War Stories, a post by @GiselleRenarde

Thirty years ago. November 11th. School assembly. Remembrance Day.

My school principal was a storyteller, and rarely without his guitar, but he didn't need it for the Remembrance Day assembly. Remembrance Day was a solemn occasion. In Flanders Fields always took pride of place, whether recited or sung.

At 11 AM, we had our moment of silence.

We were supposed to reflect on the war, but every year of my childhood, I remember standing in the school gymnasium attempting to manufacture emotion. I knew this was all supposed to mean something to me, but it didn't. To me, the war felt distant. Practically irrelevant.

It shouldn't have. Obviously. But, specifically, the war shouldn't have felt distant when I was standing in a room with teachers who were veterans. My Grade Four English teacher was an amputee due to war injuries. He was right there in the gym with us, and he was a truly lovely and supportive educator, but I never thought about him during our moment of silence.

I thought about my grandfathers, both of whom were veterans, both of whom had vastly different takes on their experiences overseas.

My paternal grandfather had one of those naked-lady tattoos that seem to have come back into fashion among hipsters. He got his during the war. It had the name and number of his battalion or regiment or platoon--I don't remember. I don't know the right words.

See, my paternal grandfather talked about the war all the time. War story after war story. And I tuned out every word. I thought it was all so boring, as a child. That stuff was all in the past. I just didn't care.

What I wouldn't give to go back in time and hear my grandfather's stories now. I'd be taking notes. I'd be writing it all down.

I've got tears in my eyes just writing this.

My maternal grandfather never talked about the war and, strangely, I can tell you much more about his wartime experiences. He was young when he enlisted, like so many soldiers. My grandma thought he looked just dreamy in his uniform.

He wanted to do some cooking overseas, and he did for a while, but because he was so scrawny, he was transferred to a tank battalion. This was not ideal. My grandfather was terrified of confined spaces. He was extremely claustrophobic, but what could he do? He had to go where he was told.

The only thing I specifically remember my grandfather telling me about the war was that he fought in Italy. His lungs were full of shrapnel until the day he died, and he had severe respiratory difficulties as a result, especially in his later years.

But the piece of information I found out most recently, from a family member in his 90s, is that, in Italy, my grandfather thought he'd died.

He found himself in a field somewhere, flat on his back, with his guts spread out beside him. Beyond his pile of guts, his best friend lay dead. My grandfather thought he must be dead too. Especially when the medical types came by, trying to assess who was dead, who was alive, who they could possibly save.

They took one look at my grandfather with his guts spilling out of him, and they kept on walking.

Proof positive, in my grandfather's mind, that he was as dead as his best buddy over there.

On their way back, those medics took a second look and determined all was not lost for my grandfather. It's a good thing they did, or I wouldn't be here to tell the tale.

Most of these war stories were told to me second-hand by other family members, since my maternal grandfather preferred not to talk about the war. He was clearly traumatized by his experiences, but he made a point of telling me that war is horrible. Horrible. It should never be glorified, because war is worse than any hell he could possibly imagine.

As a schoolchild, I didn't have the wherewithal to appreciate the sacrifices my grandfathers made. I still can't imagine the horrors they witnessed overseas. But you know what? Now that I'm a little older (and hopefully wiser), I think about my grandfathers every day. With all that's going on in the world, I can't help thinking they must be rolling in their graves.

I would be.

Pounded in the Butt by the Goddess—or Not

Sacchi Green

Drat. I’ve been around here too long. I thought I was all set with the closest I’ve come to a filthy story—at least there’s dirt involved, since the main character is stuck in a cave, and there’s a butt plug used, since she’s too stuck to prevent it and her companion takes advantage of the situation. But it turns out that I’ve used that story, “The Goddess Bites,” here before. I was all set with such a great title for this post! “Pounded in the Butt by the Goddess” (with apologies to Chuck Tingle.) I’m using the title anyway, which qualifies as a dirty trick, but not a filthy one.

