggers' convincing but unprovable conspiracy theories became more than I could bear.
     Now, on the third day, under threat, I opened the door.
     "You look like hell," she said brusquely, a frown denting her wide brow. For a moment I was tempted to throw open my bathrobe and flash my unmapped nakedness at her anyway, until I remembered that I hadn't showered in three days. Or possibly longer.
     "When was the last time you had a meal?" She kicked the door shut behind her, moving inexorably into the kitchen. I followed, and looked vaguely into the sink. Traces of macaroni and cheese had been drying on the unwashed dishes there for at least two days, but I was pretty sure there were more recent cracker crumbs sprinkled across my computer desk.
     "I'm not hungry," I said, with some attempt at dignity.
     "Well, I am. And you will be." She thumped the stack of mail down onto the table and backed me against my refrigerator, trapping me there with one muscular arm braced on either side, her large body blocking out the rest of the room. And the rest of the world. For a brief moment I felt the warmth of protection and the tingle of challenge, all merged together. A smile threatened to take charge of my lips.
     Then I saw the postal service insignia on her sleeve. Stylized, streamlined, invoking speed and reliability; but still an eagle. Still the symbol of war. I began to shake.
     "What...?" Then she saw where I was looking, and backed off, leaving me shivering even harder without the warm shelter of her body. I stifled a whimper. "The uniform? Damnit, you're even farther gone than I thought! Have you been getting any sleep? You haven't been home more than three or four days a week in the last two months. No wonder you're crumbling."
     Her voice was rough, with an underlying note of concern. She'd noticed, I thought. Kept track of me. Well, I'd had to tell her to hold my mail whenever I was away working on voter registration and getting out the vote in states where it might matter.
     Except that nothing I had done had mattered. I slumped back against the refrigerator and began to slide down it. "All that work...we tried so hard..." Tears burned in my eyes and stung my throat. "I did my best..."
     She dragged me upright with her big hands under my armpits. Her thumbs pressed into the sides of my breasts hard enough to leave marks. The pain was a welcome distraction, I realized. Amazingly welcome. My nipples began to harden, and the tears retreated just a little.
     "Yes," she said soothingly, "you did..." She broke off abruptly and looked intently into my eyes. Her tone changed, seething with scorn. "Sure, you tried, but you didn't try hard enough, did you? You call that doing your fucking best?"
     I couldn't flinch away from her bruising grip. Her words seemed brutal, biting--but oddly familiar. My own words, in fact. I discovered that I didn't want to flinch. What had I written next in that story she must have read? Never mind, I'd just wing it. "I'm sorry," I muttered, ducking my head so that my brow rested between her breasts. If I leaned one way or the other, if I turned my head, my mouth could fill with...  No, I hadn't earned such bliss. "It's all my fault. I know it is."
     "You bet it is," she growled. "And you're going to get what's coming to you." She yanked me over to a high chair at the kitchen counter and dumped me there. I watched in awed anticipation as she pulled off jacket and shirt and stood flexing her hands, her white wife-beater clinging to the tantalizing contours of the flesh beneath.
     I started to untie my ratty old bathrobe, but she slapped my hands away, then lifted me from the chair, swung around, and suddenly I was sprawled across her lap. My bathrobe was bunched up around my waist, leaving my ass hanging out in all its chilly vulnerability, so much more humiliating than full nudity. No amount of wriggling and kicking could make my feet reach the floor. I whimpered.
     "You want something to cry about?" Whack! Her hand came down full force, no warm-up. I yelled, and braced for another hit, but she pinched and squeezed hard for a few seconds, probing for sensitive spots, not that there was an inch of flesh that wasn't either aching or aching for more.
