(Author's note: Owing to errors in syntax, lexicon and title, this story has been revised and re-posted. Thank you, Pebe and St. John, for pointing them out.)
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Nudity is underrated. I subscribe to this belief without shame.
It was the long summer, and the scorching sun had sent us scampering to the backyard where my father had built us a large swimming pool on its half acreage. I was thirteen but I knew how privileged I was. I knew that in a class-conscious society, my family was mired on the acme of its social and political echelon. But with the country's history of revolutions, I was not ignorant that our position was not unshakable.
This afternoon, I was in the company of all my brothers and sisters. These included my half siblings, who were Papa's offspring with First Mother: First Brother Mishka, Second Brother Kishern, Fourth Brother Tzrhan, and their sisters Rehan, and twins Shehnaz and Xinli; Papa's progeny with Second Mother were there too: Fifth Brother Jorhan, Sixth Brother Erzhen and their sisters Arishka and Elfinaz; and my beloved full brother, who was Papa's scion with his third consort, was also there: my little autistic Jieshan.
In all 12 of us, but someone was missing. I scanned the heads buoyed on the glassy surface of the water. It was Third Brother, Quiyern. I did not see him anywhere. At once, I assumed that he was out on another date again.
We were a long time in the backyard. The sun was starting to meld all things under it in a burst of Santa Fe colors. Suddenly in the heat of the afternoon, a cry rang out to shatter our lazy repose on our plastic floats and those inflatable morphous rafts. Unable to swim and aquaphobic, I had been sitting on the edge of the pool, lethargically dipping my toes to test the water, and so I was the first to spring up. Besides, I had run out of excuses for not getting into the water with the rest.
"There's going to be a circus again everybody!" I yelled wickedly in my still-unbroken voice, knowing too well the meaning of the shrill cry.
I raced back into the house and Father was just pulling Quiyern's white brief to his ankles. Quiyern stood before Father, all of twenty-two years old, 5 feet 8 inches tall and still being spanked when he deserved it. I peeped through the aperture between the Indian ivory door and the Chinese accordion screen of the living room. Quiyern's penis was erect while Father held it in his palm for one of a spectrum of reasons known only to himself. He was scolding my red-faced stepbrother at the same time. I giggled unheard.
"No more late nights." "Get your grades back up or it's the military school for you." "Tell Leann she will just have to find someone else to take her to the dance." These were but some of the fragmented ultimatums I was overhearing, but they were adequate for any discerning bystander, not unlike myself, to draw an educated conclusion about Quiyern's infraction. Father, it seemed, had just received Quiyern's academic scores and an accompanying note of warning from the university.
Far too hot to stand away from a cooling fan, I entered the living room gingerly and caught Father throwing me a glance. I bit down on my lower lip and shot him back my most cherubic mask of innocence. Ignoring my intrusion, he turned back to the task of the moment. I heard Father's imperative that Quiyern hand him his underwear. While Third Brother bent to retrieve his brief from his ankles, I stole a peek at his smooth scrotum. My stepbrother was developing like a mythical deity. Desperate promises spilled from his lips while he handed Father his protective covering, but Father responded with a somber invitation that he now climb over his knees to receive the 100 hand spanks. Like Shakespeare's love-struck Romeo, I longed at the same time, to be my father's hand and Quiyern's bottom. Both were objects of beauty in my childlike perception.
Father rested his hand on my stepbrother's plump cream-colored bottom and then returned to attend to me. He asked me what my business was. I said that I was bored and hot, and then added, "may I please watch?"
Father nodded but Quiyern protested. A quick smack of Father's hand on his bottom cheeks silenced his protest immediately.
"Did you not often watch when I was spanking Mishka or Kishern or even Rehan?" Father asked mindfully.
Quiyern nodded with a defeatist resolve. I giggled again and approached the settee beside Second Mother. In respect to my Mama Number Two, I kept a safe distance from her, however. My bare feet stuck out of the edge of the deep white settee and I swung them to a tune audible only to myself. Mama swatted my knees to make me sit still.
About the same time, Papa had given Quiyern's bottom his first swat. I had missed it on account of Mama's poor timing. But I had heard Quiyern groan. This was replied with nine successive smacks placed all over his raised derriere, and my stepbrother was starting to kick his legs. Papa maintained his rhythm after this preliminary warm-up set and thereafter spanked Third Brother's naked bottom in sets of five smacks each, which were then followed by a five-minute pause. During this time, Father gave his sagacious apothegm for a successful life, while Quiyern cried.
In the course of the spanking, Father also studied the way his third heir was responding to his punishment. He seemed to increase the pace and severity of his spanks when he was midway through completion. He was raising his hand so much higher and letting it plummet down brutally on Quiyern's fleshy underlayers over and over again about twenty times.
WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! WHAP!