So I’ve scrabbled around for a Plan B, and come up dry. You can’t have something both filthy and dry, can you? Filthy seems to require a considerable component of wetness. Well, so does erotica in general, but filth suggests something more akin to mud wrestling than heat between the sheets.  Speaking of sheets, my knee-jerk first image of filthy sex is the kind that, if performed in a hotel, leaves the bedding in such a state that you never dare go back to that same hotel. I’ve actually had that experience, in a way, although I wasn’t the one having the fun. It was on a club outing to Provincetown, and I was the one sleeping (but not sleeping much through the noise) on sofa cushions on the floor of the living room of a seedy hotel suite, having generously turned over the actual bedroom to a club member sharing the suite and her new acquaintance brought back from a party we’d all attended. And I was the one paying for the suite.  I’ve never used the experience as the inspiration for a story, but if I did, I think my detailed descriptions would qualify as filthy.  

Maybe I’ve written something filthy and don’t even know it. Some writers I greatly admire talk about how really filthy their latest story is, and when I read it I may think it’s a great piece of erotica, but not what I’d call filthy.

That’s the whole point, I guess. Filth is in the eye of the beholder. (Ouch! Sorry about that image.) When it comes to erotica (or porn) everyone has their own sense of where the fine lines fall between hot sex, dirty sex, and outright filthy sex. And for many, the filthier the better.  Come to think of it, some of those same writers like to say that they write smut; I’ve done it occasionally myself. It’s a case of claiming a derogatory term and using it with pride. Maybe that applies to calling one’s work filthy, as well.

On the other hand, some things may just strike us as honestly filthy, things we’re embarrassed to have written. They may not strike anyone else as notably dirty, or notably enough to be interesting, but they still make us squirm and feel icky. Especially when we use an imaginary character written about in several other stories who would be outraged to find out she was used that way. I, um, hope she never finds out.

You knew this was heading toward an excerpt, didn’t you. Here’s the setup. The character has left the love of her life because it’s wartime, and they’re sent in very different directions, and her ambitions as a pilot can’t be accomplished if she’s in a lesbian relationship (this is during WWII.) She’s crash-landed the Spitfire she was ferrying from London to Scotland in a storm, and injured a German prisoner of war who’s escaped from a nearby prison camp.

Two excerpts from “Spanking Gunther” (in DL King's anthology Spank):
_______________

1.(The Beginning)

Gunther squirmed in the grip of the familiar dream. Punishment, yes, surely he deserved every blow! But could justice be done when it gave him such twisted pleasure?
Fraulein Ludmilla, in the old schoolroom, raised her wooden ruler to bring it down on his vulnerable knuckles. Gunther tried to keep from hiding his hands behind his back, but failed, so she bent him harshly across the desktop, yanked down his woolen breeches, and proceeded to inscribe a lesson onto his tender buttocks, written first in red streaks by her hands and then, by the ruler, in purple welts.
Her grunts of exertion—so brutal, so unrestrained—beat in harsh counterpoint to his sobbing cries. The punishment went on and on, exciting him more and more…then ceased, abruptly, as a hail of bullets against a Panzer’s armored turret drowned out everything else.
The dream shattered in a jolt of panic sharp as lightning.
Battle-honed reflexes kept him low, struggling to shelter his head. Except that his arms couldn’t move! Something held him immobile, face-down. Paralysis? Had he been hit? No, he was able to twist his torso with an effort, but wrists and ankles were restrained by strong bonds. Oddly soft bonds, yielding a scant fraction of a centimeter before holding fast. When he fought harder to move, one ankle sent a stab of pain up along his leg. So he had been wounded! It subsided to a dull ache when he lay still.
“Take it easy, Gunther. It’s only a storm.” The voice was weary, stern, and unmistakably female. “You’re safe enough. Looks like you’re stuck with being my prisoner for a while, though.”
It was still a dream, then, taking strange new turns. But…a sharp flash and the bone-shaking rumble of distant artillery set him to struggling again.
“Cut it out, Gunther! It’s only…donder. And, um, blitzen. Thunder and lightning, and some damned impressive hail on this tin roof.”
Memory began to trickle back. The escape from the British prison camp at Halmuir Farm…the endless, bramble-strewn Scottish moors…his companions recaptured while he crouched in a thicket hoping to snare a rabbit for their dinner. And then, after two days of wandering, he’d sighted the sheepherder’s hut through pelting rain. But there his memory hit impossibility. The rest could not have been real, not here! A fighter plane roaring down on him so close that he’d thrown himself flat onto the cold, wet grass? The sands of El Alamein would have made more sense. And then the world vanished in a burst of pain, ceasing suddenly in darkness, and silence. He could remember nothing more.
Now Gunther opened his eyes to a stormy dawn. He turned his head. The dimness of the morning was dimmer still inside the little stone hut, its one window covered by a leather flap, but the rattle of hail on the roof had diminished. The narrow wooden door stood open to let in some light. And there was the woman, silhouetted against the grayness, lounging against a doorpost. She straightened and came to stand above him.
Not a woman from any of his favorite dreams. Nothing like Fraulein Ludmilla, nor even movie goddess Marlene, so naughty in The Blue Angel, so sultry in top hat and tails in Morocco, so deliciously cruel with an imagined riding crop in her elegant hands. This woman was tall, dark-haired, strong, self-assured—and in military uniform.

