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During the first weeks of spring, everyone around me complained about the winter that wouldn't end, but I kept my mouth shut. I said nothing when sleet hissed against our windows, when the snow pack melted and the river frothed mad, or during the countless gray days of pounding rain. Even five inches of snow from an early April nor'easter didn’t compel me to speak. Saying anything would jinx me. All that changed mid-May. In its usually chaotic way, the southern New England weather swung from intolerable to temperate, pushing people from sweaters to tank tops practically overnight, proving, I suppose, how native nutmeggers can't escape that locally indelible Twain-attributed saying, “If you don't like the weather, wait." But wait, I could. Unfortunately, forty-eight hours into the 70-degree days, my luck ran out. Standing at the kitchen sink as dusk neared, I heard them from the window, spring peepers, they who herald the first warm nights of spring. In the seasonal wetland behind our neighborhood, they sprang up, tiny creatures no bigger than a fingernail, always heard but largely unseen. They would signal my fate, a fate I'd meet under a man-made shrine that, ironically, worshipped their kind. When John came in from hauling the trash to the curb, I knew I was doomed. The smirk on his face told me so. |
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As Friday turned towards twilight, the temperature slid from hot to comfortable with forecasters predicting a clear night. Spring birdcalls faded with the sunlight and in the void between light and dark, those spring peepers rose again in choir. Unlike the birds that dominated the daylight, their sound was not diverse; it lacked the distinction of a mocking bird among crows. No, the spring peepers croaked in cheeping, high-pitched unison and lone soul that I am I didn’t welcome them. If anything, I wished they’d croak deeper so they could sound more like the doom I anticipated. My fate arrived hours later, once darkness had fully wrapped itself around my world. John came to me, collar and leash in one hand and a small duffle bag in the other. He motioned me to follow him to the couch where he dropped the bag at his feet as he sat down. He opened it and drew out my clothes. "Strip," he ordered. He needn’t say more; I knew the drill. I peeled off my common, everyday clothes and stuffed my trembling body into the uniform of the night: Flannel shirt, leather chaps, and a custom shaped, leather underwear that hid my crotch and the roundness of my ass but left one thing accessible: my asshole. In the dark, only that hole matters. Once I had dressed properly, Master strapped the collar to my neck and the leash to its O-ring. He picked up the duffle bag and rose with a "time to go." As we moved to the front door, he turned off the lights, both inside and out. To my immediate relief, we left our house under the cover of darkness. It was unlikely that anyone would see us like this, the leader and the led, bound by collar and leash. As we walked down our driveway and along the street, my relief dissipated and the anxiety that comes when John does this to me flooded me. The cover of night was not enough to protect me from what was to come. If anything, it facilitated the inevitable. The walk to the bridge is brief, just a "down the hill, cross the street, turn left" jaunt. Little in the way of living things moves about this time of night, rarely anything beyond a stray car of teenagers trying to make curfew or the bark of keen-eared dog. All too often, I long for something to halt our steps, something that would deter us from the bridge, but I'd yet to see so much as a cat cross our path. East of the bridge, John found the trail down and pulled me by the leash to follow. I stepped over the guardrail and watched my steps down the narrow footpath. The ground was soft and my boots sank slightly into a near-muck that had not yet grown slippery. The air smelled of moldering leaves, a rank odor that said last autumn's detritus had yet to give way to its final decomposition. Soon, the smell of lube and human bodies would overtake my senses. I cannot say which odor I find most detestable?or more morbidly attractive. Where the footpath met flat ground, a puddle of water greeted my steps. Wet, everything was wet with spring. My time indeed had run out. We walked along level ground until a gravel slope encroached on us and forced us towards the train tracks. I stumbled as John trotted me over the tracks and towards the bridge's first footing. There we settled into the obscurity of darkness. I could hear the river running just yards beyond us and the rush of its waters spoke of spring runoff, too swift to host those little frogs of dusk. John dropped the duffle bag, knelt before it and rummaged through its contents. A cursed word of frustration, then the tiny beacon of a