Sacchi Green
I have to admit that I never burned my bra, not even back in 1968 when early radical feminists staged a protest demonstration at the Miss America contest in Atlantic City. It turns out that nobody else did, either, at that or any other major demonstration. They did toss bras, girdles, nylons and other articles of constricting clothing into trash cans, but there was no burning involved. One of the organizers is quoted as mentioning “symbolic bra-burning,” but there’s no documentation, photographic or otherwise, of any burning bras, and with the heavy media coverage of the event reporters would certainly have noticed any actual fire. I’d be surprised if no adventurous girls ever tried it in imitation of what some mythical reports said had happened, but if they did, it doesn’t seem to have been documented by anyone.
The “bra-burner” mythology was generally attributed to a sensationalist male-dominated press’s determination to trivialize the feminist movement, but the Snopes fact-finding web site found that in 1992 a young female reporter for the Washington Post (later a contributing editor to MS. magazine) admitted to having tried to compare burning bras to young men burning their draft cards, in the vain hope of having the women’s liberation protests taken as seriously as the Vietnam War protests. Instead, “bra burning” became fodder for comedy and disdain.
So, no actual bra burning. What many young women did do to feel revolutionary was decide not to wear bras at all, somewhat to the puzzlement of women of their grandmothers’ generation who thought they had been modern and radical in adopting those new-fangled bras in the first place.
I was of the age and inclination in the late sixties and early seventies to declare my adherence to the cause of women’s liberation by going braless. Not being particularly dramatically endowed in the frontal department, it didn’t make a whole lot of difference what I wore, but I was comfortable, and living in a college town where plenty of girls were doing likewise. By the mid-seventies, however, I needed to wear a nursing bra until my second child was weaned, and after that I never felt comfortable without a bra’s support. TMI, I know.
What, I wonder, made bras the focus of the “burning” myth? Mere alliteration? "Burning girdles" was too much of a tongue-twister? Actually, I don’t wonder. Our culture is more obsessed than most with women’s breasts, whether braless or crammed into structured garments intended to uplift, enhance, and shape them. Women going “topless” in public are considered outrageous and, in most areas, are breaking the law. To be fair, they’d be breaking the law by going bottomless, too, but so would men, so it’s the ban on exposing female breasts that challenges equality. These days, though, the ban seems to have focused mostly on the nipples. If the nipples are covered, you can get away with showing just about everything else. Is this because the nipples are the most sensitive areas? So are men’s, but those are acceptable anywhere, and it’s the rare romance novel that doesn’t feature a buff and burnished male torso complete with implausibly taut abs and unabashed nipples backed by implausibly robust pectorals. If the cover shows women at all, they’re garbed in either wispy drapery or elegant gowns, which may show most of the breast, but not the nipple. And not a trace of a bra.
In any case, breasts, and bras, are arguably our dominant markers of binary sex. Women wear bras, men don’t need to. For people with female bodies and masculine-of-center gender identities, this makes the question of bras tough, even painful. This is where binders to flatten the breasts come in. Binders are far from new, having been common for women in various cultures and eras, but they seem new these days as a means of avoiding presenting as female if you don’t feel entirely female. They send a message, a more complex and nuanced one than bras do when it comes to erotic relationships.
See? I finally got around to erotica. Just settle down, loosen your bra or binder (or somebody else’s) and, I hope, enjoy this excerpt from my story “Carved in Stone” from the little-known anthology “Desire Behind Bars: Lesbian Prison Erotica.” The characters are Yevgeniya, a Russian Olympic medalist in wrestling, and Alex, a stone carver, both in prison and on yardwork duty. (It helps if you’re familiar with Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress.”)
____________________
In the back, Yev bolted the connecting door and resumed pacing while I dutifully chipped away at rust and filed dull edges. A paint-streaked tarpaulin heaped in a corner caught my eye. I filed it in my mind for future reference.
