SSC 2009: The Naughty Chair, by John Marks

This is a work of fiction.
(425 Words)

The Naughty Chair

She couldn't get the image of the chair out of her mind. The Naughty Chair. A simple wooden four-legged school-room chair. It sat in the discipline room, with its wood-strip floor and wood-paneled walls, its old-fashioned blackboard, and the leather-covered chair that was HIS. And the implement cupboard. That was all there was in the room.

Today she had been caught out. It was just an innocent expletive, in a moment of stress. But such excuses wouldn't fly with him -- the rule was no bad language, ever. So she was confined to her room, waiting for her appointment with the Naughty Chair. Told to think about her behavior, she was instead obsessing over her punishment.

Soon -- all too soon -- she would be led down to the discipline room by her ear. She would be scolded, her skirt pinned up, her panties lowered. She would be bent over the back of the Naughty Chair, hands on the seat. Then he would take the ruler, or maybe the strap, and paint her bottom bright red. She would be wriggling and crying her eyes out. Oh, how she hoped he wouldn't use the cane, too. Probably not -- she hadn't been defiant, nor lied. But it would still hurt like blazes.

Then she would find herself sitting, her bare bottom on the hard seat of the Naughty Chair, facing a corner of the discipline room, a bar of soap held in her teeth, her hands on her head. Half an hour she would spend in the chair, or maybe an hour. Her eyes would be red from crying, and her bottom would stay hot on the chair seat.

After her corner time, it would be back up to her room for an early bed time, probably without supper. If she had taken her punishment well, she would be allowed to rinse her mouth from the taste of soap.

She hated her punishments, her encounters with the Naughty Chair. She hated being told that she had been a Naughty Girl, hated being treated like a child. She hated crying herself to sleep after a punishment session. Yes somehow, she knew that she needed it. Knew that without his care, his strictness, his enforcement of the rules, she would go way off the rails. Spankings HURT, but she felt loved and cared for afterwards. Still she could do with feeling that love and caring another time, just now.

Just then, she heard footsteps, his footsteps, coming up the hall towards her door. Her time was up. The Naughty Chair was waiting.

-JM

Pablo email

Good, solid work here. Nothing terribly original, but makes perfect use of the picture - and, notably, tells the story with visual style and precision, which is exactly right for the category. Progressing in a form of future tense, and then screeching back to the present, matches the lead character's expectation and dread nicely, although it can be a colder, flatter exercise than a narrative in which things actually happen. The largest gap here for me is any real sense of character. The 'characters', such as they are, are really just thin archetypes. Some small scattering of specific details about their lives and personalities would help to give them shape and make them feel more real.