The Tale of the Fly Swatter

I erased all the correspondence.

Every word of it.

 

I wish now I hadn’t. With what I know now, with what I’ve lived now, I’d like to read it. But it’s all gone. Deleted in a panic, as if wiping out the words could wipe out the memory of an experience of being someplace I didn’t know existed, in a state I wasn’t prepared to handle, sent there by a man who didn’t understand what he’d done, didn’t know how to bring me back, and cared too little to try.

 

I came across his ad on Craigslist, where I wandered in those days looking for… for what? I think – I choose to think – that my goal was mainly for erotic stimulation of the linguistic variety. I like to think I was as reckless as sometimes I was.

 

How did it come to me, the awareness that sometimes people indulged in the things I fantasized about? Erotica, maybe? My library was growing, I must have known something. And the ads…

 

And then there it was. A man – see, there it is, I wish I hadn’t deleted the correspondence. But as I said… anyway, he declared his interest in spanking those women who needed… well, they always come up with some way to phrase it. Women who needed what happened when they were taken over a man’s lap and his palm came down on their bare butt.

 

When they needed the pain.

 

Or something like that.

I must have read the ad a dozen times. Read it and read it and felt the hunger and the arousal and – because it’s never just my cunt, it’s always also my brain – felt the curiosity.

 

So I wrote him, from the anonymous yahoo account that served all sorts of functions.

 

I wrote him, curious, wanting to know… more.

What was he thinking.

What would he do.

What did he want.

 

What would it be like.

It was all about the spanking, he said. For him. Giving me what I needed. As for him, maybe at the end there would be a blow job. But that wasn’t the main thing for him.

 

But for me?
What would it be like?

 

So he made a suggestion.

A bit of self-flagellation.

Did I have anything I could use?

A fly swatter.

I had a fly swatter.

I still have it, hanging from a hook in the kitchen.

That would be long enough.

Long enough to reach behind.

OK, fine, an experiment, I can do that.

And I did.

 

I went into the bedroom, fly swatter in hand. 

Took off all my clothes.

Went from there into the bathroom.

 

Why? Why did I go into the bathroom? It’s a small room, not much space to swing anything. But with the door open, I’d be looking straight at the large mirrored closet in the hallway. Maybe that was it. So many details aren’t clear.

I went into the bathroom.

I put the mat down on the floor.

I got down on my hands and knees.

Naked, I got down on my hands and knees, facing the expanse of mirror in the hallway.

I must have looked up at myself, facing the mirror.

Did I see the change in my eyes?

Did I already see a change in my eyes?

I picked up the fly swatter in my right hand and reached behind…

 

Now. I feel myself going there as I write, as I describe, as I remember. I’m so damn suggestible, even to myself, that as I describe the scene I’m back in the scene, there on the bathroom floor, in the moment before that small square of mesh landed on my naked butt. I feel myself going to that place. That place I didn’t even know existed.

With one swat, I took myself to subspace. 

 

I can’t remember if I accompanied the action with a fantasy. I have a feeling I didn’t. I think that the position itself was enough, without words, without a script, without an image. I was down on my hands and knees. Submissive. Exposed. Vulnerable. I must have been aroused by the impact such as it was but it was the mental response… the emotional response…

 

I scared myself. 

I was deep in subspace.

Lost in subspace and didn’t know where I was or how to find my way out.

 

I was probably crying.

I wrote him back.

I told him what I had done and how I had responded.
And he gave me nothing.

 

It’s a good thing I never saw him in person, because he had no idea what to do. No idea where I was, what to say, how to help me. 

 

A common acting technique is emotional recall. You learn it in acting class, you do it there as an exercise, remembering an intense experience so you can bring back the emotions, the reactions, when your character is going through something similar. A common technique – but potentially a dangerous one, if the remembered trauma is too triggering and the teacher too inexperienced to deal with the effect of the memory.

I was in a place I didn’t know existed, alone and lost, with no one to pull me back and no one to offer aftercare.

 

I deleted the correspondence, as if that would erase the memory.

As if that would make me safe.

 

But I wasn’t safe.

Not one bit.

 

I was Odysseus tied to the mast, hearing the siren’s song, struggling against the ropes, cunt swelling, struggling and cursing and begging to be released, until my desire melted my bonds and I threw myself into the ocean, swimming towards my doom and my salvation.