“You look like a caged lioness,” I said after a while. “That marble mantelpiece I told you about had a lioness crouched above the poem, looking ready to spring.” If she didn’t spring pretty damned soon, I would. The thunder grew ever louder, heightening the sense of urgency.
Yev didn’t spring, exactly, just took one long stride. “So, you like your pleasures with rough strife?” Her growl vibrated into my ear, no distance at all between us now, bodies moving against each other slowly to savor the rising heat of friction. Her arms wrapped around me, mine around her, grasping each other’s butts, pressing into each other—but I raised my hands and bent my torso back just enough to yank my shirt off first. I hadn’t bothered with an undershirt.
“Nothing up my sleeves!” I gasped. “But you’d better make sure I’m not hiding anything down below.”
Instead of pulling my pants down, she tightened her grip, lifted me off my feet, and shoved me up against the locked door. Her knee came up between my legs, supporting my weight, while she gripped and squeezed and probed every inch of my hips and thighs. Visions of magnificent bruises flitted briefly though my head, vanishing in the urgent need to feel more of her. I rode her knee, bent my head to bite along her shoulder through her shirt, then lower, respecting her binder, yet coming back again and again to leave damp spots with my tongue where I knew her nipples were swelling into soreness.
When, for balance, I had to grab Yev’s shoulders, her own mouth got busy with my breasts, telegraphing more and more wild need into my cunt, until I pushed off, landed on my feet, and got my fingers inside her waistband. “Fuck rough strife!” I panted. “Just...just fuck!”
Yev was panting too, and maybe swearing—some of it was in Russian, some didn’t sound like words at all. With a twist of my body that she could easily have countered, but didn’t, I got her to the tarp and we dropped down onto it, rolling over and over each other for the sheer joy of it. Knees, hands, mouths pressed into whatever warm hollows they found until the need for more focused intensity overwhelmed us.
Yev pulled my pants down and off with expert speed while I was still fumbling with hers. I gave up the attempt, lay back, and let myself be swept along by her mouth working hard at my clit and her big fingers demanding more and more space inside me. My hips arched upward for even deeper penetration. I clutched at her short hair, trying to tug her head down harder against me, but she refused to be forced past the point where her tongue could move freely. She kept my desperate need mounting and swelling until my screams of frustration surged into incoherent cries of pleasure. Only in the afterglow did I realize that the full force of the storm had just passed over us, and Yev had perfectly orchestrated my climax to match the fiercest blasts of thunder.
When I had enough breath, and some control of my body, I rolled on top of her, streaking her bare thighs with my wetness as I slid between her legs. I couldn’t remember how her pants had come off, and didn’t care as long as I could get into her musky heat to torment her for at least as long as she had done it to me.
But Yev wouldn’t let me get away with that. Her powerful scent and taste demanded more than teasing licks and the hands pressing my head hard against her were too strong to resist. I managed to make room for my own hand to work deeply into her heat, and set up a pounding rhythm of thrusts.
Sounds more growls than moans rumbled from Yev’s throat. Her walls clenched harder and harder around my fingers, her strong thighs gripped me until it hurt and her hips bucked so fiercely that I had to brace myself to stay with her. I managed to hang on, not easing up, riding her peak as growls became one long, rising howl, then descended gradually through harsh gasps to mere panting. By that time my head was pillowed on her belly, rising and falling with every deep breath. When I couldn’t resist any longer and moved my lips across her sweaty skin, over her binder, and up into the hollow of her throat, I felt as well as heard the words she muttered low in Russian, then English.
“So long...such a long damned time...”
I knew exactly what she meant. It had been a long time since I too had opened up to sex this intense. And it wasn’t over yet. With very little rest we worked each other into another burst of glorious spasms, and then, taking my time, I stroked and nibbled and licked her to yet another, only slightly more gentle. The sounds she made were enough to give me aftershocks.
We lay there, nearly comatose, until I said, “We’ve missed count. How screwed are we?”