     Whack. Whack. WHACK!  A relentless rhythm, repeated with variations, making me realize, as much as I could think at all between gasps, that I'd had no conception at first of what full force could mean.
     On and on, with no let-up except to get me off-guard, interrupt my expectations. From my ass to my thighs I was hot, throbbing, quivering before and after each impact, and my whole body jerked with the intensity of each strike. The tears were back, flowing down my cheeks, snuffling in my nose, but the wetness squeezing from my cunt under her relentless pressure made a keener impression.
     "Please," I whispered, but she ignored me. "Please," I cried louder, wriggling my crotch against her thigh, then trying to raise my butt, straining against the forearm steadying me across my waist. She paused.
     "'Please,'" she mocked. "You think you've had enough? Ready to forgive yourself, are you? You think this is it, we're finished?"
     "No, please...I need...I'm so hot..."
     "Flaming hot," she agreed, pinching one buttcheek hard. "And getting pretty tender. Maybe it's time to stick a fork in and see if you're done." There was no time to process what she'd said before two fingers and then another thrust into my hungry cunt. The tines of her "fork" seemed to spread apart, clench together, probe commandingly just where my need was most demanding, until, just as her other hand came down in a sharp, solid slap on my sore ass, the wrenching spasms hit and shook me from my toes to my streaming nose.
     It was a long time before I could fumble the sleeve of my robe up to wipe away my tears and snot. She was stroking my reddened ass gently now, but for a little while I still sobbed softly, wringing every drop of release from that magnificent catharsis.
     Finally she carried me to the couch, and we cuddled for a while. I started to work my mouth surreptitiously across her undershirt, millimeter by millimeter, but suddenly I sat upright. "Don't you have to finish your route?" I asked.
     "Nope. I have the afternoon off. Just came by to check on you."
     I snuggled back. "You did a good job," I told her. "I'm so glad the postman never gives up."
     "Neither snow nor sleet nor stolen election," she agreed. "I've been around the block enough times to get some perspective. And so should you. A little food might help, though." She set me aside. "C'mon, I'll take you out for something spicy enough to get the circulation flowing, if you can manage to get dressed."
     My circulation was already in fine shape, but I was suddenly ravenous. In fifteen minutes (ten for a mutual shower that nearly derailed our plans) we were heading toward her station wagon.
     "Just a minute," she said, her hand on the door. "Extra credit if a young whippersnapper like you can tell me what those are about." She motioned toward two weather worn bumper stickers held on with strips of duct tape.
     "'McGovern/Eagleton'", I read. "Um, '72? But...wasn't it McGovern/Shriver?"
     "Yeah, eventually," she said. "Close enough. But look it up. Politics is always messy. How about the other one? I saved them both when I finally had to junk my first car. They don't make 'em like Dodge Darts anymore."
     ""Don't Blame Me, I'm from Massachusetts'." I had to think about it. '72...'73... "Nixon? Watergate? The impeachment?" She nodded, but still waited. "Okay, right," I said. "Only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia went for McGovern."
     "And even then," she pointed out, "McGovern got 40 percent of the vote. Don't go forgetting how many people are still on the same side you're on. And some of them are getting their rears in gear to fight on." She opened the door and didn't wait for me to say anything else, which was a damned good thing, because I didn't have anything else to say just yet.
     She just let me relax as we rolled onward toward food and fellowship, her hand on my thigh and my head against her shoulder, my thoughts for once not so much on politics as on what I hoped to get with all that extra credit.
       
