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.

We don't talk about these things: #Sex, #Taboo & 90210

by Giselle Renarde

I'm loving everybody's posts this week. Taboo is such a great topic of discussion.

As I read Lisabet's post, I was reminded of something you're going to laugh at me for doing but I don't even care.

I've been re-watching Beverly Hills 90210 on DVD.

I just finished the first season and I'll tell you this: I remember watching EVERY SINGLE ONE of those episodes when they originally aired in 1990.

Yesterday I got to the episode that has lived inside my brain since I first watched it: the one where Dylan and Brenda have sex for the first time. It's been almost 30 years since I first watched this episode and I still remember tons of lines from the show. Like how after they have sex for the first time Brenda makes the hotel bed and when Dylan tells her she doesn't have to do that she says, "What will the maid think?"

That line has stayed with me all these years. I don't know why.  I just like it.  It would make a good book title, wouldn't it?  The butler did it! What will the maid think?

Okay, something else about that episode has stayed with me too.  Something more personal.

My parents knew I loved 90210 even though, being a preteen when it first came on the air, I was a tad young to be watching it.  Maybe not by today's standards, but I don't have kids so what do I know about today's standards?

Anyway, I've mentioned before that my mother worked nights and my father was always passed out by the end of Entertainment Tonight.  That meant I got to watch 90210 (and everything else that came on after 7:30) without parental supervision. And THAT meant I didn't experience the awkwardness of having my mom glaring uncomfortably in my direction as teenagers on TV discussed the risks and rewards of having sex.

Thank goodness for that, because sex was a taboo topic in my household. Still is. Nobody ever discussed sex when I was a kid.  Nobody ever discusses it now. I'm very close with one of my sisters. We've never talked about sex.  Not once.

My mom did give me "the sex talk" (which was more awkward than informative) but here's what prompted that discussion:

When my mom announced that she was pregnant with my youngest sister, I was mad as hell.  This wasn't your typical sibling rivalry or whatever kids go through when they're afraid a new baby will usurp their Favourite Child crown. I already had other siblings. I hadn't been upset about their existence.

This one was different. I was ten years old and already I had more than enough experience raising children.

You know, I had an epiphany a couple months ago. I heard the word "neglect" and started thinking about the way definitions shift over time.  When I was a kid, I would have defined child neglect as, like, taking off for two weeks and leaving your kids to fend for themselves. I wouldn't have considered myself or my siblings neglected. There was always an adult body present in the house. Now I realize that if that adult body is not conscious, it doesn't count. If one parent is out of the house and the other is perpetually drunk and you've got a 7-year-old running the show, yeah, sadly, that's neglect.

Ouch.  I hope my mom never reads this.  It would kill her.  She is such a devoted parent.  Being a mother is the most important thing in her world.  I know she did what she thought was best for us, always, but living in a domestic violence situation with an alcoholic made life really difficult for all of us.

Not only was I raising myself and my siblings, but I was babysitting a parent as well.  I remember that I always had to wake myself up during the night to go downstairs and check the kitchen. My dad had a habit of coming to late at night or early in the morning and cooking when he was barely conscious. He would put something on the stove or in the oven, then pass out again.  One of my responsibilities was to get out of bed at regular intervals to make sure there was nothing burning downstairs.

So when my mom announced that she would be having another baby, my little 10-year-old brain did its little 10-year-old version of screaming, "How dare you stick me with another kid?" I felt like she was spitting out babies for me to look after. I was so mad.

For whatever reason, my mom was convinced I was angry about her pregnancy because I didn't clearly understand where babies came from.

When I heard this theory, everything inside me did a little 10-year-old version of going: "You have got to be fucking kidding me!" Her theory seemed so juvenile and irrelevant. I had bigger fish to fry.

Of course, I didn't communicate to my mother WHY I was mad.  It would have hurt her feelings, for starters.  More than that, we didn't talk about feelings in my family.  That was a taboo even bigger than sex. I chose to sit through the awkward sex talk rather than admitting to my mom that, at 10 years old, I was already too worn out to take care of another kid.

A few days after that highly memorable Brenda-and-Dylan-have-sex episode of Beverly Hills 90210 first aired, my mom confronted me on the topic. She told me I wasn't allowed to watch the show anymore. Apparently that episode had caused an uproar. Moms across America (and Canada too, I guess) were pissed these two teen characters on a TV show discussed the possibility of having sex, had sex, were happy about their decision, and nothing bad happened.  Everybody knows that when teens have premarital sex on TV, their genitals are supposed to shrivel up and fall into a bucket of boiling lava.

Anyway, the hoopla around this episode was such that my mother heard about it and confronted me on the issue.  I remember her exact words: "I've heard that Dylan and Brenda have already had sex!"

And you know what I said?

"No they didn't."

I lied for them.

I lied for Dylan and Brenda.  I did it to protect their reputations.  No, that's not true.  I lied because I wanted to keep watching the show.  Mind you, one of the perks of being a neglected child is that, between raising someone else's kids and making sure the house doesn't burn down, you can really watch whatever you want on TV.

Giselle Renarde is an award-winning queer Canadian writer. Nominated Toronto’s Best Author in NOW Magazine’s 2015 Readers’ Choice Awards, her fiction has appeared in well over 100 short story anthologies. Giselle's juicy novels include Anonymous, In Shadow, Cherry, Nanny State, Seven Kisses, and The Other Side of Ruth.
http://donutsdesires.blogspot.com

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.