2. (The End)

“You could…you could try to force me to tell you the way to the prison camp.”
“I’m sure I could beat it out of you,” she said severely, but when he stole a look at her face he caught a hint of a smile, the first slight lifting of her mood.
“What’s eating you, Gunther?” she asked, almost companionably. “I don’t need your information—you can’t grow up on a Montana ranch and then become a pilot without developing a fine sense of direction—but why the angling for punishment? Who’d you leave behind?” Her voice turned bitter with the last sentence.
Now hope seemed more permissible. He looked at her slantwise, gauging her expression, and took a chance. In an exaggerated drone he began, “I tell you nothing. Only name, rank and…” Before he could get to “serial number” she grabbed his shirt by the collar, hauled him over onto his back, and dragged his body entirely off the bed. From flat on the floor he saw her knowing glance at the bulge in the crotch of his trousers, and felt it surge even higher.
“On your knees, Sergeant Bernhardt,” she snapped. “Arms across the bed, ass in the air.”
Gunther scrambled to obey, hindered only a little by his bound ankle.
“Drop your pants.”
The dingy, grubby fabric was bunched around his ankles in moments, effectively hobbling him. He heard her move away, dared a look, and saw her drawing leather gloves from the pocket of a flightsuit hanging on a peg beside the door. He shivered in anticipation, until she drew the scented nylons  that had tied him carefully from inside her tunic and tucked them into that same pocket. Startled, he blurted out, “Will you not tie me again, Fraulein?”
She let the form of address pass. “Nope. This is your party, buddy. Just hang onto the bedframe and pretend.” In two steps she was right there, swinging the pair of gloves, whipping them across his buttocks in a series of blows so fierce that he did have to grip the wooden frame to keep from flinching away.
“Now,” she ordered, pausing and pulling up the stool so she could sit, “tell me your sins! Who have you left behind?”
Gunther had to let it out. “Mein…mein General! Feldmarschall Rommel!” Just speaking that name in German brought him close to tears.
She slapped him again. “Rommel? A fine soldier in a rotten cause. And you deserted him?” The contempt in her voice hurt more than the blow that came after, one harder than any yet. The gloves had dropped to the floor, and now she was using her bare hand. Gunther visualized how it must look against his reddening skin, and came so close to ejaculation—not yet! not yet! she might stop!--that telling his story was a necessary distraction.
“Not deserted, no, never! We were his personal troops, the very best, sent to hold off the enemy while the main forces retreated.” The chaos, the despair, the exhaustion, came back to him in waves.
“And you failed?” More blows now, from an open hand, varying the angle and the sharp, cracking sounds, striking new territory, down to his thighs, returning full force to flesh already sore and beginning to throb. Then she paused again.
“No!” Gunther was half-sobbing, as much from memory as from pain. “We held as long as possible, as long as was needed, as long as enough were left alive…” He had to stop for breath.
She struck him again, but not as hard. “And then?”
“And then we were captured.”
“That’s it? That’s all?”
“I should have died, as well.” The hot tears rose behind his eyes. It all seemed so real again, and yet so indistinct, the sand, the choking clouds of artillery smoke, the berserker’s fury that had possessed him until it crashed at last into helplessness. “I swore that I would return, or die. It was all that I dared say to him...”
“And that’s what you call a sin?” The lieutenant leaned back. Gunther could sense her beginning to retreat into her own sense of guilt.
“Please!” he gasped, lifting his hips toward her. “Please!” At any moment his arousal would turn to unsated pain. She must push him that last lap, raise him to the highest peak of intensity. “Ma’am, Lieutenant, Fraulein, bitte, mehr!”
So she gave him more, spanking his sore buttocks in an unrelenting rhythm that varied but never faltered, switching hands from time to time, driving his body into the bed’s leather straps until his cock felt so savagely huge and hard that he thought it would surely burst through them. What an arm she had, and such hands! At any instant now the impact of her blows would surge right through his flesh and set him off, soon, soon…but what was that sound? Artillery again?
“Now!” the lieutenant barked. “That’s an order!” Suddenly her hand was no longer striking his buttocks, but squeezing them, digging into the flaming soreness, making his hips move so that his cock pressed into the straps in rhythmic thrusts that drove him to a peak beyond retreat. “Now!”
And Gunther obeyed, all guilt submerged, all pleasure embraced in its full, searing glory, by the power of her authority. The flood of release spewing in sticky white bursts through the leather straps onto the floor brought also a storm of cries and harsh groans and possibly words, but if he called out any name, he could never after recall whether it had been that of the Field Marshall, or of the American woman he knew only as Lieutenant, or Ma’am. And in any case, soon enough he was crouching beside the stool with his head in her lap, face against the wool of her uniform trousers, sobbing incoherently as she stroked his hair.
“Well done, Sergeant Bernhardt,” she said firmly at last. “But pull yourself together now. That’s an army jeep you hear laboring up the hill. We’ve been found.”
________________