“Maybe a lot, maybe a little. So what?” She was quiet then for so long that I thought she was asleep, until she opened her eyes and grinned at me, more wolf than lion now. A supremely satisfied wolf. “You have not quite managed to kill me yet, although you came close! I have decided what you must carve on my tombstone, just in case. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, now there’s a poet!” The lines she recited in Russian meant nothing to me, though the resonance of her voice stirred both my mind and body. Then she translated, stumbling over a word or two:
“Sorrow happens. Hardship happens. The hell with it, who never knew the price of happiness, will not be happy.”
“Carve it in Russian,” she said cheerfully. “There are better words for everything in Russian.”
____________________
Showing posts with label Andrew Marvell. Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Andrew Marvell. Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Show all posts
Monday, November 13, 2017
Monday, May 16, 2016
“Tear Our Pleasures with Rough Strife/ Through the Iron Gates of Life.”
Sacchi Green
How could I decide on one favorite character? I suppose I could have chosen one I’ve written three stories about…or the one who’s been in two of my stories, with another one simmering in my backbrain…or one of the other three who’ve appeared twice (so far)…or the Olympic skater… But, on reflection, I decided the safest thing was to go with a very recent character, so I could be pretty sure I wasn't repeating an excerpt that I’ve posted before.
I tend to think of my characters in pairs, so I’ll tell you about Alex and Yev (Alexandra and Yevgeniya) from “Carved in Stone,” my story in Desire Behind Bars. Alex is the first-person narrator, but Yev was by far the most fun to write about. They’re both in prison. Alex is a tough stone cutter who designed a garden installation that turned out to conceal a drugrunner’s stash, and wouldn’t deny in court that she’d suspected something of the sort, or cooperate by giving the names of other customers who might or might not have dome something similar. Yev is the big, muscular former “enforcer” for a Chechen drug lord living in the US, and has reason to think she’s safer in jail than out, but suspects that Alex may have been hired as a “hit man” to knock her off even there. Sparks of animosity fly, but even hotter sparks are in the air when they’re both working outside on the grounds crew.
__________
I tossed aside the file. “Now for your story. I showed you mine. You show me yours.” I lay back on the grass, propped up by my elbows.
She leaned against the riding rig of the mower. “Fair enough.” For a second she reached down. I thought she was going to shed her shirt as I had, but she looked slantwise up toward the window of CO Haynes’s office and changed her mind, instead rolling up her sleeves as far as they’d go. I could tell that beneath the shirt she wore a binder that couldn’t quite conceal the swell of full breasts. I had too little in that department to bother binding, but enough to make a sweaty undershirt interesting. The fact was not lost on Yev. And, possibly, CO Haynes.
“I too would not speak at my trial. I have family yet in Chechnya...if indeed they still live.” She was silent for a moment or two. “There was a time, long ago, when I imagined a different life. Just need a little while, I thought, to save up money. But to work as bodyguard to a Chechen drug lord is a road to nowhere but destruction, even in America. He enjoyed humiliating men by having a woman rough them up. For a few, who liked very much to have a woman rough them up, he used me as a reward—and then blackmailed them. If I tried to get out...” She shrugged. “Now he is dead, but I could tell more than is known, and there are men still free who would pay much to have me dead as well.”
I nodded. Yev’s level gaze acknowledged our mutual attraction without diminishing her suspicion one bit. I gave it a try anyway. “If somebody put out a contract to get rid of you in prison, wouldn’t a cute young femme be the natural choice? Plenty of them manage to get close to you. A blade between the ribs or a contrived accident wouldn’t take much muscle.”
“Pah! Those children. Them, I can read. If not, they do not get close. But you...either you tell the truth, or you are very, very good at what you do.”
“Why not both?” My wry grin coaxed one from her. I turned back to the mower. “Come on, let’s get this rust monster put back together.”
Crouching together, conscious of being watched from above, we worked quickly, not touching, not needing touch to feel each other’s heat.