     

   
         
       
             
           

What Good Old Days?

by Jean Roberta

This post is partly about synchronicity: events or items that appear close together, apparently at random, but which form patterns.

Yesterday, a venerable local restaurant, The Diplomat, put on an American Thanksgiving Day feast of butternut squash soup, roast turkey, mashed potatoes, mixed vegetables, and pumpkin pie. This was a new thing for the restaurant, which has been a downtown landmark for many years in the prairie town of Regina, home of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and capital of the province of Saskatchewan.

Of course, Canadians don’t get a day off for American Thanksgiving. We had ours on a Monday in October.

My spouse Mirtha and I made reservations and went to the Diplomat, a dimly-lit space decorated with oil portraits of diplomats on the walls. Since my American parents passed away in 2009, Mirtha and I have both missed my mother’s American Thanksgiving family suppers, which sometimes alternated with American thanksgiving in the home of some other expatriate faculty members at the local university. My family moved north in the 1960s, as part of a mini-exodus of intellectuals during the Vietnam War era. In the fifty years since then, nearly all the academics of my parents’ generation that I knew in my youth have passed away. (One notable exception, my father’s old colleague in the Economics Department, celebrated a book launch and his 100th birthday on the same day as the feast at the Diplomat.)

So Mirtha (who is Chilean-born) and I went to the restaurant for a “family” style turkey supper. I felt nostalgic for the Thanksgivings of my childhood in Idaho. Mirtha felt nostalgic for my mother’s Thanksgiving suppers, which she attended as a guest for twenty years.

We both know that the first Thanksgiving in the U.S. was a celebration (giving thanks to a Protestant God) for a victory of white settlers over the “Indians.” It had been a slaughter.

It troubles my conscience that this has become such a characteristic American holiday. I prefer to think of Thanksgiving the way Mirtha seems to, as a simple occasion for good food and (if possible) good company.

We would have liked the companionship of some close friends or relatives, but neither of us missed my father’s rants about how much better everything was in the U.S. in the good old days before troublemakers began demanding social and legal equality for all human adults. At family get-togethers, he usually held forth on a subject dear to the heart of every American conservative: the supposed compatibility of “democracy” with extreme disparities of income, of experience, and of status. According to this logic, “democracy” requires recognition of the inherent inequality of different groups of people, and the necessity of allowing the fittest to survive at the expense of the rest.

I’ve never actually heard a conservative claim that slavery was a democratic institution, but I’ve heard it implied. And I’ve been told that the drastic racial segregation formerly enforced by “Jim Crow” laws was necessary at the time, and would help keep the peace now.

This week, I got the latest issue of BBC History magazine, to which I subscribe. It includes two short articles under the title “Why are America’s white supremacists on the march again?” A woman historian, Manisha Sinha, briefly summed up the history of American racism since the U.S. Civil War, which resulted in the end of slavery. By upper-class southern standards, the uncompensated loss of slaves was an enormous loss of property, from which that class never completely recovered. Ms. Sinha discusses that loss as a kind of founding event, and she mentions the Confederate flag as a symbol of resistance to an interracial democracy.

Dr. Michael Cullinane begins his article this way: “White supremacy tarnishes every era of United States history. Even at the outset of the government’s founding [in 1776], white privilege prevailed.” I found it refreshing to read about a familiar topic from a non-American perspective.

While reading, I couldn’t help imagining the voice of my late grandmother (dad’s mother), who had southern roots. “But those people belong with their own kind,” she would say. “It’s only natural.” She also liked to reminisce about the “good old days,” when “everybody had servants.”

Last week, when teaching a story in the “Southern Gothic” tradition to my first-year English classes, I thought about how upper-class southern nostalgia for the “gracious living” of the antebellum past has spread throughout American mainstream culture. It literally makes me nauseous.

Even while gruesome little cell-phone videos show white men in uniform killing unarmed black civilians in front of their loved ones, and this evidence is shown regularly on the news (even here in Canada), the mainstream mantra seems to be “there’s fault on both sides.” I’m sure this would be my father’s argument.

Any moral code that isn’t based on a general recognition of human rights seems to me to be no better than anarchy. Yet morally-righteous defenders of extreme oppression seem to abound everywhere, including in Canada. The only difference between nations is in which underdog is being abused.

And I haven’t even brought up violence against women. In the region where I live, this especially affects indigenous women.

Mirtha sometimes tells me she wants to get off this planet. Sometimes I want to go with her. But since we’re not really willing to die yet, we distract ourselves with the comforts of our own little life together.

Even though I sign petitions and even send letters of protest to various levels of government about the latest outrage, I know there is really nothing we can do about racism, or sexism, or classism. All these abominations seem to be getting worse rather than fading away, as the optimists of the past said they would.

In the meanwhile, there’s always good food and drink for those of us who can afford them.

Not So Psychic

by Giselle Renarde

My mom just got back from a vacation with her friends.

A couple weeks before she left, I had a dream my mother died during her trip. You'd think it would rip my heart out, but it didn't.  There was a voice in my head saying the universe had given me enough signs. I knew this was coming. So, emotionally, I was on the numb side of being okay.