So much for Plan B. That’s such a feeble attempt at filth that my character would be not only be outraged, she’d be contemptuous. But she’s magnificent when she’s contemptuous! And she might even call me filthy names, so there's that.



 
 

     
 

 
 
     

 
 

 



     

Forever – is composed of Nows

Sacchi Green

Forever – is composed of Nows –
‘Tis not a different time –
Except for Infiniteness –
And Latitude of Home –

Emily Dickinson is, as always, right. Each moment of Now is a component of Forever. Forever is built of Nows, each affecting the next, each happening in just one of all the potential ways. In cases of things like chemical reactions resulting in explosions or physical effects of gravity there may not actually be much in the way of alternatives on a moment to moment basis, but in the case of humans, we tend to think that choices come into play, however conscious or subconscious they may be. I’m inclined to broaden the concept and assume that all living things make choices, however random. In another mood I might argue that even the choices of living things are determined by chemistry and physics on levels we may never understand, but in general I figure that we might as well believe in free will, because we have to behave as though it exists in order to function at all.

So, onward to the choices we make, the major ones, involving clear alternatives, metaphorical “forks in the road.” More precisely, however much I’ve been procrastinating, the choices that I’ve made. Anybody who’s lived as long as I have must have made a whole lot of crucial, life-changing choices, right?

Right, but…as I look back, trying to remember, it’s hard to find times when there really seemed to be a choice. In petty, everyday ways, noodling around on Facebook, etc. instead of doing anything constructive like writing, sure. I make bad choices like that many times a day. But at the the times in the past when a different choice might have made for a better outcome, it wasn’t clear, and often didn’t even seem possible. I came to dread choices when it came to dealing with the difficulties of my younger son (who has since, many years later, been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome and a few extras) because I was being pressured on many sides but no options seemed right or even possible.

