Leave It All Behind

by Giselle Renarde

For more than 50 years, my grandmother was married to a man with unchecked mental health issues.

My grandfather didn't believe in doctors. I want to say he hadn't seen one since WWII, when shrapnel was embedded in his lungs (where it remained until he was cremated), but I think I'm romanticizing the past a bit. Because in the late 1950s my grandfather was incarcerated for committing a violent crime against his family. Since he was institutionalized in psychiatric correctional facility, I suppose he would have seen doctors then.

I can't imagine that helped matters any.

Point being: my grandfather didn't see doctors if he wasn't being forced to. But he did self-medicated. With alcohol.

I spent a great deal of time with my grandfather, in my youth. I remember him very fondly. After his death, my grandmother revealed to me that he'd been abusive toward her in every way possible.  I was shocked to hear this. It didn't sound at all like the grandfather I'd known and loved. In fact, it sounded more like my father... who was also institutionalized after committing criminal acts, in what's now known as a forensic psychiatric hospital.

When I started working in the domestic violence sector, I learned more about the cycle of violence that plays out through the generations. That's when the pieces started coming together. My mother was "daddy's little girl"--her words. So she married a man just like her father. She saw no reason not to.

When my grandmother began speaking more openly about the family violence that had taken place throughout the years, my aunts started talking too. Not my mom. My mother doesn't like to talk about unpleasant things. She says the past is in the past. It isn't, and perhaps one day she'll come to that realization, but she hasn't yet and it's not an issue that's easy to push.

Throughout my childhood, my mom's two younger sisters were an endless source of funny family stories. I remember taking the subway with them when I was six or seven years old and saying, "Tell me another story about when you were kids!" I couldn't get enough.  I loved their hilarious stories about my aunt's pet rooster and the family of ducks that lived under their house.

So when the darker stories started coming out, I was really amazed. All those sunny family stories were still true. They'd just left out the unpleasantness until now.

My younger aunts told me about coming home for lunch on school days. My grandfather did shift work and he was home during the day. My older aunts were in high school, and their lunch period started a little earlier than the lunch hour at the elementary school. So my younger aunts would walk home together, and on certain days they'd find my older aunts leaving the house. No words would be exchanged. Only a frown and a shake of the head. That was enough to inform the younger kids that it wasn't safe to go inside. On those days, my aunts didn't get to eat lunch.  They went into the field across the road, and they played or gleaned grains for their pets.

The new stories, the dark stories, don't go into detail the way the sunny ones had.  But they don't have to.  I know now that my mother grew up in much the same family environemnt I did. There are so many nuances to the type of fear a child experiences growing up in a household that could spiral into violence at any moment. You can feel it all around you. The air is too still.

My grandmother once told me about a book she read some time in the 1950s. It was a novel about a woman she identified with, a housewife with a whole bunch of kids. Not a bad mother, but not a happy housewife. A woman who'd had enough of the pressures at home.

The character in this book packed a suitcase and left it all behind. Left her husband, left her kids. Took off and had adventures of her own.

I remember my grandmother telling me how much that book meant to her.  That character was her hero, because every day of her life she wanted to do the same thing: pack a suitcase, leave it all behind.

But my grandmother... she never did leave.


Giselle Renarde is an award-winning queer Canadian writer. She was nominated Toronto’s Best Author in NOW Magazine’s 2015 Readers’ Choice Awards, and her book The Red Satin Collection won Best Transgender Romance in the 2012 Rainbow Awards. Giselle has contributed erotica and queer fiction to nearly 200 short story anthologies and written dozens of juicy books, including Anonymous, Seven Kisses, Bali Nights, In Shadow, and Nanny State.

Visit http://donutsdesires.blogspot.com for free erotica and exciting new releases.

The Scent of the Violet

by Annabeth Leong

“Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”

The quote above has saved me from a trip through what I often find to be insufferable and pedantic territory.

While forgiveness is beautiful and important, I’m very concerned by all the self-righteousness around the concept that I come across in my general reading and living of life. I think it’s an act of grace and mystery, and by its very nature it’s about going beyond what’s required. So what bothers me is what I see as intense peer pressure, particularly in communities focused around self-help, religion, or other similar pursuits, to forgive people in all circumstances, sometimes far more rapidly than seems reasonable to me. This is often accompanied by a slew of platitudes about forgiveness, why it’s important, and how it works.