penlight shined down. Onto the hood. The hood obscures me, but it also shields me. It muffles the sounds of that which gets done to me. It soothes me with its musty scent and renders me anonymous so I need not focus on how vile I am. It saves me from the worst of what occurs to me. The first time John did this me, the hood kept me from a panicked flight. It soothed me the same way it might comfort a horse being led from a barn fire. It kept me manageable and in my place. That's not to say it freed me from all anxiety?I was well aware of why I was there, even then, that first time?and when the man stepped up to me, I flinched at his nearness. As rich as the smell of my hood was, it could not overcome the smell of this man. He was feral with the need for release. Yet he hesitated. "Man or wo ??" he tried, but John interrupted. "Does it matter?" No answer. "I told you I'd bring a hole to fuck. An asshole. Here it is, take it or leave it." John can be such a sarcastic dick when he bullies people. I tried not to think about what was happening to me when I heard the tear of wrapper and the grumbling that came with it. I tried to go blank as the man's dick pushed into me. I struggled to divorce myself from the snorting beast he became as he arched over me, furious in his intent and desire. I imagined the spring peepers instead, hearing them in the idle of my mind. Fruelings, my late grandmother had called them, fruelings. Such a sweet word, it celebrates the very sense of spring as it rolls off the tongue. Like that other word my grandmother would use, liebeskind. But that word had dark beginnings. "Nothing good will come of this," she had hissed to my mother when first she held me, before she welcomed me into the family with her kisses and her cooing. Liebeskind -- me, the child tainted by an accident and abandonment, cherished despite the shame. As the cock shuddered within me, I choked on my shame, knowing that that man’s orgasm had fulfilled my grandmother's old world prediction. In the safety of daylight, after that first time, I walked to the bridge to marvel at it and at what had occurred beneath it. Built just before the stock market's bust had robbed Connecticut of income, it connected two disparate sides of the small city I called home, and the Department of Transportation had spared no expense in making the bridge a notable landmark. Over each footing sat a giant thread spool, sculpted from stone and bare of thread, marking the city's glory as a one-time thread manufacturer. At each end of the bridge, upon two taller and more majestic spools sat eleven-foot tall bullfrogs. There they perched, each copper green with bulging gold eyes. Crouched on three legs while a hind leg stretched luxuriously down over the spool, each looked upwards towards the sky, but not quite at it, vacant and dumb. The state of Connecticut had pompously named the bridge "Thread City Crossing" but everyone around town called it what it was: the frog bridge. And beneath the clean lines of its design, hiding under its commemorative presentation, lay evidence of the city's less savory reality: the waste of lives lived marginally measured in booze bottles, discarded needles, cigarette butts, and condom wrappers. Amid which I had croaked plaintively while an anonymous horn dog had fucked my ass. And yet I wait for another one of these clandestine and dirty encounters. You'd think I'd be ready for whoever approaches me, but experience has not brought me any ease. I still stand there, tensing in the dark as I wait to see whether cock or fist or toys will be used on me. Yes, some men like toys. Voyeurs, they touch themselves as John shines his penlight on me, on the whole aching ordeal. I hear them when they come, and for reasons I've yet to fathom, I find the sounds of masturbation always more lurid than those of sport fucking. Footsteps. I hear them now, muffled but close. Code words are spoken and John's hand is at my neck, pushing me to bend over. I hear a zipper, a condom wrapper, twin sounds of ripping, of things being readied. Cold lube slathers my hole. John's finger slides into me, prepping me. The anonymous taker steps up to me, but I'm startled when I feel a slight, small hand on my hip as the man presses into me. What enters me is slender and long ?the guy must be skinny, I think?but it feels difference, lacks something, and I'm at a loss to say what. My asshole, however, says something of its own. It rejects the cock, protesting in painful spasms. Skinny Guy doesn't notice; he just keeps pushing and it pisses me off. All I can do behind the hood is howl and although it feels futile, John recognizes the tenor of my complaint. "Hold up there," he tells the trick. "Stop pushing. Rectal spasms." Skinny Guy heeds him and, as they wait for me to settle down, John talks shop with the guy. "First time out since last year. It tends to panic at the first fuck of the season." It. Damn, that