The first phase of Smut Marathon 2019 ended on Sunday, with the field cut from 44 to 30 and all scores reset ahead of the knockout rounds. By the slimmest of margins, I topped the cumulative standings from Rounds 1-6, which is extremely gratifying but also no guarantee whatsoever of further success in the challenges to come.
More interesting to me is my score progression over the last couple of assignments. I picked up 17.0 total points over the first three rounds, but virtually doubled that tally in R4-6 (33.6), with my highest score of the competition coming in R6 (13.0). That’s no coincidence: if there’s one thing last year’s Smut Marathon taught me about my own writing, it’s that I’m a lot more comfortable/confident with flash fiction (500-1500 words, broadly speaking) than I am with micro-fiction. As the word count’s risen, so have my scores.
Anyway, that’s not really the point of this post. I wanted to share my R6 story – not just because I’m pretty proud of it (though I am), but because it generated rather more confusion than I was expecting. I won’t say more than that now – don’t want to shape anyone else’s response to it more than I have done already – but after some initial grumbling and eye-rolling, I think it’s going to prove a good lesson in not taking your audience for granted and not assuming they’re going to read something in the way you want/expect them to.
The prompt for this assignment was ‘wedding dress’ and the target length was 450-500 words. I’d love to know what you think, so do please hmu in the comments below or via Twitter.
12 Years
On their first anniversary – three months After The Bad Thing Happened – she went home with a man from her yoga class. Spread out on his dining room table, she stared at the ceiling as he used tracing paper to stencil onto her skin all the names she used to love being called. Slut. Tease. Trouble.
The following year, she pulled up a stool at one of the city’s many student bars, and quickly seduced an earnest young man who was only too happy to masturbate into his stripy M&S boxers, before stuffing the soft, sticky cotton into her mouth.
Third anniversaries are marked with leather, and 45 minutes after she’d handed her trusty paddle to the pro domme quietly recommended by her best friend’s brother over a bottle of wine one night, so was she.
By year five, she longed to feel a man inside her again, so she took that same helpful brother to the bluebell wood she’d played in as a child, and straddled him against the base of a tree. His short, thick cock pulled from her a shuddering wave of nostalgia and grief, and she sobbed into his shoulder till spunk trickled down her thighs.
12 months – and another half-dozen, mercifully less emotive penises – later she attended her first sex party, where she gazed in wonder at the bodies writhing in front of her as she dangled in iron chains from a sturdy wooden beam. It was an awakening she’d expected to have in her mid-20s when she moved to the city, and which she’d rather thought had passed her by.
Their 9th anniversary was the first she spent living with another man, in what proved to be a facsimile of domestic bliss. As instructed, he beat her vigorously with a willow cane, though as with so many things in their relationship, he never quite understood why.
After their 10th anniversary had come and gone (Tinder date, aluminium butt plug; less exciting than she’d hoped), she fell into a deep depression, fuelled by grief that suddenly felt as fresh as it had done in those first foggy days in the hospital. 20 years felt so far away. Too far to cope without her annual celebration of everything that might have been.
And then a breakthrough. An idle Google search. Symbols no-one had told her about. Steel for 11 years – a dildo somehow both easier and more intense than the butt plug – followed by silk for 12.
12 years. In her own way, she felt light and sunny again. Nourished by memories that no longer opened the door for aching sadness, and by the love of a man who knew what he could – and couldn’t – be for her. When she pulled up the skirt of her silk wedding dress – faded grass stains still dusting the hem – and bent over their bed, the first thrust of his cock brought everything full circle.
She closed her eyes and smiled. Gave a silent prayer of thanks. And finally said goodbye.