tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36925250291905772262024-03-15T15:25:02.629-04:00OOF!Beat Up in Front of Herbellypunchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15626322785267248362noreply@blogger.comBlogger54125truetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3692525029190577226.post-57361566863751715202023-10-27T12:22:00.002-04:002023-10-27T16:11:51.530-04:00Lump<h4 style="text-align: center;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 16pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 120%;"><span style="font-family: arial;">LUMP'S
ADVENTURE<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Lump came from far away. Some said one place, some another,
but they all saw the far-away look in his eyes. That look and his quiet calmness, gave him a soft maturity that a few of his peers found highly attractive, if
at first only because he was so different from the other boys.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The local boys were a quick, sharp, deft pack of brutes who loved the alleys. Lump was taller than most, and softer, with warm hands and a firm, round
belly. He had come to their city to study an art with one master. The master
had no other pupils: The only arts that inspired the local boys were boasts and
seductions and fist-fights.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">They resented Lump, when they took any notice of him. He was
a pot-bellied sissy in their world, but his very existence seemed to be
a rebuke to their coarseness. He was an easy mark for them when they felt like
playing the bully or showing off in front of their girls. All he ever got from
the local toughs was a humiliating insult followed by a belly-full of knuckles.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">In this place, men had to be eager
to flash a fist or swing a stout club. The town prized tough aggressive boys who brought a bigger foe to his knees, and Lump was bigger and easier than most all of them. But he walked
everywhere and dutifully took part in the local life.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Yet Lump seemed always half lost in his own world, unaware
of the local toughs as they clouded around him with cruel intentions. Even
after they had jumped him or challenged him and their fists began to clout into
him, he suffered terribly from their plunging blows but he seemed never to
expect them. Or to see that more were coming.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Instead he stood bewildered, absorbing
the violation. A blow that any other boy would anticipate and block, he took
wide open. And his blatant aching reactions — he made no effort to mask his
suffering with manly toughness — only seemed to inspire his tormentors.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVFCPYNhLyGLMHo1GiMBxAIQHwanjDr1kDjx1Fdan-8CVkmB6gPYa7GU8me_OBfANCgxlsP8JwfpBEQS6yeOUa71e4fsAaMfHeJ8N8vURSDm9W4rjB-XUjWv9QGDIye3xLbb5G5zVqTFiK4Y9Vp_xi1rxN98S98KSg5gwyocLFgRu243lK7KiuJ8SWPB_Y/s427/My%20Projectedtg.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="427" data-original-width="400" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVFCPYNhLyGLMHo1GiMBxAIQHwanjDr1kDjx1Fdan-8CVkmB6gPYa7GU8me_OBfANCgxlsP8JwfpBEQS6yeOUa71e4fsAaMfHeJ8N8vURSDm9W4rjB-XUjWv9QGDIye3xLbb5G5zVqTFiK4Y9Vp_xi1rxN98S98KSg5gwyocLFgRu243lK7KiuJ8SWPB_Y/w375-h400/My%20Projectedtg.jpg" width="375" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;"><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;"> </span></o:p></p>
</h4><h1 style="text-align: left;"><span style="line-height: 120%;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: large;">THE BOY
BRAWL</span></span></h1>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Lump's first exposure to the cruel attentions of his new
home had come a week after he arrived, when he was barely in his teens, at the
town's annual Boy Brawl. This was a spectacle in the high springtime: A
mandatory public mass brawl for all resident boys of Lump's age, in the sand arena at
the edge of town. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Lump read the announcement carefully to see if he was excused as a stranger. He wasn't. "Maybe they won't notice me," he thought, but his heart sank.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The fights took place under the eyes of all, and the girls
talked of it eagerly for weeks beforehand, speculating on the likely fortunes
of their favorites. Even the matrons got a gleam in their eyes when they
reminded each other it was nigh.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The citizens filled the arena grandstands, arriving early
for the best views. The boys strode onto the sand at the appointed time. They
stood in a row and bowed stiffly, 40 or 50 of them stripped down for combat. At
a signal from the Master of the Arena, it began. Young men hurled together and
scrummed in a mass in the middle, elbows and fists flying, each lad seeking to
put another in the dust at his feet.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Each one lunged first for a particular rival. For days
leading up to the fight they had taunted and goaded one another. No two fought
as a team; that was considered unsporting.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Lump had no rival, and all the other youths dismissed him and his </span><span style="font-family: arial;">visible curve of belly </span><span style="font-family: arial;">as
too weak and soft to be a threat. But he knew he was expected to make an effort and he wanted the girls to
approve. So after a few minutes hopping from foot to foot at the edge of
the action with his fists raised and feeling ridiculous, he got his nerve up.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">He took a deep
breath and stepped determinedly to a knot of fighters on the edge of the
swirling mass and tried to latch one of the boys around the neck from behind.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The boy never even turned around. As soon as he felt the
grip from behind he instinctively jerked his arm back with a fierce elbow-jab
that rammed full into Lump's belly. It was meant as a mere warding off, and a real fighter would be out of range, but Lump
hadn't braced himself and all but ran his belly into it. The jam caught the soft boy high in the gut and wide open.