Father had already spanked Quiyern seventy times when he decided to rest. This meant he had arrived at the part we dreaded most, yet longed for, for its intimacy could very well be equated with a love affair. It was the time Father reached under to press our g-spot and then forced open our anus. Once that was accomplished, he spanked us on our hole. He did this to both his sons and daughters. This act in its purity of purpose touched the deepest chord of our most primal of instincts and whether or not any of us children admitted to it, we never outgrew that longing, for it always bonded us to our father.
I observed Quiyern's thighs automatically spreading apart at Father's manipulating his genitals. Father menaced his son's puckering hole extremely harshly before the latter could voyage to its erotic detritus and throw Father's objective askew.
Soon Quiyern was yelling and howling at his anus's being exposed, vulnerable and spanked before witnesses. He even dared to plead that Father allowed him some slack. Father purposely ignored him. In fact the plea was a serious infringement of his ordinance. None of us had ever been allowed to negotiate our own punishment with Father. Father later reminded my stepbrother of this and continued to see his mission to its bitter end.
The end did come, much to Quiyern's sorrowful relief. Almost an hour had passed by then. Father raised his scion up and because Quiyern was his big and heavy boy now, Father let him down gently on the sofa and the men hugged each other for a long time. Then, Father ordered Quiyern to stand up and turn around. Quiyern's penis was still erect and even wet on the slit.
Now Father was rubbing cool salve into his buttocks and his anus, which were a prism of colors although crimson dominated, and I imagined that Third Brother must be very sore, too. I envied this intimate moment between them and so quietly and introspectively slipped away.
"Was it fun?" Mishka asked as I re-joined my siblings at the pool.
I nodded, smiling, but I felt also an emptiness I could not comprehend.
Just then Quiyern appeared. He had been sent outdoors to contemplate his punishment and resolution and to be further humiliated by displaying his nudity to all of us. I went to his assigned corner near a rubber plant whose outward-spanning wax-buffed leaves were strategically covering his potent emotions. I lifted up the branches and admired his potency. Quiyern blushed. This stepbrother was so beautifully made that God must have taken His time with this one.
"Stop it!" Quiyern scolded me. Mishka joined him in reprimanding me.
"I thought you wanted me to teach you to swim," Mishka said. "Now come on, before it's time for supper."
Of course I wanted to learn to swim. I was also rejoicing that Mishka could take time off his busy work and philanthropic schedules to make our family activity whole. But I was still feeling envious of Quiyern. I wanted to be him now. Or if not him, I wanted to take his place in the corner. He had been the focus of all of Father's attention today.
And so I did it - I yanked down my bathing suit and discarded it on top of my towel. I went and stood beside Quiyern. I told him that I would keep him company for as long as he had to be stood up with all his aesthetic nudity.
"Thanks," he smiled, "but it's not necessary. I'm fine."
"But I know you're fine. That's just the point," I suddenly said, and I amazed myself. I could not have thought that my own evaluation of myself was cogent but it did make sense to hear myself verbalize why I was feeling such envy for my half brother.
Quiyern shrugged his shoulders cryptically. Thereafter he and Mishka gave me up to my facetious caprice.
I must have been standing with my stepbrother under the ravaging ultra violet rays for about half an hour when Second Mother suddenly made an appearance. She seemed displeased with me. I had not known it at the time, but I was to discover later that she had gone back to Father to complain that I was making a mockery of her son or else of decency for flaunting my nudity. For shortly after she left, a servant came for me and escorted me back to Father's Study.
"Why are you naked, son?" Father asked me, as soon as he had sat me on his lap. My penis felt crushed between his legs and my bottom.
"I only wanted to keep Quiyern company, Papa," I said half-truthfully, wincing loudly at my impaled two-inch.
Father carefully dug out my penis and comforted it in his palm. He seemed to be weighing it and commented that I must drink more milk. I wasn't certain if he meant it for the benefit of my penis or overall development but I said I should try, and added as a reminder, for he was sometimes very long-winded, that milk made me sick. I believed the doctors had a name for people with symptoms like mine - lactose intolerant, and told him so.
"Do you like being naked?" Father asked finally.
"I don't know," I stammered, confused at the question and what it implied.
"Why are you running around without covering?" Father asked me more lucidly now.
"Papa, you taught me there was no shame," I answered vaguely. I was starting to weep at what he was implying about me, or about my sense of morality. "You taught us all."
Father gave my second mother an accusing look, which did not escape me.
"If a strange man or woman came to you at school, say, and asked you to follow them," Father now quizzed, "and then told you they wanted you to take off your clothes?"
"I wouldn't do it, Papa," I replied, now letting my tears flow for I was frightened and confused. Was my Father going to give me away? "It would not be right," I added.
"Why, Han?" Father pursued with some solicitude about my tears.