Something I’ve been thinking about for a while is that mainstream culture isn’t monolithic, so problems in it often come in pairs. This can make it confusing to criticize mainstream trends without sounding like you’re taking up the other common side. For example, with respect to forgiveness, there’s another mainstream thread of implacable and vengeful anger. See, for example, the various horrific things that U.S. Republican presidential candidates are saying about the vengeance they wish to take in response to terrorist attacks (which often describe acts that would harm many innocent people). I don’t endorse that at all.

To me, this sort of vengeful anger seems like the flip side of pressure to offer kneejerk forgiveness. Both stem from a lack of understanding of forgiveness as a process, and beyond that of the reaction to violence as a set of complex feelings. The mainstream view toward the aftermath of harm looks to me like a binary switch: be vengefully angry forever, or forgive immediately. In my life, probably unsurprisingly to those who know me here, things are far more complicated than that.

I’ll focus on the forgiveness side because that’s our topic.

It’s been complicated for me to get at what forgiveness actually means. At times, I’ve treated it as a thing that totally wipes away whatever wrong was done, in such a way that I placed myself in situations where I was harmed over and over again in the same ways by the same people. At times, the concept of forgiveness (which I might describe now as formally releasing someone, either in your own heart or through conversation, from an obligation to somehow “make it up to you”) gets mixed up with the concept of erasing your anger. I think it’s possible to forgive someone but still feel angry about what was done, and that in many ways that might be a healthier view of what forgiveness could look like. At times, I’ve felt pressured to tell someone I forgave them, particularly in the immediate aftermath of an event, and then found later that I was still suffering from what they had done. At that point, it felt like I’d be making myself a liar if I brought the issue up again.

I’m really concerned about pressure to forgive, for example, ongoingly abusive family members, especially depending on how forgiveness is being defined. If forgiveness means mentally releasing them from some sort of perceived obligation to change but feeling okay about avoiding them forever, then that seems okay to me. If, on the other hand, it means showing up at Thanksgiving and going through more abuse, I’ve got some questions about whether this is really a good idea.

Most importantly, though, for forgiveness to preserve its essential grace, it can’t be obligatory and it can’t be flippant. It needs to be seen as the act of unnecessary generosity that it is. It needs to be seen as the product of time and self-reflection. It needs to be seen as something that can’t necessarily be performed on command. It’s also not easy, and it may not necessarily make things right in any obvious way.

This brings me back to the quote. Though often attributed to Mark Twain, it’s apparently actually of unknown origin.

What struck me, though, is that it preserves the complexity of forgiveness. It’s a lovely image, full of the sort of grace and mystery that the concept of forgiveness possesses to me. It also raises a lot of questions, and doesn’t shy away from the disturbing elements involved.

The flower in the quote has been crushed. There’s no question being raised about whether real harm was done (another issue that often muddies forgiveness—”no harm done” is, I think, a different circumstance). The flower has been crushed and will go on as such. There is no evidence that the foot that crushed it paused, tried to help, or even noticed. It is possible that no amends can be made, and that the crushing is irrevocable. And yet, there is that beautiful fragrance.

But what is that fragrance for? Aside from the beauty and mystery it possesses, it may well go unappreciated. The owner of the heel may never notice the scent. Releasing a lovely scent may do nothing for the flower. And yet it’s undeniable that there is something better about a world in which this image exists.

That last paragraph is really important to me because it counteracts what can be a frustratingly utilitarian view of forgiveness. Accompanying the pressure to provide it rapidly is often the idea that it’s “good for you.” As if it were a way of eating one’s spinach. It is often true that forgiveness, offered sincerely after time and self-reflection, provides a sense of spiritual release, and that it may ultimately be better for one’s psyche than nursing a longstanding grudge. On the other hand, that “good for you” idea feels far too simplistic to me.

If forgiveness is an act of generosity, which I think it is, then focusing on oneself while offering it seems to come at it from the wrong angle. And, as I’ve brought up before, I don’t think forgiveness is good for you if it leads you to continue suffering harm (for example, by forgiving an abusive current partner and then deciding for that reason to stay in the relationship). I’d rather take “good for you” concepts as side effects rather than essential motivation for the act.

The flower may die. It may be crushed again. And yet the scent remains. There’s something lovely and hard to grasp about that, and that gets at the essential nature of forgiveness as I see it.

I’ll Give You Something to Cry About

by Annabeth Leong

The story below is fiction (normally, I write nonfiction for The Grip). Note that this story includes themes of age play and references to childhood abuse.

Five years ago, I didn’t think I had the guts to do this scene, no matter how many years I’ve thought about it.