“Yev?” One of the crew members peered around the corner of the garage. “Fifteen minutes until count!”
“Go then. Shoo, shoo.” She waved an arm. “You too!” Yev could probably get away with not being in her assigned room for the thrice-daily count by the guards, but I couldn’t. Her big hand gripped my ass hard before shoving me in the direction the others had gone. I let her get away with it. Anyone else would have had that wrist in a sling for at least a month.
At dinner we kept to our opposite sides of the dining hall, casting the usual enigmatic glances at each other. A shadow of a knowing smile drifted across Miss Natalya’s face.
The next day Yev and I mowed, while the others trimmed the hedges along the drive. I stopped and got off at the rock that had bent the blade. “No digging out this one. There’s a whole lot more of it down there, like an iceberg. Was it sticking up this much last year?”
“A little more each year I have been here.” She saw the question on my face. “Three years. Six more to go.”
“By then they might as well just make a rock garden here and stick some kind of plaque on this.”
“You could kindly offer to carve words into it. Fine lines about the greatness of prisons.”
“I could do a wreath made of coils of razor wire around the edges. And in the middle...hmmm... there’s a verse I inscribed on a marble mantelpiece, for a rich guy’s bedroom. Lines from an old poet, Andrew Marvell. They’ve been on my mind lately.” I paused for dramatic effect.
“So tell!”
I basked in Yev’s impatience as I sat on the new-mowed grass. And I told:
“Let us roll all our strength and all/Our sweetness up into one ball,/ And tear our pleasures with rough strife/ Through the iron gates of life.”
The words hung between us. “Is that how you like your pleasures, McKenna?” Yev said at last. “With ‘rough strife’?”
Something about her expression told me to tread carefully. A hot, sweaty bout of rough strife with Yev had certainly been on my mind, but I remembered how her old boss had pimped her skills. And what about her new boss, if Haynes could be called that? “It depends,” I said, glancing back toward his office window, but it was out of sight around a corner.
“It does.” Yev slumped to the grass beside me. “Sometimes...” Her voice was so low I could scarcely hear it. “Sometimes one does things to protect others.” She jerked her head back toward where I’d looked. “Yes, he found out, somehow, and wanted some of that for himself. Humiliation, punishment, the usual. But he has a wife and cannot afford visible injuries, so he asks for other things. And of course he provides his own...implements.”
“Pegging?” Even as I said the word I was trying to shake that image of Haynes out of my mind.
Her laugh was harsh and abrupt. “There is a better word for that in Russian! But yes.” She shrugged. “The hardest part is not leaving bruises, or more, on him. But he leaves others alone and does all he can get away with to please me, for the moment. No more need be said.”
She stood and climbed back up on the mower. “But what about you, McKenna? Alex, the girls call you when they speak of you, which is often. You did not give me much of an answer. It depends on what?”
“On being equally matched,” I said. “Strength for strength.”
Her wide grin was wolfish now, and genuine. “Perhaps I should have mentioned my silver medal in Olympic wrestling.”
“Thanks for the warning!” I looked her over. “I’d sure like to meet whoever won the gold!”
“Ah, Anneliese!” Yev rolled her eyes in remembered bliss. “We still correspond. Even here she sends me letters now and again. Who knows? Maybe some day you will have the pleasure of meeting her. She lives in Norway. Where mountains also rise out of the sea.” Her mower sputtered into life, and she drove away. By the time I caught up we were back at the garage and I had to bolt for the damned count.
__________
[I’ll spare you the fierce sex scene during a thunderstorm, but I can’t resist letting Yev share her taste in poetry]
__________
We lay there, nearly comatose, until I said, “We’ve missed count. How screwed are we?”
