Balancing the Equation


by 7th Son <Jihanr@hotmail.com>

Memories of my childhood are like jumbled up pieces of mosaic – rather like the mulched primary layer of a papier mache work – meaningful, but its meaning eludes me. I relied on family members, particularly my older siblings, to provide most of the details of my colored past, though I am certain much of the coloration is invention more than history.

I have been told often that I was obsessively jealous of my older siblings growing up. I would not have been more than five and was too young to be taken to task for my mischief. So while they were spanked for one misdemeanor or another misadventure, I got sent to my cot. For company were the inane accoutrements my guilt-ridden and socially visible parents regarded significant to the interior design of baby cots. The most coveted was the teddy bear of the Paddington variety, the bigger, the better.

I was often curious to see my older teenaged siblings put across Father's lap and spanked. They were always completely naked, for Father believed that the humiliation of being naked improved the quantum of his objective. Despite the family's straitlaced religious background, the sight of uncovered body parts was a convention in my father's house and comparison of bust and penis sizes promoted healthy rivalry. Early on, I had perceived a kind of intimacy that thrived between him and my siblings, as they lay on his knees, his palms on their chubby, perfectly-formed derriere raised up in high relief. There was beauty in this intimacy, whose unobtrusiveness I was then too young to define, but a share of which I was old enough to know I wanted. Unabashed, I would shed all my childish clothing and diaper, for I was not yet weaned off bed-wetting, and race naked to Father while my nurse would chase after me, screaming hysterically, her arms flailing like an octopus's tendrils.

One time I successfully evaded Nurse and reached Father, who was giving First Brother's rebellious rear-end some respite from the cane. This moment importuned me to fondle my oldest bi_s_e_x_ual stepbrother's privates as he served out corner-time, a requisite eternally carved in stone, and never to be flouted in Father's house.

My fashion-forward stepbrother's designer trousers were pooled untidily around his ankles. His hairless buttocks were a canvas of crisscrossing patterns, now red, now purple. He must be in pain, if not for the brutalizing of the adolescent buttocks he had suffered, at least for those ruined expensive pants he was so proud of. But he was smiling. Nor could I understand why his penis was wet as I toyed playfully with it, using my finger to make circular movements on its head as he directed me. First Brother squeezed his eyes shut and let out a glottal moan. I giggled at the power I had over him. How we escaped being caught by Father was a mystery to us.

I had always maintained that those perfectly-formed penis and buttocks of First Brother's must be able to turn many a gay woman straight, though I hasten to add that the likes of Ellen DeGeneres must not be holding their breaths to reprove my chauvinistic remark. I also confess that it was with First Brother that I would eventually engage in homoerotic experimentation during my preteen years.

Now closing ranks, First Brother gave me a wink as I proceeded to Father's throne.

Panting, but in love, I stood by Father. Barely reaching his knees, I tried to hop onto his lap. Father looked like God from my vantage point.

"My turn," I looked up and said to God.

Father picked me up and put me on his lap, oblivious that I would crease his silk pants all the more.

"Your turn?" he said, his voice resonating in my developing eardrums. Father never believed in cutening his voice or raising its pitch a notch higher the way women did talking to small children. "So you want to be spanked too?"

"Yes," I giggled, nodding my head zealously, not remembering or caring how I ended up on his lap, only that I was there and felt so much a part of him, so very close. I was enamoured of the warmth of my little bottom on his silken lap. This was the intimacy my unsophisticated instinct had always envisaged and it had been the only truth I knew.

"And what is your transgression, my angelic child, that you think you deserve a spanking?" Father asked while I looked down on my tiny penis. I curled my plump fingers around it, as a natural impulse of most male infants and toddlers, and pinched it in earnest. I laughed as I did.

But Father took my hand in his, shaking his head. To Father, all forms of overt prurient indulgence were taboo, including touching one's own penis, even if at this stage mine was a nascent instrument useful only for removing excessive fluids. Unable to tell what my mission was, he rudely passed me back to Nurse who equally rudely deposited me back into my lonesome cot.

This became an annoying recurrence so that it seemed that Father had cultured an aura of apathy for who I was and what I did. When I was thirteen years old, I was determined to change this once and for all but by this time I had also developed some sad misgivings about Father. I was sure he loved me least of his offspring.

And so, as part of a conscious attempt to effect a personality transformation, I became the personification of fear and terror in my house. My disgruntled nurse tendered her resignation five times in nine months, but she always turned up again by way of Mother's bribe disguised as a salary revision. I was a costly liability. Mother vacillated between being ashamed of me and excusing me in the hope that I was merely going through a tiresome phase. My stepmothers evolved my honorific 'Master Han' to the lame 'Attila', and my schoolmasters reeled in terror. I did, however, spare the ones I liked my nasty pranks.

