Date: Wed, 4 Sep 1996 21:42:33 -0400 X-Sender: teddyt@teddyt.pop.crosslink.net Mime-Version: 1.0 To: laura@netgate.net From: Ted Subject: The Attic The Attic (M/F) I was sitting comfortably in my late father's den one early spring evening, trying to make sense of his finances for probate. Although I could concentrate when I put my mind to it, a particular distraction kept me from the task at hand. It was the ongoing bickering between my stepmother, Rita, and my step-sister, Laurie, who at 19 was having difficulty reconciling herself to the pall of gloom that sat upon the old house since the old man passed away and to the fact she had to drop out of school and find work. For whatever reason, however -- bad luck, the economy or her own misery -- Laurie could not land a job and had to accept her mother's support and her rigid rules. This fight was about money and curfew, I guessed from the words wafting from stairway at the opposite corner of the house. A full 11 years older than Laurie, I had always been her protector and, even when father was alive, sort of a surrogate dad. But in the week I had been visiting, even I was starting to lose patience with her petulance. I shuffled more legal forms and bank statements as the altercation died down for a moment. But not for long. The next two sounds I heard rippled a shiver of terror across my stomach. Laurie began keening in a high pitched tremolo as the screech of aged warped wood careered down the stairs and around the corner. I hadn't heard that sound in 15 years or more, but it was unmistakable. It was the pull-down ladder leading to the rarely used attic. I thought it had been boarded up once the upper renovations had been completed so long ago and the storage area was made more accessible. Nevertheless, that sound had one and only one sensory linkage for me. Poor Laurie! I knew instantly what was happening, as it had happened to me once and my older brothers and sisters on several occasions. When one of us had gone beyond all bounds -- lying, drinking, stealing -- we had to pull the rope on that door and lower the wooden stairway and march up to the attic. Father, and occasionally Rita after she married him 20 years ago, had arranged the footlockers and trunks in the center of the planked floor beneath a bare light bulb. The woeful miscreant would kneel on a throw rug and lay his or her torso across the hillock of humiliation. The threat of a trip to the attic was usually enough to maintain discipline, but the actual journey and kneeling in contrition was like a walk to the guillotine, which in our house was "Grandfather's Strap." It was a black rectangle almost four inches wide, a quarter of an inch thick and I'd say about 30 inches long. It would hang silently and proudly in the dark for years at a time, but seemed ready and willing to go to work when summoned -- and none too silently either! As the youngest, by far, Laurie was somewhat of a stranger to the rest of us, and she had benefited from our parents' mellowing. Maybe she got a smack or two like every kid, but Laurie was generally a model of behavior. I imagined as I watched her grow up from afar that she was a girl-next-door type. She was pretty in a fresh way -- shiny black hair cut in bangs, big brown eyes, her mother's Teutonic square cut face punctuated by a turned up nose that most girls would later have to buy from a surgeon. But clearly something had happened in recent months to cause her to withdraw from school, her friends and her mother. As my left and right hemispheres tried to make sense of what was happening, I heard muffled shouting and a series of thumps that caused flakes of plaster to rain down on the cat perched on the window sill of the den. Presently, I heard Rita calling my name, and fearing that she had fallen, I quickly scrambled through the parlor and up the stairs. When I reached the attic steps, she summoned me in a firm voice. "Teddy, I need your help and I need it now!" The sense that I was needed by either, or both, of them, overcame my knees' initial reluctance to climb the steps. The sawdust and insulation fibers tickled my nostrils, but the real sensory assault came from the long dormant echoes of that leather army of one parading up and down the bare nates of humility. Rita's face was flushed from exertion and anger. But Laurie was wretched. She had obviously tried to escape her fate before the first lick and somehow had wound up against the far eave of the attic, sprawled like a toddler who had slipped on a wet spot on the kitchen floor. It was enough to make one laugh, but this was not the time or place. Her face was contorted into a frown the shape of the St. Louis Arch. Her right forearm was raised to fend off blows that had not yet been delivered and her knees were bent sharply up, exposing a rich ebony thatch of pubic hair denuded by the panties now stretched at mid-thigh. Her blue pleated skirt lay crumpled at her waist. Laurie looked helpless, and I was torn as to whom to assist. "Teddy!" Rita declared in a voice that helped make up my mind. "Your sister has been impossible. And I won't even tell you what she has done, but I need your help. She is going to get this licking if I have to expire to do it! Please help me get her back in position." Reluctantly, I stepped over to my sobbing stepsister and gently helped her to her feet. Rita had calmed just enough to kneel her daughter on the rug with a modicum of grace and temper. Rita bade me to the other side of the makeshift whipping block, where I was to hold Laurie's hands in place. I did so sadly, looking compassionately into her mournful brown pools and whispering all I could think to say: "Laurie, at least it will be over in a couple of minutes." She broke down in convulsive sobs. I felt like a traitor, but discretion seemed to overtake valor at that moment, and I complied in the punishment that was about to begin. Laurie's whimpering crescendoed into a scream of pain as the first lick of "Grandfather's Strap" crossed her bare cheeks diagonally. It nearly deafened me, and her hands squeezed the blood out of mine. The second stroke resounded like a thin book falling perfectly flat on the bathroom tile, and Laurie, this time, moaned as if undergoing surgery without anesthesia. I gripped her tighter, offering my strong hands as if placing a bullet between her teeth. Rita seemed possessed that day, but so did Laurie, as, I suppose, did I. WHAP SMACK CRACK THWAP STRAP SMACK WHOP THWACK. The licking was as good as any of my older brothers and sisters ever got. Somewhere during the penance, Laurie yielded to the strap and ever-so-slightly relaxed her muscles. Her voice could no longer shriek, but she cried and sobbed steadily as she took the whipping. Feeling so terribly ashamed not only to have to witness this juvenile licking but to take part in it, I knelt closer to my stepsister's tear-streaked face and lightly kissed her on the cheek. She turned slightly and kissed me back on my lips, the peck of a bird searching for a crumb of solace. Her hands softened in mine, and I let go of my right hand and surreptitiously stroked her chin. Laurie bobbed her head up an inch and we kissed on the mouth one more time. The rifle cracks of the strap faded, but each time Rita laid the leather across poor Laurie's bottom, the girl jolted forward and kissed harder. Our tongues met and the whipping soon devolved into just a scant annoyance. I noticed a throbbing inside my pants and, not caring what Rita might think, I cupped both hands around Laurie's head and kissed her again and again, tasting the arousal welling from deep in her loins. Each stroke of the strap seemed to turn up Laurie's flames even higher. I began to anticipate the rising and falling and we locked into each other's rhythm, she thrusting and grinding her hips over the edge of the rough cardboard trunks and I mimicking her pelvic swells. The strapping continued forever, it seemed, but Laurie was beyond anguish. She suddenly burst into orgasm a moment before my tumescence erupted. We both took a deep breath of composure, and Laurie continued to raise her backside to meet the strap for another minute. I opened my eyes and noticed something quite peculiar. "Grandfather's Strap" was hanging stoutly and stiffly from a hook, but it was a hook near a dim corner of the attic where the floorboards had rotted and the dust lay unshod upon. Laurie was still rocking and bucking, moaning and sobbing, when I lifted her to her feet, pulled the panties and hose from her ankles and straightened her skirt out. I hoisted her in a fireman's clutch over my shoulder and carefully made my way down the rickety stepladder, setting her down at the bottom as if she were made of porcelain. I looked around for Rita; then heard music from her clock radio down the hall. I peeked in the door and found her in her nightclothes napping. "Teddy?" she mumbled. "What was all that racket? Aren't you two a little old to be playing in the attic?" ###