Five years ago was before I met Janine. She knows how to get into me like nobody has since I was small. I’d have run screaming from most people with that quality, but the key is I trust Janine, even when she occupies the deepest parts of my psyche.

What she looks like matters less than how she smells and sounds. When I wear her blindfold, her boots on the wooden floor sound like judgement itself, and deep down it’s hard to remember she’s on my side. Her smell, though—that always reminds me. She is comfort food and leather, an aroma that has become the definition of transcendence to me.

“You’ve been bad,” Janine grumbles, her voice grouchy and not her own.

I know that turns some people on, but not me. My stomach drops into my toes. I can’t help struggling, both against the ropes that bind me and against the cloying sense of failure that quickly clogs my throat and makes my eyes sting.

I hear her take a breath in sharply. It’s hard for Janine to see me like this, I know, even if she wants to see every part of me. I know she feels distressed when I’m distressed, and that these echoes of the distress I felt when I was small awaken even more resonance in her. Her fingers brush my arm briefly, the touch her own rather than that of the character she’s playing.

Then she says the line, her voice growing strange and strident. “Are you crying, little girl? I’ll give you something to cry about.”

As it always did, that line makes me cry. My sobs transform from silent, half-hidden things to loud, ugly spasms. Janine doesn’t let up, because I told her not to when we negotiated this.

“Be quiet,” she threatens, “or I’ll give you something to cry about.”

The rough edge of a wooden spoon runs up the side of my arm. In the past, she has hit me with a flogger designed to draw blood, and I have smiled through the pain and mumbled endorphin-drugged words of love. None of that matters now, though. All the blood my tops have drawn, all the marks they’ve made on me, all the times I felt strong or was told I was brave—none of that takes away my small-animal fear of the wooden spoon. I take a slow breath. It won’t even hurt that much, I tell myself, but that’s the wrong approach. It’s not about how much it hurts. It’s about what it means.

“I can’t,” I say. It’s the line I’m supposed to say, and Janine takes it to mean I can’t stop crying, like she’s supposed to. I also sort of mean I’m not sure if I can do this scene. “I can’t.” I’ve got to communicate more clearly. I owe that to her. My brain is swirling, though, and it’s hard to remember that I chose this.

“Quiet,” Janine says.

She draws the spoon edge back less than an inch and returns it to my skin a moment later, the impact too soft to break even the surface tension at the top of a glass of water. It’s more than enough to break me, though. “Yellow,” I say. I force the rest of the words out. “I don’t know if I can get through this after all.”

She changes her touch back to her own. She puts a hand on the side of my face. Her fingers smell of the potatoes we peeled earlier for dinner. She pulls my head against her thick, leather-clad thigh. “You’re a good girl,” she murmurs in her own voice. “You’re so good. You can get through this if you want to. But we can stop now if you don’t.”

She gives me time to think about stopping. I close my eyes and breathe her in. Saying that I feel safe with her isn’t quite right because she can scare me to the point of tears and desperation when we decide to play like that. But I feel clear with her, like I would never lose myself. Like she would never lose herself. I think that no matter what we do, we are always Emma and Janine, people who love each other. When we act out old dramas together, we know that’s what we’re doing.

My heart pounds. Regret starts. I wish I’d never told her about this idea. On the other hand, I want nothing more than for her to tear me open in the midst of this, to find a way to the soft places I lost long ago. Janine is big and strong enough to take my anger, fear, and pain, just as I am big and strong enough to take her force and menace and need for my tears.

“I still want to,” I whisper, and immediately start crying harder because I can’t stop thinking about the wooden spoon.

Stick candy, my father called it. The first time he threatened me with it, I thought he was offering me a treat. Would you like it? Yes, I would. I’m going to slap that smart mouth right off your face. Are you crying, little girl? I’ll give you something to cry about.

Janine lets go of me, steps back, and becomes terrifying again. “Are you crying, little girl? I’ll give you something to cry about.”

“No, please…”

She manhandles me into position, my ass up to receive my licks. Her fingertips tremble against my waist. She pulls my pants and underwear down roughly. I am shaking harder than I’ve shaken as an adult. My throat is too tight to swallow my saliva and a bit of it drools out the side of my mouth and onto the bed. I’m glad I can’t see, that Janine has given me the privacy of my own darkness.

The wooden spoon comes down across my ass, carrying both the sting of the present and the ache of the past. I can barely stand the sensation as it spreads over my cheeks, but I don’t get to dwell on that because Janine keeps the blows coming fast and hard.