I knew that it was a matter of time before Father would have to sit up and take notice.

However, I would live to wish he had done it under some other circumstance than the one that shall be told in the following tale, an episode of my life which I had always insisted was unpremeditated, a faux pas of decision, perhaps. It was just another example of how I seemed to live at odds with everybody.

Ione Swallow fitted the stereotypical female ideal who emerged from the wet dreams of every male of the day, at least every adolescent male who had normal raging hormones, and to whose camera-pleasing smile alone you would jack off and cum over and over again. A local icon, she was the object of female admiration and male fantasy, a marauder of innocence. In short she was my antipodean and I was jealous – of her power, her charisma, and mostly her _s_e_x_.

And jealousy was a wicked mother.

Stories of how I had hidden her shoes on the railway tracks and how in order to retrieve them she had risked injury, in the face of an on-coming train, were gleefully distorted by the principals of the school and market grapevine. The school's disciplinary board ran up a charge against me I could not refute since there had been witnesses. The board, in addition to reprimanding me also handed a two-week suspension and five demerits, which translated to five canings at the next school assembly. It was to be my first public caning. Everyone, particularly the little grade-schoolers, had been looking forward to the thrill of watching the flogging of a sophomore's naked bottom, so it must have been a disappointment that the Headmaster overthrew the board's decision on account of my identity. But next I must hold court with Father.

"When did you become so bad?" Father asked tearing the tunic and pants off me till I was standing before him and the family in my white little-boy knickers. I audaciously turned back to look for Mother but a no-nonsense tug to my knickers restored me to his attention. Yanking my knickers down and leaving them at my knees, Father resumed his lecture.

"It's my fault," he pursued, closely observing the naked landscape of my post-pubescent body. "I have seen it many times but I have been ambivalent about it in deference to your Mother. Poor woman – how you break her heart. But this is all going to change. I've let you get spoilt for too long, and I can't allow you to carry on with your deviant ways. Mother and I have lectured you enough, but since you can't learn at this end (pointing to my head), you will learn at this (pointing now to my bottom)."

For the first time Father was looking at me in a different, if terrifying, light, as if for a purpose. He took my hairless penis in his hand, stroked it for a long while and then turned me around to inspect my bottom. It appeared that Father always performed this ritual before he spanked any of his children for the first time. It was a ritual that had taken hold of heart, habit and intellect since he decided that corporal punishment was a non-negotiable tenet in the discipline of children. I was to discover that, throughout the ceremony, he made notes of, and later committed to memory, our body's response and degree of reciprocity to punishment and threat. He had patented this time-tested formula for personalizing each of our punishment needs, to ensure the punishment was meaningful and reliable. I felt his fingers kneading, pinching and squeezing every inch of my buttocks, even between and inside the crack, while he discreetly observed the registers on my face. If this was at all erotic, Father's implacable demeanor made this premise anathema.

I was also to discover that I would be crying long before the spanking started, and this was a tradition that took hold of my own habit and heart. To be thus close to Father, to God, to love .... the tears would find no stronghold with which they could be suppressed.

It took a while but verily Father turned me over his lap, pulling the knickers completely off my weary ankles. I shut my eyes. I waited, conscious of the sublime joy and fear of the moment.

WHACK!

Father's hand came down on my cheek without warning.

WHACK!

I betrayed my years of longing in a tiny emission of a groan.

WHACK!

I groaned louder, understanding now the closeness I had seen between Father and my siblings, when for too many neglected years I was a mere detached observer, always wondering if I were destined never to be a participant in the experience.

WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!

I was yelping now, and kicking and struggling against the grip Father had on my wrists. Then as Father spanked me again and again, I was blubbering, fully understanding the warmth of his hand on my cheeks and the meaning and depth of the charges it carried in punishing my bottom.

It appeared that I must have been screaming for Father to stop because I suddenly felt a dry soreness in my throat. But he simply ignored my pleas. Father was not easily blackmailed to make decisions by anyone else's consensus, particularly the consensus of naughty children.

My punishment took an hour, I knew. The reason I knew the hour had passed was the dining table being heard set for supper at the usual time. By now the spectacle was over, the necessary embraces were quickly exchanged, the admission of having hurt somebody else was commiserated. But none of these meant as much to me as the private knowing that I was finally elevated to a status that equaled my siblings'. I was really Father's son, his seventh son. All it took was a spanking.

When I was permitted to stand up I went to pick up my clothes. This was when the next rule of Father's was given to me. It came plain and simple.

"No, do not touch them," he commanded. "For a day and night, you will remain naked after you've been spanked. I want you to be conscious of your nudity and the reason for your nudity. Come with me. We will pay Uncle Bo a visit immediately as I'd promised him. I must prove that I've kept my word to punish you for the trouble you caused him and his daughter."