It was a very bureaucratic dream. An unusually pragmatic one, for me. My dreams are usually fun, entertaining. This one was dull, grey. My siblings and I were dealing with all the mind-numbing paperwork that goes along with the death of a parent... instead of dealing with our emotions. That's par for the course, with us.

In my dream, I got the quote for how much it would cost to ship my mother's body home, since she died overseas.  I remember thinking, "My credit card won't cover this. What kind of person has a credit limit this low?"

I woke up the next morning to the familiar sound of an envelope shooting through my letterbox. Mail from my credit card company offering me a higher credit limit.

I'm not psychic.  I don't have precognitive dreams, never have.  But that one shook me. Not just the dream itself, but the confluence of dreaming about needing a higher credit limit and immediately being offered one.  That's a little spooky.

The last time I saw my mother, we were sitting around my grandmother's kitchen table.  My mom was saying how excited she was about this trip.  She mentioned that someone at the office was saying "Aren't you afraid of going there?" because the city she was travelling to has been hit with terrorist attacks in recent years.  She said she wasn't scared.  She didn't want to live her life that way.

Life is full of measured risks. She'd already decided she didn't want to be afraid about this trip.

That's why I decided not to tell my mom about the dream I had.  Yes it put me on edge, but I don't have a history of being psychic so I figured what was the point in frightening her?  Even if she dismissed it (which she almost certainly would), it would always be with her in the back of her mind. I didn't want her carrying that weight with her on a vacation she was so looking forward to.

The other side of the coin, of course, is: if I have what is potentially life-or-death information about someone else, shouldn't I share it with them?  Probably.  Maybe.  I don't know.  If someone knew I was about to die, would I want them to tell me?  I... guess... possibly?  What would I do differently? Get rid of anything incriminating. But if someone else had a dream that I would die, would I want to know about it?  I don't think so.  It's hard to say.

At any rate, my mother's plane landed safely back home this evening. I know because I checked the airport's website.  I can only assume my mother was alive and aboard.

Rescue Squad: A vignette about conscience

Here she comes.  Youthful, busty, unchanging.  Probably not looking a day older than the hundred plus years ago when she was a milk maid in Oberammergau, squeezing tits into a bucket on her daddys beat down little farm, before everything went sideways for her and she entered into that shadow world of the night hunter.  We love each other in our way.  She is my shadow self. I am her conscience.  We will argue, make each other mad, even speechless, she may tease me and more than once has touched her killing teeth to my neck the way a beloved cat might bite your hand to back you off, hard but not that hard.  But of all the people in the world, I am in the least danger from her.  We have saved each other.  

Nixie has brought a couple of comrades from her blood family with her.  These men have swagger as though they’re the posse of a rock star.  These chosen few who managed to do what the Van Helsings of this world could never do.  Take her off the street.  Take her off the kill.  Almost not quite domesticating my Nixie with their willing blood, delicately traded for hers.

“ ‘allo Scheißkopf.”

“Hey Nix.  How’s tricks?”

The guys nod and settle in.  They look slightly stoned like blissful Deadheads.  She must have given them the little taste just before they got here.  She told me, they can smell each other and when they’ve been on the Little Taste, the smell of her skin makes their dicks hard.

One of them goes to the open bar and brings back our bottles.  Paulaner Salvator for me and Nix.  The woman has taste, though she never swallows.

“I almost want to say, Nix, you look like you’re gaining a little weight, although I wouldn’t know how.  I guess you’re eating well these days.”

One of the guys looks at me sort of threatening.

“Karl,” says Nix, “This person, you hear me call ‘Scheißkopf’here, is my friend.  He likes to write.  He knows my story.  We have saved each other.  You must be his friend too.  Karl.”

This guy Karl seems like a loose cannon.  I dunno.  “Where’s everybody else?”

“At home, at work,” she says, “what people do.  How is Thanksgiving?”

“Small meal for a small family.  It would nice to eat at the church with all my friends, but my wife wants a turkey dinner even if its just us.”

“Good man.”

“Yeah, I wish.”

“Hah,“ she says.  She takes a swig of Salvator, swishes it around, holds it, spits it on the sidewalk.  “You’re a good man.  Good enough.”

