This short story is an entry in the 2003 Soc.Sexuality.Spanking Summer Short Story Contest and is copyright by the author and commercial use is prohibited without permission. Personal/private copies are permitted only if complete including the copyright notice. The author would appreciate your comments
Category: Edge
I Have Learned My Lessons Well
By
Dyke Grrl <dyke_grrl@HotPOP.com>
I have learned my lessons well:
Good girls don't remember.
What they remember, they don't tell.
It's hard; to forget things. Especially when you're only supposed to forget some things.
"I thought I told you to fold the laundry."
"I forgot." My voice is small. I make myself as numb as possible, so I won't try to protect myself. That only makes them angrier.
Chores sometimes get mixed with the things I'm supposed to forget. "Don't tell your mother I was in here." "Don't let your teachers know." "Don't remember what I did when you were five... when you were three... when you were eight...."
Don't remember. Don't remember.
It's a more important rule than don't feel, don't need, don't tell.
How can I help it if the forgetting leaks out?
It's easier this way. I cannot let them know at school what happens at home. Nothing here is bad enough for us to be taken away, and when social services did come, after... I don't remember.
But I remember not to tell.
There are lots of ways of telling. Drawing pictures is telling, unless you're careful to draw happy pictures, with smiling suns. Forgetting your homework is telling, fighting is telling, crying is telling... I practice being good very hard, because everything else is telling.
I become the perfect student. My teachers love me. They say how proud my parents must be. I don't say that no matter how smart I am, nothing will make them proud of me. I'm too horrible, and I keep on remembering.
I learn that a lie can be just as good as forgetting what I can't erase.
My mother is drunk and remorseful. "I still feel guilty for when you were five and I beat you for half an hour because you lied to me."
"I don't remember that," I lie. She relaxes.
But I do remember. I found a quarter. I remember the glint of metal between the seats of the car, fishing it out from between them. She insisted I had stolen it. I insisted I hadn't.
I remember her rage. I see the wooden spoon. I remember her eyes, and the smoke floating up from the cigarette. "I'll teach you to lie!" My heart pounds until... I can't remember.
But I learned my lesson: No matter how innocent I am, it is better to accept the punishment.
I only lie when I must. "Yes, I did it." "It's my fault." "I don't remember."
I make my mind large, to encompass forgetting. I skirt carefully around places I must not travel, relaxing only in the safe grounds of classrooms and story books.
I lock the memories behind thick walls. When I was ten and took too long coming home. When I was three and wouldn't eat enough dinner. When I broke the dinner plates. The memories loom, threatening until... I don't remember.
I have learned my lessons well:
Good girls don't remember.
What they remember, they don't tell.
The End
Author's Note: What makes this edge? Well, for me, it's because even implying that there are things I shouldn't remember, and that I do remember them, still feels dangerous--eleven years after leaving home, three thousand miles from my family, far, far out of their reach.
I am still too much a well-lessoned girl, one who believes in my deepest heart that they will stop loving me, the world will fall apart, catastrophe will occur if I let the slightest thing out about the things I wasn't supposed to remember. So for me, even this, where everything is implied rather than stated, is edgy.
© Copyright Dyke Grrl 11 July 2003
Reviews
Lori <peachesicu(at)aol(dot)com>
Wow, this one is hard for me to rate and I want to explain why. I also want to be as honest as possible. I find this piece to not fit the SSC theme which I, Lori, perceive as Spanking as a turn on, or Spanking as a comfort.
Organizer's note: Nothing in the SSC rules specifies any theme beyond spanking.
This is a statement about abuse, so being, it has left me confused as to whether it is an appropriately good short story in terms of the SSS or SSC. This was a very personal account of a terrible situation. That anyone has to have memories like this makes the living them even more horrid. I have to live at this extreme edge of dysfunction is heart breaking. What is ultimately troubling is to believe the first and last paragraph. This is edge and I hope is a cathartic release for someone. It is written well. Wish we had a real life category. If this is based on a real life experience then I feel it would fit into a real life category better. I know others will feel differently but I can only voice my own feeling regarding each and every story I'm to review. It was well written.
Sassy Jo <sassy_jolene(at)hotmail(dot)com>
This story moves me. I must admit I didn't expect to see one like this. However getting on with it...the author's thinking is very well defined. The piece makes me as a reader feel the author's pain, fear, rejection...and all those feelings that come from a dysfunctional family. It doesn't focus on the act, per se, but the reader knows what is happening. This story has touched me without sickening me. Thank you. (A note to the author: No matter how far away they are, your memory is always with you. It wasn't YOUR fault they were bad parents -- don't accept the blame.)
Warm Hand Jack
Powerful and terrible ... and beautiful. There's no beauty in the events that must be forgotten, or never spoken of, or lied about. Or in the dreadful lingering lessons that continue to haunt the teller. But there is beauty in the telling. It's stark, lucid, unadorned, masterfully understated. As the writer says in her notes, «everything is implied, rather than stated.» Exactly. It's full of things that have happened, but with no event being described in any detail. Layered with emotion, with hardly an emotion being named. Laden with threat, with hardly a threat being uttered.
The piece is strengthened by the closing repetition of the opening three lines, and by the recurring theme, «[I] don't remember.» It is all the more effective for being (except for those simple devices) unaffected and unselfconscious: non-literary, loosely constructed, and without chronological continuity (quite the opposite, in fact). These characteristics fit the child-state narration; yet one gets a strong feeling that it is very much the present adult who is speaking to us. Very well done. Excellent, meaningful spanking stories do not have to be erotic. QED.