Father led me out and we climbed into the back of the limousine. I was naked and, as Father wanted, very conscious of my nakedness. My stomach churned inside me and I was conscious of this too: I was about to be put on display for Ione and her entire family. A non sequitur. I could not help but remember this word that was first used by my elocution master. What I felt about to happen was exactly that.

PART 2

As the limo puffed its way to Uncle Bo's estate in the rolling hills, I became aware of an anxiety that festered and tied all my innards into knots. I wanted to say to Father to please let me be spared the humiliation of displaying my nudity to relatives. I looked down on my limp three-inch and the scant foliage that decorated my nether confines. No, they cannot see this! My hands flew down to my genitals.

"You will not cover yourself when you're in punishment," Father scolded, slapping my wrists. "If I wanted you to be covered, I would have clothed you."

I had reached a point where I could not care anymore for his strictures, or that I was being punished, or that he was God to me. Protocol apostatized by duress, I threw my head against his chest.

"But Papa, I'm going to be fourteen," I cried.

Alas, this was all I could manage to say. How pathetic that words, that had been indispensable at avoiding past conflicts, should fail me at this instant. What I had really wanted to say was I was growing into a man now, and I had man-organs and man-hair. But Father aborted my designs, pushing me away. He held me firmly by the shoulders, a gesture I'd learn to equate with censure.

"Oh, do you only now know to feel shame?" he chided. "It's too late for that. You should have thought about guarding your shame when you decided to pull your juvenile prank. Now sit up straight and face the consequence like the man you try to imply you are but cannot say it outright because you well know that you're a naughty little boy."

I buried my head in my hands. My knowledge of the vagaries of Ione's passion apprised that as soon as all this was over, she was bound to build a calumny about the whole affair. I thought it would be just as bad as if she were to take out an advertisement in the papers about it. In fact, she just might for news involving the august was always worthy media morsel and people got rich exploiting it.

We were now navigating the lanes up the verdant hills in which Ione's family's mansion was nestled. I felt the urge to pee. I was also sweating badly and later, following me out of the car, Father glared at the wet spot on the seat that I was leaving in my wake. He shook his head.

Ione's parents looked stern as the adults surrounded me in a circle that kept contracting. After the customary lip-services and greetings, Father prodded me ahead to Uncle Bo. Too mortified to eyeball anyone, I hung my head to my chest. My hands had been cupped over my private parts since I entered the living room, and still were, even as Father pushed me towards Uncle Bo and his wife, Kei. I knew Father must disapprove so I hazarded a glance. He was scowling but said nothing of it. Instead he had ordered me to turn around. I acquiesced, only to feel his heavy hand pressing on my back to force me to bend over.

"You can see, Brother," Father began, "that I have kept my word to you and that I stand on my principles. Han is my beloved son, and your nephew, but neither excuses him from civility. Nor is he excused from punishment for the violation of civility, which was what he did in committing the outrage on fair Ione. I know I cannot make amends for Ione's suffering, but I know that Han has been sufficiently taught what is virtue, and what evil, this day. I am certain he will not dare repeat the outrage for he knows the punishment will be more severe the next time."

During the next five minutes, longer from my place in condemnation, my buttocks were subjected to my relatives' inspection. I felt my bottom pinched, poked at and squeezed all over again. My anus was not spared either. I cannot now overstate the awfulness I felt to be naked and have my bottom put under the close scrutiny of relatives' eyes. I was left with only the consolatory news that Ione's brothers were away at camp.

Next came the apologies I was compelled to make according to Father's instructions. I went to face Ione first.

"I'm sorry for taking your shoes and hiding them, and for putting you in a life-threatening situation. If you want, you may spank me further," I murmured to my cousin.

Ione graciously shook her head.

"Thank you," I said.

I went to Auntie Kei next.

"I'm sorry for causing you distress. If you so wish, you may spank me further," I intoned.

Auntie Kei repeated her daughter's charity, and I thanked her also. But I also felt sorry that she had fallen into apoplexy from worrying about her only daughter. I knew I must take the blame.

Last of all, I made my apology to Uncle and asked for further punishment, as he deemed appropriate, though I was expecting that he would readily forgive me. With Auntie Kei and Cousin Ione, I had not dared to be presumptuous, but Uncle was more predictable. And I was his favorite nephew after all.

How wrong I was.

"Go upstairs and wait for me, then," he said. "You know the room."

I turned to Father in hope that he would advance a protest or question on my behalf. He was expressionless and for a moment maintained a tight-lipped imperiousness that was unrecognizable to me. I thought that perhaps he was waxing melancholic about Uncle's decision.

"Do what your elders tell you," Father suddenly barked, shaken from his reverie. "Have you forgotten your manners?"