“Maybe a lot, maybe a little. So what?” She was quiet then for so long that I thought she was asleep, until she opened her eyes and grinned at me, more wolf than lion now. A supremely satisfied wolf. “You have not quite managed to kill me yet, although you came close! I have decided what you must carve on my tombstone, just in case. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, now there’s a poet!” The lines she recited in Russian meant nothing to me, though the resonance of her voice stirred both my mind and body. Then she translated, stumbling over a word or two:
“Sorrow happens. Hardship happens. The hell with it, who never knew the price of happiness, will not be happy.”
“Carve it in Russian,” she said cheerfully. “There are better words for everything in Russian.”
__________
How could I decide on one favorite character? I suppose I could have chosen one I’ve written three stories about…or the one who’s been in two of my stories, with another one simmering in my backbrain…or one of the other three who’ve appeared twice (so far)…or the Olympic skater… But, on reflection, I decided the safest thing was to go with a very recent character, so I could be pretty sure I wasn't repeating an excerpt that I’ve posted before.
I tend to think of my characters in pairs, so I’ll tell you about Alex and Yev (Alexandra and Yevgeniya) from “Carved in Stone,” my story in Desire Behind Bars. Alex is the first-person narrator, but Yev was by far the most fun to write about. They’re both in prison. Alex is a tough stone cutter who designed a garden installation that turned out to conceal a drugrunner’s stash, and wouldn’t deny in court that she’d suspected something of the sort, or cooperate by giving the names of other customers who might or might not have dome something similar. Yev is the big, muscular former “enforcer” for a Chechen drug lord living in the US, and has reason to think she’s safer in jail than out, but suspects that Alex may have been hired as a “hit man” to knock her off even there. Sparks of animosity fly, but even hotter sparks are in the air when they’re both working outside on the grounds crew.
__________
I tossed aside the file. “Now for your story. I showed you mine. You show me yours.” I lay back on the grass, propped up by my elbows.
She leaned against the riding rig of the mower. “Fair enough.” For a second she reached down. I thought she was going to shed her shirt as I had, but she looked slantwise up toward the window of CO Haynes’s office and changed her mind, instead rolling up her sleeves as far as they’d go. I could tell that beneath the shirt she wore a binder that couldn’t quite conceal the swell of full breasts. I had too little in that department to bother binding, but enough to make a sweaty undershirt interesting. The fact was not lost on Yev. And, possibly, CO Haynes.
“I too would not speak at my trial. I have family yet in Chechnya...if indeed they still live.” She was silent for a moment or two. “There was a time, long ago, when I imagined a different life. Just need a little while, I thought, to save up money. But to work as bodyguard to a Chechen drug lord is a road to nowhere but destruction, even in America. He enjoyed humiliating men by having a woman rough them up. For a few, who liked very much to have a woman rough them up, he used me as a reward—and then blackmailed them. If I tried to get out...” She shrugged. “Now he is dead, but I could tell more than is known, and there are men still free who would pay much to have me dead as well.”
I nodded. Yev’s level gaze acknowledged our mutual attraction without diminishing her suspicion one bit. I gave it a try anyway. “If somebody put out a contract to get rid of you in prison, wouldn’t a cute young femme be the natural choice? Plenty of them manage to get close to you. A blade between the ribs or a contrived accident wouldn’t take much muscle.”
“Pah! Those children. Them, I can read. If not, they do not get close. But you...either you tell the truth, or you are very, very good at what you do.”
“Why not both?” My wry grin coaxed one from her. I turned back to the mower. “Come on, let’s get this rust monster put back together.”
Crouching together, conscious of being watched from above, we worked quickly, not touching, not needing touch to feel each other’s heat.
“Yev?” One of the crew members peered around the corner of the garage. “Fifteen minutes until count!”
“Go then. Shoo, shoo.” She waved an arm. “You too!” Yev could probably get away with not being in her assigned room for the thrice-daily count by the guards, but I couldn’t. Her big hand gripped my ass hard before shoving me in the direction the others had gone. I let her get away with it. Anyone else would have had that wrist in a sling for at least a month.
