A Short Story By Mr Strict
Her "drawers" are open in the back, white pantaloons with all the ruffles and lace of the Victorian age.
The house too is Victorian; the heavy furniture, the ornate bed, the muted colors all anachronisms, all Dickens come to life.
And as she stands in the upstairs bedroom, the maid's room, changing, admiring herself in the gold-framed mirror that hangs there, she thinks about the punishment to come. How it too will be Victorian in its timbre, in its severity.
She turns that word over in her mind, "severity," changing her pose so that she can see her bare white cheeks protruding through the opening in the pantaloons.
"Severity," she thinks, recalling the saddlestrap she saw in his hands, the ivory handled hairbrush on the sideboard downstairs.
"Severity," she thinks, her bottom tightening involuntarily as she thinks about the two-tailed tawse he showed her, worn, but still limber, the leather faded from many years of use. Many years of application across the bent bare buttocks of other girls in other times.
She goes back to the bed to wait, the last image firmly in her mind, the girl, admonished, told to change, returning shame-faced to the master's chambers, to stand in the corner and wait, skirt up, pantaloons open. Waiting, while he finishes entering the day's accounts in his ledgers; waiting, the cold air across the warm skin of her cheeks, her bottom bared and on view to him.
Waiting. The two-tailed tawse on his desk as she waits, waits to be bent over with her skirt hitched high and her bottom exposed for chastisement. The tawse on the table, the saddle strap carelessly draped over the back of the study sofa, draped where she soon will be draped.
The leather ottoman waiting to be positioned in the middle of the room, the cold leather under her bare tummy as she waits for the "hygiene" that precedes correction. She tries not to think about that as she sits on the bed, feeling her cheeks tense, feeling the butterflies that flutter in her tummy.
"A full Victorian correction," he promised her. What any maid would have gotten at her master's hands, any unruly servant. The exposure, the unveiling and viewing, the corner while she waits and imagines her fate.
The hygiene, the antique syringe he's going to use, the embarrassment of having it done to her. Having him do it, the soapy injection in her bowels while she bends over the ottoman and takes it there, up her still white-cheeked behind.
The exposure, the hygiene, the corporal correction.
She sits on the bed, her bottom bare through her pantaloons, waiting, projecting herself forward in time to his arrival as she waits.
The door to her room is closed; she sits and waits for it to open, for him to come in and take her to him.
To put her over his lap, for the punishment to begin.
The waiting is intolerable.