“Getting old.  Don’t like to see myself in mirrors.  You never get old.  Why do people think nosferatus don’t like mirrors?”

“It’s just the movies,” she says.  She’s looking at my tarot cards.  She reaches for the High Priestess card.  “These are what I don’t like.  I hate these.  Didn’t you know that?”

“I know what happens when you tell your fortune with them.  I’ve seen it.”

“Do you know?” she says to the men.  “Have you ever seen a nosferatu have their fortune told?”  She looks at me.  “May I?”   

I push all the cards to her.   She stacks them and shuffles them like a pro even though the cards are fairly large.  She cuts, reverses, shuffles again.  “Watch, boys,” she says.  She lays out a row of four cards face down.  She turns them over, one by one.  The High Priestess.  The Tower.  The Devil.  The Moon, reversed.  She sweeps them up, shuffles several times.  Lays them out, one by one.  The Tower.  The Devil.  The Moon, reversed.  “If I did this all night long, it would always be the same cards.  This is how it is to live outside of time.” She looks scared.  “I hate these cards.  The crucifix doesn’t scare me, mirrors don’t scare me.  These cards scare me.  Because they speak the truth”

At the next table a girl sits, a skinny little goth girl all in black, with green hair and nose piercings.  She's thumbing away at her phone, waiting for someone.  We’re all looking at her.  In a minute, another guy shows up.

They speak in low voices but we can hear.

“You’re from facebook?”

“Yeah,” says the guy.  “Romeo”

“Hi Romeo.  Juliet.  I still haven’t decided how,” says the girl.  “But I want to do it together with you.”

“I want it to be with you too.  I couldn’t do it by myself.  I couldn’t go through with it, but with you I could.  We need a place.”

“At home, my parents bed.”

“That would really fuck their shit up.”

“Especially my step dad.  Perv bastard.”

“Or we could jump off a bridge.”

She looks at us, we pretend not to hear.  Nixie pretends to be absorbed in her beer.  She spits it on the sidewalk and the guy makes a face.

“Bridges are scarey,” says the guy.  “and they have to be really high.  Water doesn’t compress, you hit it at high speed its like concrete.  But it doesn’t always kill you.  You have to be high up to off yourself right.”

“Savannah river bridge is high up.”

“I don’t think it’s enough.  Pills?” he says.

“I can’t get the right pills.  Maybe a gun.  That’s what guns are for.”

“I can’t afford a big gun.”

“I can get a .22 from this guy,” she says.

“Don’t use a .22,” says Karl.  The kids look at him.

“Fuck off,” says the girl.

“No, he’s right,” says Nixie’s other guy.  “A .22 won’t cut it, the payload is too small.   May as well stick an ice pick up your nose and lobotomize yourself.  You’re not serious unless you get a 9 mil at least.”

“Nine mil,” says Nixie appreciatively.

“A .22 payload just bounces around in your skull chewing your shit all up and doesn’t waste you.  Wasting your time is all.”

 “A shotgun,” I say, “that’s the right way if you’re serious.  That’s what you want.  That’s how Ernest Hemingway did himself.  Fucking elephant gun or something.”

The guys wag their fingers at me approvingly.  We’re all bros now.  “Shotgun,” they chorus.  


 “Shotguns a stopper,” says Karl. “Sweet fuckin’ A there, bubba.”  

“A .22, fuck that shit,” says the other guy.  “Get real with that shit or don’t even suit up for it.  Spend your life in a wheel chair drooling on your dick.”

Nixie has this sad, pensive look.  I know what she’s thinking.  Back in the day, she’d have been glad to give these two kids what they think they want.  “It is my business to know such a one,” she’d once told a suicidal priest.  Now they’re right here, practically sticking their throats out and she just watches.  She’s wrong about the cards.  She can change over time.

“I knew a guy used a deer rifle.  Very clean.  If you can catch the back of the palate just right, almost no blood.  Almost.”

“Wow,” says Nix.

These two kids are looking sick now.  No.  They’re going to be okay.  I hear the guy who tags himself Romeo get up.  “Forget it,” he says to the girl.  He disappears into the urban night.