"Because," I answered, "they are not family. They are bad people and there would be shame."
Father let me get down and got up. He took my hand and was about to lead us out the door.
"Where are we going, Papa?" I shrieked. He was going to give me away after all!
"We're going to visit Uncle Bo," he answered tersely.
I pulled away but Father's hold was too tight for my eighty pounds to resist.
"Papa, why?" I cried. "What's my transgression that you want to display me naked to Uncle? Please, Papa, don't! I have done no wrong. I'm indecent! I have no covering."
I remembered only too well how ashamed and humiliated I had felt on my recent visit with Uncle Bo when my uncle had betrayed for all time our friendship by punishing my feet and backside so painfully. Sure, I had deserved it for the anguish I had caused his family but he need not have caned my feet.
But I had managed to stop Father in his tracks. It had seemed, at least to me, that I had managed to change his mind about visiting my uncle. So relieved was I that I flew into Father's arms and burst into tears in his belly. What I had not known was that he had just been putting me to the test all that time.
"You're not indecent. You're naked, that's all," Papa said tenderly correcting me.
"At home, yes, Papa. But I would be indecent in Uncle's house," I sobbed.
"There's no shame in being naked at home," he suddenly intoned, "no shame at all. You have that right."
Father pressed me against his bosom and hugged me. Then he turned to Second Mother and said: "I swear. You lot will give me apoplexy with your whims. Are you satisfied now, Mother? Really, you should be grateful that Han empathizes with his brothers at all."
Errata most pharisaical! It wasn't empathy so much as the twin evils of covetousness and envy that provided the motivation for my pubescent nihilism. Once more, they could not keep me out of trouble.
But I said nothing to correct Father. It was rare for Father to make the wrong observation of any of us. Besides, I did not want Second Mother to hold the trump card in what was becoming clear to me was a conflict of opinion she was having with Father concerning my having done a strip tease today.
"Put on your trunks and you may go back to your sisters and brothers," Father told me.
"Yes, Papa," I said, nodding sadly. I wanted so much to swim in the nude. I remembered that Mishka, my oldest stepbrother, had promised to teach me to swim and said that I could swim naked if that was what I wanted.
Mishka let me ride on his back in the pool. He was the Sea Dragon and I the mighty corsair of the ancient junk. I was still scared of the water and refused to be thrown in, and was just content to ride piggy-back on First Brother. Besides, I no longer wanted to learn to swim today or ever. I was disturbed and troubled. Second Mother's apocryphal had made me feel ashamed to be naked and I didn't even want to be clad only in my trunks. But as the evening wore on, gentle Mishka and the cool water helped me forget my shame.
Then, just when I thought it was safe to enjoy the feel of the water lapping my toes beneath me and without any warning, Mishka heaved me from his back over the edge of the pool. In a seamless move, that was almost poetry in motion, I was in Father's arms. He put me down on the stone floor. I looked up at two faces dark against the blare of the sunlight.
"Your mother tells me you were specifically told to wear the striped trunks and not this," Father said to me while Mother gave me a surreptitious wink.
I sensed from the wink that there was an adult conspiracy, which Mother was trying to intimate to me in nuances but I was missing all her signs.
"Is this right?" Father asked again.
"Yes, sir," I answered, "but ...."
"No 'buts'," Father interjected. "If you were told to do something and you failed to do it, would it constitute disobedience?"
"Yes, sir, but ...." I said again.
"I said, 'no buts'," Father scolded, and then removed my bathing suit right there and then in front of all my siblings. He turned me over his knees while he sat down on the wooden bench. I was getting a spanking?
Indeed. WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! In a daze, I was smacked twenty times on my bottom. Father never even waited to hear my explanation. I couldn't wear the striped trunks because I had outgrown them. I was, after all, growing bigger all the time. I had told Momma this and she had understood. So why was Father confusing me this way? I cried because it was so unlike him to be this unjust and impatient with me.
After the spanking, Father sat me up. I sobbed on his shoulders for a while. The humiliation of being spanked outdoors and sporting an erection in front of my siblings had been too awful. I wanted Father to hug me forever or until my erection had abated. I didn't get my wish.
For Father had committed another anomalous act. He sent me back to the water, naked because that was specified as a post-spanking requirement, but I was also allowed company and play this time. I wanted to ask him why but he had said again, "no buts", as if he had read my mind.
"And get on with the swim lesson," he told my First Brother and me.
Carrying me to that other mythical god with the incomparable beauty, Father himself restored me to my pantheon that was First Brother's back, at last naturally naked as I had wanted, and happier than a drunken lark ought to be.
It was incredible how I overcame my fear of water that evening itself, and before twilight descended to cool the air and everyone's temper, I had already learned to paddle furiously like 'Tibet', my father's great hunting mastiff.
THE END