This is not pain that feels good. This is pain that blazes like hellfire across my skin and through my heart. This is pain that burns me out and cracks me apart, that I keep thinking I’m not going to be able to take anymore. I hold my safeword at the back of my mouth the way that, as a child, I clutched my favorite glow-worm doll to my chest when I had to go out to the garage alone in the dark. Even if I don’t need to use it, I need to touch it, to take comfort in its presence.

My sobs have become silent again, body-wracking. They contort me. They add an element of breath play to this already intense scene because I can’t get control of my lungs while this is happening to me. I am not crying soft, pretty tears. I am crying tears that make my face muscles seize, that make snot pour from my nose and onto my upper lip.

The inside of my mind goes black. There are only a few things left in my world. The spoon. The safeword. The tears. Me. Janine.

There’s a clatter as the spoon drops to the floor. Janine grabs my ass and squeezes, her palms hard and cold against my heated, tender skin. She is shaking so hard I hear her teeth chattering. She reaches one hand forward and brushes her knuckles over my wet cheeks. I hear a sucking sound that makes me think she’s sucking my tears off the back of her hand, and I realize the privacy of the blindfold wasn’t only for me.

I know what she wants to do. We talked about it. The tension of the moment stretches out. She told me ahead of time that this would be the part she might not be able to do in real life, no matter how hot it made us to fantasize about it in the dark.

Her fingers return to my face, wipe the snot off my upper lip. “You’re disgusting,” Janine says, but her voice cracks out of character.

She pauses for so long that I think she’s going to stop the whole scene. I’m too scared to move, poised on the brink of too many things. “Yellow,” she says finally. “Yellow. I don’t fucking know if I can talk like that.”

I discover then that I can get some control of myself after all. I slow my crying enough that I can whisper to her, give her a message from the Emma of the real-life present. “You’re good,” I tell Janine. “So good. I love you.”

I am aching for the rest of what we talked about, but I remind both her and me of the truth: “We can do this another time if we need to. If we want to.”

She smoothes a hand down the side of my thigh. Her fingers tighten cruelly, and I gasp. “I want it now.”

My body answers with a long shiver, a sense of impending catharsis. “Green,” I tell her, and she answers with a slap to my reddened ass.

“You’re disgusting,” Janine says, her voice stronger now. “You’re still crying, little girl? I’ll give you something to cry about. I’ll fucking give you something to cry about.”

She forces her fingers between my legs, finding my cunt. I don’t know when I got wet. I haven’t felt any pleasure so far this scene. My body somehow got ready, though, as if my tears lubricated my cunt as well as my face.

Janine attacks me with spearing fingers. “You take that, you fucking disgusting girl. Is that something to cry about? Is it?”

I can’t answer her. I’m crying too hard. I’m feeling too much. I’m in a place past bad and good, a place beyond memory or the present. This was my childhood. This wasn’t my childhood. I am big and strong enough to take the desires that make Janine feel ashamed. She is big and strong enough to give me something to cry about.

I cry and cry, for myself, for the small parts of me, for the lost parts of me, for the places I can’t open anymore, and for the ways I can’t properly close, not even when I want to. And eventually, Janine finds her way so deep into my cunt, which feels just then like my life and like my soul, that I come for her, still crying.

I'd like to acknowledge the influence of Xan West on this story. If I hadn't read Xan's excellent book Show Yourself to Me, I don't think I'd have had the guts to write this.

Angry Birds

By Lisabet Sarai

“Hey, Liz – isn’t that Bart?”

“Where?”

“Behind you, at the other end of the bar. Talking to the blonde with the big artificial tits.”

“Sounds like him. It’s not worth my energy to check, though.”

“Really? Last week all you could talk about was his six pack and his stamina. You told me you thought you were in love.”

“You’re dreaming. No way I could love that sleazebag.“

“But last week...”

“Last week is ancient history, Jill. Let’s bury it.”

“But...”

“Look, I was briefly deluded into thinking Bartholomew Jackson was a decent and reasonable person. I was wrong.”

“What did he do?”

“Can’t you just drop it? There are so many other, more interesting topics to discuss.”

“C’mon, Liz. I’m your best friend. Spill!”

“You really want to know? Okay, you asked for it. You’re gonna puke.”

“That sounds a bit dramatic.”

“Just wait. You know how he was the perfect gentleman when we met? So solicitous of my comfort and all?”

“Yeah – I have to admit I was a bit jealous that it was you he wanted. His buddy Jeff was a total dud. Couldn’t get it up to save his life.”

“That’s one problem Mr. I’m-a-Stockbroker-So-Bow-Down-to-Me Jackson didn’t have. He had a perpetual boner.”