The girl stares at her phone.  She stares at all of us.  “You are some sick fucks,” she says.

“Oh, are you offended?  We’re sorry.”  Nixie smiles and raises her bottle.  For an instant I see them under her upper lip, long, sharp as stilettos, inhuman.  A kind of nosferatu boner from these kids and their death wish.  This talk must be like pornography for her kind. I don’t think the girl saw the teeth, she just gets up and goes.

“A good night’s work,” says Karl.  The other guy turns to me and lifts his chin. I see the circle shaped scar about as wide as a pencil.

“So that’s how you know so much about .22s?” I say.

“Lost a couple teeth, that’s all,” he says.  “I was a just real dick head at it.”

Nixie pushes my cards back to me, all but one.  “They’re good men, my men.  They don’t want it to happen to anyone else.”

“Did you know those kids would be here?”

She gives me that look, like a wolf considering a rabbit and holds up The High Priestess card.  “You don’t know all about me, Scheißkopf,   You just think you do.”

My conscience is clear

We went shopping earlier today. Black Friday has reached us here in the UK so the city centres and malls are full of people sniffing out bargains. Needless to say, the car parks are pretty full too. We arrived at the shiny new mall near where we live and cruised around in search of somewhere to park. Zilch, so we did a second circuit and spotted one solitary space up one of the aisles. Problem was, to reach it would have involved going against the arrows painted on the tarmac. So, we did another circuit and approached from the right end this time, just in time to see a white van settling into our space. He’d spotted the space, and driven straight in the wrong way.

“Has he no conscience?” my husband wondered aloud.

Not sure about a conscience, but what that guy did have was a parking space.

So, here are some random thoughts of mine on the subject of conscience.

Over the years I’ve arrived at the conclusion that for most of us conscience is a somewhat fluid concept. Some things matter, to some people. Others, less so. I suppose I’m more of a pragmatist than my husband. If I’d been driving I doubt I would have even noticed the arrows on the ground. That space would have been mine. I guess though that’s why I’m the one with speeding points on my driving license and parking tickets stuck to the front of the fridge (I save them, like trophies). Those rules are more like guidelines, right?

Drink/drive laws though… now those might as well be etched on stone tablets as far as I’m concerned. Those rules matter. I don’t think I could bring myself to down a couple of glasses of prosecco then get behind the wheel, and if by some weird circumstance it happened I’d be wracked with guilt afterwards. But enough to turn myself in and possibly lose my license? Nope. Don’t think so.

Fluid, see?

There are lots of things that set me off on a mini-guilt trip. Forgetting to take poo-bags when I go out for a walk with my dogs is a case in point. Of course, I mean to take the bags. I have piles of them stashed in my kitchen drawer and in most of my coat pockets. I do my best, honest. But sometimes I screw up and on those occasions if one of my little Westies crouches down to do the necessary I’ll be casting furtive glances around, hoping no one sees and lining up my excuses (not that anything would assuage the vengeful approbation of the dog poo police). But do I go back afterwards to clean up? Not a chance.

The dog poo police are one thing, but what about when no one would know? I was brought up with the Protestant work ethic firmly ingrained in my psyche. I’m convinced I should work hard, something terrible will happen if I don’t, and I don’t expect anything for nothing.  These days my idea of working hard is writing, and I treat it like a job. Because it is. But I work for myself, I keep my own hours, set my own targets and standards. If I take a day off, no one would have anything to say about it.

No one except me.

So, I work every day, all day, including weekends and a lot of evenings. I tell myself it’s because I want to, but in reality I feel guilty if I don’t write. I feel I’m letting someone down, though I couldn’t rightly say who that might be. I promise myself to do better tomorrow and I usually do. My conscience demands it.

And here I am, completing another OGG post, and on the correct Tuesday at that.

My conscience truly is clear.

What would Sigmund say? #spanking #psychoanalysis #flashfiction

By Lisabet Sarai

“What would Sigmund say if he could see you now, Nathan—stretched across my lap with a bare bum and a hard-on?”

“Ow! Hilda...”