Love of My Life

By Lisabet Sarai

I figure my parents must have started teaching me to read when I was four. Certainly I remember my pride when at the age of five, I could make it all the way through Dick, Jane and Sally on my own. Even before then, my dad and mom read aloud to my brother and me, not just stories but poetry, too. Words—beautiful, lively, evocative words—were a part of my earliest experience.

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea

In a beautiful pea green boat.

They took some money and plenty of honey

Wrapped up in a five pound note.

The Owl looked up at the stars above

And sang to a small guitar.

“Oh beautiful Pussy, oh Pussy my love,

What a beautiful Pussy you are, you are,

What a beautiful pussy you are.

That’s from memory, laid down close to sixty years ago.

By the time I was six, I had a library card. I read whatever I could get my hands on, diving into alternative literary worlds that seemed at least as real as the one in which I lived. I remember the Mushroom Planet books by Eleanor Cameron haunted me. Then there was book entitled The City Under the Back Steps (now out of print, apparently), a cautionary tale about girl who’s shrunk and imprisoned in an ant colony as punishment for her deliberate squashing of the ants on her back walk. That (obviously) made a huge impression on me—and I learned a lot about ants. A few years on, I was devouring Nancy Drew mysteries, practicing to improve my powers of observation and imagining myself as a clever detective, and a series called Childhood of Famous Americans, bios of people like Sacajawea, Betsy Ross, Helen Keller and Juliet Lowe. (According to Amazon, this series is still alive and well. It now includes the likes of Neil Armstrong and, heaven help us, Ronald Reagan!)

Science fiction—Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov—came a bit later. I read the Foundation Trilogy in junior high school and was sufficiently influenced by those books that I actually called a local talk show to ask Isaac Asimov a question. Before you shrug and say “so what?”, you should know that I was pathologically shy at that point and would do anything to avoid using the telephone. (Remind me to tell you the lost library book story some time.) My passion for his story overcame my terror. (As it turned out, he was rude and dismissive. I was crushed.)

Another milestone I recall was The Count of Monte Cristo, at 1100+ pages the longest book I’d ever read. That was in 8^th grade. And Gone with the Wind—when would that have been? Probably around the same time. All I know is that I cried at the end, devastated that Scarlet’s blindness and pride had robbed her of Rhett’s love. Meanwhile, Stranger in a Strange Land, also consumed during my mid-teens, had a huge impact on my imagination and my developing sexuality. I’m certain my tendencies toward polyamory can be traced to the Valentine Michael Smith’s “sharing water”.

For years, I spent my afternoons sprawled on my bed with nose in a book, as my mother would say. She would prod me to get up, go outside, get some fresh air, play with friends. I far preferred the company of the characters in my most recent read to the kids in my suburban neighborhood. Sherlock Holmes—Catherine and Heathcliff—Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester—Frodo and Gandalf—Captain Nemo—the eponymous Rebecca in Daphne Du Maurier’s tale and “She” who must be obeyed, in H. Rider Haggard’s classic—there weren’t enough hours in the day to spend with them, as far as I was concerned. Reading let me explore ancient Egypt, classical Greece, medieval France and Celtic Britain, wandering in both space and time. How could the backyard or the local mall compete?

I have vivid recollections of many wonderful books, up until my late teens. Anorexia really messed up my memory, perhaps due to a lack of nutrients. Or maybe my mental abilities were impaired by the anti-depressants I took regularly for several years. Certainly I read voraciously while I was bouncing around from one hospital or temporary home to another. What else was I going to do? Dropped out of college, estranged from my family, suspicious of all the people who wanted me to eat, torn by anxiety and self-disgust, I took refuge in books. I hardly recall anything I read, however, though for some reason I know The Brothers Karamazov was on the list. Or maybe Crime and Punishment? It’s all a blur.

I hadn’t really read much erotica until I got involved with the man I call my master, while I was in grad school. He assigned me various texts: The Story of O, of course, and Anne Rice’s Beauty Trilogy, for a start. I discovered Victorian porn, The Pearl, My Secret Life and Laura, a book I’ve discussed here in the past which might not be Victorian at all, but which had a profound emotional and erotic effect on me.

Then in 1998, I happened on a used copy of Portia da Costa’s debut Black Lace book, Gemini Heat, which inspired me to pen my own first novel, and changed my life.

Since then I’ve consumed enormous quantities of erotica, as a reviewer, an editor, and just for fun. My reading tastes remain catholic, however. Usually I’ll have several books in process, at least one of which will not be erotic. Currently I’m reading The Echo Maker by Richard Powers, a literary novel about family and neurophysiology; Carousel by Aurelia T. Evans, which I guess would be categorized as kinky erotic horror; Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics and Lipstick Lesbians, by Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons (though I’ve gotten bogged down in this and haven’t opened it for months); and Sexual Outsiders: Understanding BDSM Sexualities and Communities, by David A. Ortmann and Richard A. Sprott. I still adore a solid science fiction tale; The Wind-Up Girl by Paolo Baccigalupi and Anathem by Neal Stephenson are highlights from recent years, enthusiastically recommended. Well-written historical fiction can still sweep me away, too, though I was a bit disappointed by my recent read of Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies.

In short, reading is my first and perhaps my most enduring love. The pleasure I’ve experienced writing this post, remembering my favorite books and reliving my first encounters with them, recalls the secret glow I feel after a night of erotic pleasure. Lovers come and go—sexual need fades with age—but books will always be there, or so I pray.

When I imagine my future, I see myself, perhaps infirm, perhaps indigent, even alone, but still reading. Without books, I wonder if life would be worth living.