“And that’s bad?”

“Well, no – I mean I like sex as much as the next girl...”

“More, I’d say.”

“Do you want to hear the story or not, Jill?”

“Sorry. Go ahead.”

“The first night was great, I admit. He rocked my world. I came three times, once all over his face. Very nice indeed.”

“So what happened?”

“It all started when he saw the shelf of my books.”

“Oh, Liz! You didn’t tell him your pseudonym?”

“In a moment of weakness and deep stupidity. What can I say? He seemed so nice, so appreciative. I’m hungry for recognition. As soon as he found out they were my books, though – that I write erotica - he changed. Completely.”

“How?”

“All of a sudden he was channeling Christian Gray or something. Using my stockings to tie me to the bed. Slapping me around. Forcing me to suck his cock. Bending me over and drilling into my ass without any lube. I guess he assumed that I must be a total slut, with no qualms about anything sexual.”

“Well, you are pretty wild, compared to me at least. I thought you liked a bit of kink.”

“Sure, with the right person, under the right circumstances. After the appropriate negotiations. Bart didn’t even ask. Like I said, he just assumed I’d eat it all up, that I’d swallow his cum and lick his butt hole and beg him to fuck me the way I did that first night.”

“So why didn’t you kick him out?”

“I tried! That’s when I found out he’d been secretly filming every damn thing he did to me. Even that first time, when I was all starry-eyed. He threatened to post the videos on the ‘Net, along with my pseudonym, if I didn’t go along with his filthy ideas.”

“Jeez, that would be a disaster for your job!”

“Tell me about it! So I strung him along for a couple of days, while I worked on the problem of how I could get the vids back, or at least destroy them. When he showed up at my door at 3 AM Sunday, with two other guys in tow, ready for a gang bang, I got desperate.”

“Oh my god! What did you do?”

“The first thing that came into my mind. I acted excited, like having my holes stuffed by a trio of slobs was my most cherished fantasy. In fact, I told Bart, I’d always dreamed of having guys piss on me.”

“Yech!”

“I warned you! They loved it! It just confirmed their opinion of me as the ultimate deviant slut. Anyway, I fixed them all drinks, told them I had to get ready but I’d wait for them in the bath tub. While they were chugging down their cocktails, I made some quick alterations to the electrical wiring in the bathroom.”

“You don’t mean...?”

“Hey, there’s got to be some use for all my engineering degrees! I made sure the floor was nice and wet, then I knelt in the tub – on the rubber mat. They stumbled in, barefoot – whipped out their junk – aimed and let fly... The liquid completed the circuit, just as I’d planned. The lights flashed – there was a smell of charred meat – the circuit breaker blew – then everything was quiet. When I turned on my flashlight, I found all three bastards unconscious on the floor, lying in puddles of their own pee.”

“Liz, you’re unbelievable! What if you’d killed them?”

“Unlikely. Anyway, I didn’t. After I’d made sure they were breathing, I slipped Bart’s iPhone and keys out of his pocket. Using his car, I drove to his apartment and let myself in. I flushed his phone down his toilet. Logged on to his computer, deleted all his files on Google Drive and Drop Box, trashed all his email. Then I used his baseball bat – you remember him bragging about being the top hitter in his Saturday league? – and smashed his MacBook into little tiny pieces.”

“God! He could have you arrested.”

“I suppose. Just in case, I made sure to take some shots of him and his cronies. I can always accuse him – with some justification – of rape. Those pictures was the last thing I sent Mr. Jackson before I wiped him from my contacts and unfriended him on Facebook. I sent copies of the pix, along with a somewhat less graphic account of the situation, to my lawyer, too. Just in case. But somehow I doubt Bart will bother me anymore.”

“’Hell hath no fury...’! Hey – do you still have those photos on your mobile?”

“Yeah, sure. I look at them every now and then to remind myself not to trust anyone with the secret of my identity.”

“Let me see... Jeez, that’s totally disgusting! Hey, I’ve got an idea. I’ll be right back.”

“Sure. Ah – Joe – can I please get another G and T?”

“You pervert! Get your hands off me, you creep! Oh no, don’t come any closer or I’ll call the cops...”

“Here you go, Liz. One gin and tonic... What’s her problem? Quite a pair of lungs on her!”

“Thanks, Joe. I think she may have just had her fantasies shattered. Hey, Jill – that was brilliant!”

“I hope that asshole learned his lesson. Never mess with an angry woman.”

“Never mess with a woman – period. Can I buy you another drink, girlfriend?”