At dinner we kept to our opposite sides of the dining hall, casting the usual enigmatic glances at each other. A shadow of a knowing smile drifted across Miss Natalya’s face.
The next day Yev and I mowed, while the others trimmed the hedges along the drive. I stopped and got off at the rock that had bent the blade. “No digging out this one. There’s a whole lot more of it down there, like an iceberg. Was it sticking up this much last year?”
“A little more each year I have been here.” She saw the question on my face. “Three years. Six more to go.”
“By then they might as well just make a rock garden here and stick some kind of plaque on this.”
“You could kindly offer to carve words into it. Fine lines about the greatness of prisons.”
“I could do a wreath made of coils of razor wire around the edges. And in the middle...hmmm... there’s a verse I inscribed on a marble mantelpiece, for a rich guy’s bedroom. Lines from an old poet, Andrew Marvell. They’ve been on my mind lately.” I paused for dramatic effect.
“So tell!”
I basked in Yev’s impatience as I sat on the new-mowed grass. And I told:
“Let us roll all our strength and all/Our sweetness up into one ball,/ And tear our pleasures with rough strife/ Through the iron gates of life.”
The words hung between us. “Is that how you like your pleasures, McKenna?” Yev said at last. “With ‘rough strife’?”
Something about her expression told me to tread carefully. A hot, sweaty bout of rough strife with Yev had certainly been on my mind, but I remembered how her old boss had pimped her skills. And what about her new boss, if Haynes could be called that? “It depends,” I said, glancing back toward his office window, but it was out of sight around a corner.
“It does.” Yev slumped to the grass beside me. “Sometimes...” Her voice was so low I could scarcely hear it. “Sometimes one does things to protect others.” She jerked her head back toward where I’d looked. “Yes, he found out, somehow, and wanted some of that for himself. Humiliation, punishment, the usual. But he has a wife and cannot afford visible injuries, so he asks for other things. And of course he provides his own...implements.”
“Pegging?” Even as I said the word I was trying to shake that image of Haynes out of my mind.
Her laugh was harsh and abrupt. “There is a better word for that in Russian! But yes.” She shrugged. “The hardest part is not leaving bruises, or more, on him. But he leaves others alone and does all he can get away with to please me, for the moment. No more need be said.”
She stood and climbed back up on the mower. “But what about you, McKenna? Alex, the girls call you when they speak of you, which is often. You did not give me much of an answer. It depends on what?”
“On being equally matched,” I said. “Strength for strength.”
Her wide grin was wolfish now, and genuine. “Perhaps I should have mentioned my silver medal in Olympic wrestling.”
“Thanks for the warning!” I looked her over. “I’d sure like to meet whoever won the gold!”
“Ah, Anneliese!” Yev rolled her eyes in remembered bliss. “We still correspond. Even here she sends me letters now and again. Who knows? Maybe some day you will have the pleasure of meeting her. She lives in Norway. Where mountains also rise out of the sea.” Her mower sputtered into life, and she drove away. By the time I caught up we were back at the garage and I had to bolt for the damned count.
__________
[I’ll spare you the fierce sex scene during a thunderstorm, but I can’t resist letting Yev share her taste in poetry]
__________
We lay there, nearly comatose, until I said, “We’ve missed count. How screwed are we?”
“Maybe a lot, maybe a little. So what?” She was quiet then for so long that I thought she was asleep, until she opened her eyes and grinned at me, more wolf than lion now. A supremely satisfied wolf. “You have not quite managed to kill me yet, although you came close! I have decided what you must carve on my tombstone, just in case. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, now there’s a poet!” The lines she recited in Russian meant nothing to me, though the resonance of her voice stirred both my mind and body. Then she translated, stumbling over a word or two:
“Sorrow happens. Hardship happens. The hell with it, who never knew the price of happiness, will not be happy.”
“Carve it in Russian,” she said cheerfully. “There are better words for everything in Russian.”
__________
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