word, it. The sound of which stuns me and makes me stupid. Stupid enough that my asshole opens right up. I know why John does this to me, why he brings me here. Once, between tricks, he told me how in the years before men had to worry, he'd bring "his boy" to the bathhouses. How he'd bend the guy over and let cock after cock take his ass, how used the hole would, by night's end, look all stretched and weeping white. He told me he kept his boy naked the next day so he could "test the burn" with dry fingers. He recalled the rent parties he staged, where people would pay for an evening cluster fuck. There, he could take instant photos, capturing anonymous, tight shots of holes, cocks, and mouths. John brings me here, does this to me, because he misses those days. Skinny Guy starts up again, fucking me at a slow, steady pace. He utters an "oh yeah, nice" and his other hand comes to rest on my hip. The voice is gruff but shallow, lacking just like the hands. But the dick that reams me knows what to do and wastes no time going about its business. It plows me, stretches me. Sometimes it grazes a nook of bliss, sometimes it hits a cranny of discomfort. But Skinny Guy isn't wham-bam rhythmic like the others who've used me. He mixes it up. He grinds his pelvis, cork-screwing his dick into me. He fucks slowly; he fucks fast. When he goes deep and holds it there, I sense that he loves his dick far more than he enjoys my ass. The variety of movement he foists on me begins to overwhelm me and I want to escape the sensations. I seek refuge. But where can I go? I think of frogs, again, but this time of their past. I think about that night in 1754 when a sound so terrifying rose up that the village folk feared that if the French and Indians weren't descending upon them, then Judgment Day had. Morning's light revealed that it was neither men nor God who had waged war, but frogs. Hordes of them. And they had battled to the death over a millpond as it went dry and their amphibious screams had sent people spiraling into fear. Whereas me? I only had a cock up my ass. Still, I want the frogs to scream for me, to sound the alert, to save me. I long for them to rescue me on this my judgment day. It won't happen though. The water moves too fast for all but those stoic and stupid copper frogs. No, I won’t be rescued and I can't scream in death knell fervor either because my suffering is a myth and a myth is never the truth and my truth is darker and deeper than any mass frog extinction ringing out in the black of night. Because deep down inside, I like what happens to me. I may fear it, I may tremble before it, but ultimately I like it. The dick pulls out and the void left in its wake is mysterious and confusing. I'm not certain an orgasm was had. But Skinny Guy says "nice hole" and pats my ass. It's the only acknowledgment I receive. No farewell, no clumsy inquiry about whether I'm tucked forward or tapped shut. As footsteps sound and recede, it dawns on me. The small hands, the underdeveloped voice, the dick that didn't quit with orgasm, he?he who had me?understood all too well how concealment works, how anonymity can mean something other than the obvious. Dysphoria, it would seem, seeks its outlets in camouflaged appearances and finds its solutions in unusual realities. In the hour just before darkness lifts, I lie in bed, unable to sleep. Outside, the birds haven't waited for daybreak; they chatter in the dark. House wrens, finches, even the occasional robin make noise. A brief ruckus in the tree outside our bedroom window tells me that even baby birds need an a.m. feeding. But these sounds will fade as the breeding and brooding subside in the heat of summer. So, too, will one of two things that croak, namely that which sings sweetly, collectively, historically. The other won't be that lucky. It will protest and plead in falsetto and false struggle every time it's taken out and made anonymous. But at least by then the days will be long and the nights, short. And maybe June will be as rainy a month as the entire winter was white. Whichever, I'll take my comforts where I find them. |
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12.07.06: Scarlet Letters -- in case it isn't glaringly obvious -- is currently
on an extended hiatus. The web has changed, we've changed, and
we're trying to figure out how we both fit together now, which isn't a process we want to rush. If you're looking for more current SL-related content, you can
have check out upcoming books from editor Heather Corinna and previous co-editor Hanne Blank, check out Heather's current sexuality sites, or explore sites through the femmerotic network. We hope to be back with you soon, as fresh, challenging and
unexpected as ever.
In the meantime, by all means, enjoy our years of past content,
all of which still remain in the public and subscription areas.
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