The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
This is a work of fiction. The events described here are imaginary; the settings and characters are fictitious and are not intended to represent specific places or living persons.
This is the first chapter of the George and Lisa story, a part of the Gulf Coast universe.
I have told versions of this story before in other venues. It took place over fifty years ago, during the height of the Cold War, which explains some anachronisms. George was seven and in the first grade and his sister Lisa was five and in preschool. Their father and an uncle were military officers, frequently away on deployments. It was a time of great global tension and the adults had consciously decided not to burden children with the knowledge of current events.
Told in the voice of Lisa:
Dad was away, and mom was over at our Uncle Rene’s church doing something. The church was the center of our community and sat at the opposite end of our block on the parish road. George and I were supposed to be over at the park which was catty-corner across the intersection from our house. Supposed to be running, playing, and burning off a child’s natural excess of energy.
But for some reason the two of us had decided to come back inside of the house. “Why” is just a small detail from years ago. I don't remember if we were playing with a ball, or just running through the house being typically rambunctious kids. But what happened was totally predictable; We broke something -- a pottery vase mom had sitting on a bookcase in the living room.
Everything was pretty tense back then. At the time, we didn't know why everyone seemed to be constantly on edge. Of course, we figured it all out later. Mom’s husband, and her big brother were both overseas in harm’s way. Mom wasn't the sort of person who would be unreasonable, and I don't actually know whether it was me or my brother who broke the vase. Of course that detail didn't matter either. We were playing together where we shouldn’t have. Neither of us were innocent.
George showed his true colors as we stood there, looking at the pieces on the floor.
I began to cry.
“What's the matter,” George asked.
I continued to sob.
“Lisa, are you hurt?”
Typically his first concern was for me.
I shook my head side to side and pointed down. “Look,” I said through my tears.
“Maybe we can fix it,” George doesn’t fret problems, he looks for solutions.
“Really?”
“Maybe,” George said. He went to the utility room to get the small metal dust pan.
He collected all the pieces he could find from the wooden floor and placed them in the dustpan. Then we walked to the kitchen table. The vase was a Southwest American Indian design, of clay pottery, and it must have looked as if we were junior archaeologists with an ancient find.
I sat there with rapt attention as my older brother laid out all of the recovered pieces in logical order before going and getting the Elmer's Glue from the kitchen cabinet. The vase was a sturdy, not delicate, design and there weren't that many pieces to glue back together.
As he had with the balsa wood airplanes that he built with dad, George took all the pieces and fit them together making sure they would fit, before applying glue to any surfaces. Then, once he was happy with the fit I held the pieces while George sparingly applied glue. Soon, we’d put everything back together. It wasn't perfect, but you had to look close to see the hairline cracks.
It hadn't taken that long, but in those few minutes my emotions had gone on a figurative roller coaster ride. My guilt over disobeying mom and playing in the house and breaking something that was important to her. The love shown to me by George in fixing it. Well, that’s the way I saw it, even though he was at least equally responsible for breaking it in the first place.
Then, I felt guilt again over the realization that we were about to deceive mom by simply putting it back on the bookcase as if nothing had happened.
I started to cry again.
“What's the matter? George asked.
“I have to tell her.”
“No, you don't.”
“Yes, I do. It wouldn't be right to pretend like it didn't happen.”
“I'll tell her,” he said.
“But we both broke it.”
“But I'm older. I should have told you not to play in the house.”
“You don't tell me anything.”
“No, but I should have. Mom isn't really going to be that upset…” he said. “I don't think…”
“Maybe.”
I couldn't put it into words back then, but I have an overdeveloped superego. Perhaps as a result of having a grandfather, uncle, and later a couple of lovers who were preachers. Or maybe, as my cousin Eva tells me, it's the other way around. We are drawn to seek truth in our life’s work by our superegos. I'm always more troubled by what's right and what's wrong than most of the people around me. I'm always thinking about what I'm doing and whether I should be doing it or not.
People might think that’s funny. Because I'm constantly weighing the options and then making the choices that society disapproves of. Doing things like fucking my brother and my cousins, as well as stuff society might give you a pass on if you just said: “Oh, mea culpa, you know it just happened. We were drunk and (Satan, hormones, sorrow, loneliness, emotions, or some other force of the universe) took over and I tried but I couldn't control it.”
I never “cop-out.” I am in control of myself, and I tell people that I have considered all of the opinions before me and I chose to ignore societal convention because what I chose was the best option available to me -- all things considered. I fuck my brother because he is the best guy that I know. Maybe I have an overdeveloped ego as well.
“I should be punished,” I said.
In later years, George’s response to me would be: “Why? You are already punishing yourself.” But back then he simply disagreed with me.
It was the beginning of this dynamic that we share to this day five decades later. I was five-years-old, and I didn’t have the words to express it yet. But I understood that if I suffered a little bit for doing what I knew that I shouldn’t have done, then I would feel better, my penance would be served.
(As an aside, I once conservatively figured that George’s penis or his fingers had been inside of me -- on average -- six days a week for fifty weeks a year over a period of fifty years. That’s fifteen thousand times. I offer no apologies for fucking George, and I don’t plan on ever stopping.)
“Spank me,” I said.