“Dr. Schultz, you mean.”

“Right, right...Damn! That hurts!”

“Stop squirming and answer my question.”

“Um—probably something Oedipal—ouch!—something about wanting to crawl back into my mother’s womb...”

“I’m twenty years your junior. Though you certainly do like to suck on my tits.”

“Gorgeous—ow!—gorgeous tits, Dr. Schultz. Take your blouse off and I’ll play with them while you spank me.”

“My diagnosis? I’d say you had an overactive Id, Nathan. Only stern punishment can keep your ravenous lusts in check.”

“And you, Hilda, with your crops, floggers and dildos, have penis envy—OW! Your fingernails are like knives.”

“I’ll carve my initials into your ass, my infantile little analyst. You won’t be able to sit for a week.”

“Oh no, don’t... Marilyn will see the marks!”

“Doesn’t your conscience bother you? Deceiving your unsuspecting wife?”

“Ow! Yes! No! Not really...Oh, Hilda, Dr. Schultz, please. May I come?”

“Naughty, naughty boy. You’re a mess of unconscious urges and repressed fantasies.”

“Argh! God, I can’t stand anymore...”

“It’s fortunate you have me to play the role of your SuperEgo.”

Hey, Presto!

I don't have a whole lot to say about underwear. While I think lingerie is nice and all, I get much more of a buzz from seeing a woman in workout gear, for example.

But underwear does, of course, perform a vital function. Though it can be painful, fiddly and just plain annoying, there's nothing quite like underwear for avoiding some aggravating and frustrating incidents.

I'm talking, of course, about Amazon's Adult Filter. That's right, people without underwear on covers have been proven, time and again, to cause your book to be suppressed, or even banned.

So what, pray tell, is an author to do, when the perfect shot for their cover happens to have a woman with no top on? Doesn't matter that there are hands covering those earthquake-and-tornado-inducing buds of erectile tissue mounted upon said fleshy globes. Doesn't matter, even, if her back is to us. If she ain't wearin' a bra, then in the Adult dungeon she goes. (Wait...that sounds kinda hot...)

Well, in answer to the first part of the previous paragraph, what an author has to do, generally, is ask their cover artist to sneak some underwear on 'er., as if by magic. Hence the title of this blog.

But in the absence of a Brassierus Appearus spell, I've always found Photoshop gives me all I need to clothe the nekkid. And I thought I'd share some of my examples with ya. A couple of these are rather old—dating back to the first days of the 2012 Pornocalypse, when the tits hit the fan.

Example One

Girls Only: Pool Party by Selena Kitt

Possibly the most aggravating part of this cover being Adult filtered was the fact that so many other covers out there at the time had hand-bras, and those covers were NOT filtered. The only difference Selena and I could find was that those other bras were made by male hands. So there was the distinct smack of double standards in the air, as well as (arguably) a soupçon of homophobia.

In order to get around the issue, I slipped a cheeky bikini top on our braless brunette. It was a tad tricky getting it between the palms and the pillows, but I was very proud of the result.

Example Two
Sybian Club by Selena Kitt

It was a fun construct to get all the various pieces in place with this cover. The initial, rude, version of this cover actually had the main model's underwear in purple, as it is on the chastened version. I kist wanted to show it this way because it was another adjustment I made to ze undies...which is, after all, what this blog is all about! But it was the seated model who was the reason for the kerfuffle at the Adult Filter section of the Zon. Side note, but it was fiddly trying to find images which would hint at a sybian without actually showing a sybian in use. This was a neat enough work-around, I thought. Until the bare-assed-ness brought us down. Still, hey presto! and I pulled some black panties onto seated girl.

Example Three
A Baby for my Billionaire Stepbrother 4 by Cassandra Zara

I believe this li'l baby is unpublished now, but it's another case of sideboob being front-and-centre. Essentially the same solution as for the Pool Party cover. Find a bra and put it on, all the day you'll get good Zon.

Example Four
Someone Different by Gina Kincade

This is the most recent example of ninja tricks fixing commando models. Not only did I get a nice black bra on the ley-dee, I also got a good tatt on the dude!