Those Nows are Thens, though, all components of Forever, but no longer requiring decisions in the same way. What’s done, or not done, is, well, done. Lately, when I’ve been spending time in places that have long been familiar—the home where I grew up, the college I went to, the place I love to retreat to in the mountains of NH, the house I’ve lived in now for almost forty years—I’ve been imagining that I see ghosts of myself at different ages, and remembering how life felt when the future seemed more extensive than the past. I envy those ghosts, just a bit, but I don’t second-guess their choices, and don’t think of times when I wish they’d done things differently, except on the few occasions when I might have been kinder or more helpful. There’s always the regret that I didn’t get started writing much sooner than I did, but that doesn’t feel as much like a wrong choice as just the way things worked out.

When it comes to forks in the road, I’d rather think about roads taken than those unexplored. I’ve just come back from a short trip to Cape Cod, where I’m always reminded that my parents got engaged on Nauset Beach, at the beginning of WWII. They knew that my father would soon be drafted into military service, and knew that it might be wiser to wait until after the war, but the British movie Mrs. Miniver tipped the scales and persuaded them (and many other couples, I’m sure) to go for all the joy they could, while they could. Without that choice, I would not exist. I’ve always been grateful to Mrs. Miniver and Nauset Beach.

I don’t like to speculate on what would have happened if my parents had made a different choice, but I do feel a certain fascination with choices made under the pressure of dramatic events like WWII. Which leads, wouldn’t you know, to excerpts from a story, or rather a couple of stories, that I’ve mentioned here before all too often. That’s the way it goes with fascination. In the first story an American army nurse stationed in England and an American pilot ferrying war planes for the RAF have a brief, intense fling, and then have to part, the nurse being transferred to the Pacific and the pilot returning to the US to fly with the women’s air corps there who have been promised official military status soon (a promise that isn’t kept.) The pilot can’t afford the scandal of a lesbian relationship, but she wavers in her intention.
____

     I thought, when I could think anything again, that she had fallen asleep, she was so still. Gently, gently I touched my lips to the nearly-healed tattoo above her breast. Tiny wings matching mine. Something to remember her by.
     Without opening her eyes she said, in a lost, small voice, "What are we going to do, Kay?"
     I knew what she was going to do. "You're going to claim the sky, to make history. And anyway," I said, falling back on dark humor since I had no comfort to offer, "a cozy menage in Paris seems out of the question with the Nazis in control." 
     Then, because I knew if I touched her again we would both cry, and hate ourselves for it, I stood, put my clothes in as much order as I could, and walked away.
_____

Thirty-five years later they meet again, in Alaska. Kay has married a soldier whose life she saved in the Pacific war, raised a family, become a physical therapist, and recently discovered how to contact Cleo, the pilot. Cleo has made a career in flying and has a partner, Yelena, who had flown bombers in Russia during the war, one of what the Germans called “Night Witches.” Later, after her husband and child had died as the result of a Siberian earthquake that Stalin refused to acknowledge with medical help, she defected to the US, crashed on an Alaskan ice shelf, and was rescued by Cleo. Yelena is wise, and big-hearted, and welcoming, and understands that she and Kay are, in a sense, living each other’s alternate lives. Near the end, she urges them to spend some time alone together.
_____

At last we lay peacefully, cocooned in blankets, Cleo's head on my breast, my mind drifting. Surely we had been like this always, through the lingering violet twilight of summer, and the long, white nights of winter.
"Kay," she said suddenly, "I did try to find you. But it was too late."
"Yes," I said, stroking her vibrant silver hair. "And if it hadn't been too late..." What of Jack, I thought, and my children? But all I said was, "Yelena would have been alone on the ice."
"Yes," Cleo said. We clung together a little longer, in perfect understanding of how much, after all, we had.
_____

Now, when I think in terms of “what-would-have-happened-if,” I think of it as a “Yelena on the ice” situation—which is also, incidentally, a story I intend to write one of these days. Or years.

Enough of speculation on forks in the road. Today, and often lately, I’ve been concentrating on the Nows of these lovely autumn days. I’ve stood in the yellow (and orange and scarlet and green) woods of Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken and not worried about which of two diverging paths to take, but just absorbed the beauty, the glory, the infinite gift of being there, in the moment, in the Now.