I had spent many summer holidays in this estate. I had even grown up with Ione and her older brothers, playing in these grounds and among the catacombs of the house. I knew every corridor and postern and stairwell that had always echoed of things past: the broken roller-skate, the forsaken rag doll with the torn-off arm, the discarded pawn jettisoned from the chess set. So I easily found the guest chamber.

I found the mirror quite easily too. For as far back as I could remember, the mirror, framed in jade and dated in the eighteenth century, had stood on the cul-de-sac on the end of the short corridor of the annex that was used as a dressing room. It was the first time since my spanking that I was able to seize an opportunity to examine the bruises taking form on my bottom. In fact I was eager to see them. Standing with my back to the full-length mirror, I doubled over from my waist and put my head between my spread thighs. It was a marvel – my two rounded plump cheeks were a palette of purple, green and red, that reminded me of a pre-schooler's finger painting. I smiled happily as I remembered how my cheeks came to be in that state.

But now I was hearing footsteps approaching the chamber. I straightened up and hastened to the bed. I sat on the eyelet covers, my hands between this and my warm buttocks. Father, Uncle Bo and Auntie Kei were too soon at the door.

"Stand up, son," Father said. "Hands by your sides." He seemed to me, sad, though he assumed a peremptory tone. You did not want to test him in this mood.

Then I heard all about how Cousin Ione had had to walk on her bare feet to the scandalous site, how the long walk on the dirt had been the ruination of the tender flesh of her feet whose soles were now covered in blisters and sores. I also heard that for this Uncle Bo must spank me for justice's sake, so then I must stretch out on the bed and be prepared to receive the punishment I deserved.

I did not see Uncle Bo fetch the cane as I was being busied for my punishment. Father helped lay me on my back, raising my arms above my head and warning me to keep them there until everything was over.

Auntie Kei then disappeared behind me and Uncle Bo re-appeared to take her place at my feet. If they were playing a game, it would have been comical. I could only wish they were because I saw it next – Uncle's cane. It was a foot in length and two inches in diameter at the handle that tapered to an inch's diameter at the pointed end.

"Papa!" I let out a frightful scream. I was ready to spring up and flee but Auntie was holding down my wrists. It seemed like a conspiracy of the adults to be this absurdly vindictive towards a mere child, I wanted to cry out.

I went on to cry and could not stop throughout the time I was caned. First my legs were lifted up so that my feet could be presented to Uncle's cane. Uncle whipped each of my feet on their soles six times and I had thought that, by the end of it, I would surely be crippled. I was not, of course.

In my weakened state, I allowed Father to hold my legs up together. He held them crossed at the ankles. Auntie Kei cupped my penis and testicles in her hands as if they had to be protected. My tears did nothing to waver my uncle who imposed the cane very harshly on my raised bottom. He gave me just five lashes but they raised painful welts and created scars that only faded after two months.

Screams – horrid, unquelled, and mine – they were all I was aware of from the time that Father quietly wrapped me in the eyelet covers and arranged me in the car, to my arrival at the safety of my bed chamber.

And non sequitur – it first visited my thoughts a few hours ago, and I was hearing it again the whole time that Father bore me to my chamber and put me to bed.

Non sequitur – indeed, I had only wanted to level things between my siblings and me. It was not supposed to end this way. I had only wanted the same kind of bond they shared with Father. But here it was, a cast of a hundred trespassers in what was to be my moment with Father alone.

I spent the night in tearful introspection as arguments cluttered all other fronts. I would learn later that the womenfolk, led by Mother, had scored a coup with Father's heart, securing his promise that no other, except himself, must ever again lay their hand on his children to punish them.

At last when peace was restored to the house, First Brother came to minister to me. He sat at my head.

"How could you?" I heard my stepbrother ask. There was no hint of judgment, only sadness, in his voice. "I know how hard you try to be bad. I even know why. But this really was stupid."

"I thought you loved me, Mishka," I complained. "You said I was the only one."

"Don't be naοve," he replied. "You're my brother."

"Half brother," I said, correcting him, "and Ione's your cousin! Why must it be her? Why is she your girlfriend?"

My stepbrother regarded my riposte in surprise, then said gently: "Is this what this was all about? You were jealous."

"Yes." My decision not to dissimulate came as a surprise even to myself.

First Brother climbed under the covers. He held me.

When I felt safe and emboldened, I continued: "Do you think you could make love to me someday? I mean, when I'm older? When I'm your age?"

He let out a deep sigh and held me tighter, smothering me. "Shut up and go to sleep," he whispered.

He found my penis, wet and hard.

"You've earned it, you little pervert. I love you. I always have. And Father, too. You have us both."

THE END

© August 1998, JRK. This revised version is copyright, November 2000.


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