“What?”
“Spank me for breaking the vase.”
“Mom wouldn’t spank you for breaking a vase.”
“No, and that’s why you have to.”
George pointed at the big window over the sink.
We lived on a corner lot and were in the kitchen. We were higher than the cross street but that window looked right out onto it. The street was close, it was only ten feet or so to the sidewalk. A bigger concern should have been how mom, a cousin, or an aunt or uncle could have walked through the back door at any moment. Everyone in the extended family had a key.
“Let’s go upstairs,” I said.
It was an older and rather unique house, having been adapted and added-onto over the years. My brother and I had our own bedrooms -- with sharply sloping ceilings -- in the front and back of a converted attic. A tiny bathroom was under a dormer in between our rooms. I walked up the stairs and sat naked on the fuzzy cover that mom had put over the lid of the toilet. As a kid I preferred these one-piece jumpers, so to get a bare-ass spanking I had taken it off.
It was the sixties, and mom and dad weren’t prudish. George and I had been bathed together. We played naked in the sprinkler in the backyard, and sometimes inside when it was really hot. We shared a bathroom. Neither of us were ever known to close doors. The prevailing attitude was “it’s only a big deal if someone makes it one.”
“Spank me.”
“Are you sure,” George asked.
“Yes,” I said. I needed it to make me feel better.
“Okay,” George said. When we repeated the process later he would add: “It's just that it’s weird.”
That first time it was implied, not said: It was weird. But it was also true. The two of us were finding on our own -- without anybody having explicitly told us -- just how weird the intricacies of human sexuality were. How something that you wouldn't enjoy in a non-sexual context could actually feel really good. Of course this was the first time. It was five and six years before each of us hit puberty.
George sat on the edge of the bathtub and I stood. Then I slowly bent over his lap. I'm not sure where we both learned how to do this, deliver a bare-butt spanking. We probably extrapolated it from a fully clothed version on a television show. Because the singular time that mom ever spanked me was actually two years later.
At first George half-heartedly slapped me on my bottom a few times. I had to tell him to do it harder because it wasn't feeling like a real punishment. It was just, well, what I would call in retrospect, “love taps.”
That first time my wonderful big brother George spanked me on my naked ass, he did not do all of the glorious things that he would learn to do for me in the future. I’m not certain that the scene was even sexual at the time, although like many it is in retrospect. It was intimate and definitely a consensual power exchange.
I often ask myself, how much do children pick up from their surroundings without being explicitly told? How much do they subconsciously observe without being aware of what they are seeing? George and I, with our cousin Jamie, would soon figure out the power exchange dynamic of our parent’s love making, and how mom was sexually submissive to dad. How does that dovetail with many of our first times?
But back then we didn't consciously know everything. For George, whom I honestly think was created by a loving God just for me, it was instinctual. Our first time, after making my bare gluteus maximuses a nice pretty shade of pink with his hand, George carefully, softly kissed each one of my inflamed butt cheeks.
“Gotta kiss it to make it better,” he said, quoting mom.
Aftercare? Does a seven-year-old understand aftercare? George simply loved me. He would do anything that I asked of him within reason. Even something that he didn't have an independent desire to do. But seeing how it affected me got him into the whole scene, maybe not that first time but eventually. And loving me, he was a most willing participant.
In future “sessions” George wouldn't just kiss my buttocks. He would kiss me all over. He especially favored my tiny breasts, which growing up I had a somewhat negative fixation on. Later on, when he would spank me he would make sure to drag the back of a knuckle through my slot to make sure that he was mixing pain with stimulation of the erectile tissue beneath my labia.
Later on, George would intentionally send conflicting signals to my brain. Signals of both pain and pleasure interpolated. Although our cousin Monica would tell us that there really isn't any such thing as “pain” or “pleasure.” There is only physical stimulation that releases neurotransmitters. That our brains receive electrical signals from our genitals. It doesn't really matter what caused those nerve cells to release their chemicals, just that they release them in quantity.
George has always known the way to make my nerve endings release those chemicals in quantity. To send plenty of electrical signals to the pleasure center of my brain… To push me breathlessly over the edge… To make me come and come and come until I am a shivering, wet soppy dishrag. Of course that didn't happen when I was five, and he was seven. We were just learning and creating a framework, the basis for so many wonders which would come later.
On that first day my ass was red. But I no longer felt guilt over what I had done. Only a great love for “my” George and what he had freely chosen to do for me. How much he cared about me, how much he truly loved me.
It may have been the day that I chose to give him my soul.
He helped me to get to my feet and he kissed me on the top of my head as I stood. We walked to my bedroom and found a dress for me to wear. Something that wouldn't touch my inflamed bottom.
Of course with my having a sore buttocks we didn't pick out any panties for me to wear. Perhaps that day was another beginning for us. The first time that I consciously gave up the wearing of panties. Something I frequently do for George’s enjoyment.
We didn't tell mom about the broken vase on that day. Probably more as an oversight because we had found something so much better to think about. But, she deduced what happened later, when not seeing those tiny hairline cracks, she filled it with water. Which, of course, melted the glue.
--Lisa Ann
For the next story in this series, go to The George and Lisa Story, Part 2 of 8: Hide and Seek