It drilled him deep in his stomach-curve.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Lump staggered back and blurted a loud grunt, clutching his
gut, and he blundered in place, howling, for a long time until he got his
breath back. His antic performance was comic relief beside the tight, seething
mass of the fighting, and it drew laughter and mockery from the onlookers.
Above the noise a lusty laugh rang out from the woman who taught dancing to the
girls near the temple, and she finished with an emphatic judgment: "What a
big-belly oaf!"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Lump blushed, and avoided looking up. He slowly pulled
himself upright, and approached the mass again. This time he kept his big belly
out of elbow range. He got as close as he dared, reached in, gripped one boy by
the shoulder, and tried to turn him around. But the lad merely shook him off,
then turned to see who was after him.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">When he saw Lump he sneered. But Lump quickly squared off in what he must have thought was a
fighting stance. His fists were up close to his face. He couldn't help it. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Lump swept his arm in a wide swing toward the boy's face.
The boy, </span><span style="font-family: arial;">a lanky youth with wiry muscles,</span><span style="font-family: arial;"> easily shied back and let the blow whiff past. Then he grinned and punched Lump hard in the stomach. The blow sank deep in his flesh
before Lump even began to react. The punch rippled his middle and drained his
air again with a deep-bellied "OOFF!" and Lump fell and rolled,
kicking and groaning in the sand.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">By the time he was on his knees and breathing right, the
mass brawl had broken up into scrapping pairs. Each
boy took up with a rival equal to his skill and strength. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">But some had no peer
handy.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">So they went after Lump, to bide their time waiting for a worthier foe and to build reputation with the crowed and have some fun at
the expense of Lump's potbelly.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Lump didn't have to go in search of suffering now. It was
delivered to him in heaping helpings. They abused his belly mercilessly with
their knuckles. busting the breath out of him with jabs and chops and yet keeping him on his feet, helpless, for a long dose of stomach-pounding humiliation.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The first boy who deliberately made him a target was a short sparkplug of a lad. The smaller fighter merely menaced Lump with a
fist cocked as if to strike Lump in the mouth, and Lump quickly raised his
hands to protect his face. The eyes in the crowd were on him now, lusting to
see his pain, and his innocent reaction made the dancing mistress smile
wickedly and mutter, "yes, protect your face, you soft-bellied fool!"
while some of the girls who had crowded close to the rail gasped and gripped
the arms of their friends in anticipation.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The smaller boy delivered. His blow packed all his weight. He torqued his arm and stomped forward and rammed the jab-punch deep in Lump's helpless belly. The strike had all the
effect the slugger could have hoped. Lump flew back, arms windmilling, eyes
bulging wide, mouth open round to sound the low, loud <i>"OOOOO"</i> that
announced his gut-suffering.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">He tripped and sprawled in the sand, writhing, and turned on
his side, lost in the pain and panic of a breathless bellyache.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">His smaller
opponent rushed up to him and gave him a firm kick in the stomach. That spilled
Lump onto his back, arms flung wide, in mindless agony, and his tormentor
responded with a firm heel-stomp into his belly. Then he looked down at Lump and
spat, "get up, so I can beat you again!"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Lump, now beside himself in the throes of suffering and
humiliation, nonetheless managed to obey his tormentor as best he could. He got
to his knees, but was too breathless to stand.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The boy grabbed Lump by the hair. Lump's hapless hands flew
to his head. "I said, stand up, SOFT BELLY!" he shouted and as he
said it he delivered a swift boot to the belly of the helpless boy. Lump
collapsed again in the sand.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The merry dancing mistress led the applause and shouts of
approval.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">It was not to his credit that Lump lasted more than half of
the contest. He never managed to land a single blow, and he survived only as a
punching bag, not worth the trouble of any one boy to take him out completely.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">They wouldn't knock him out, and he couldn't defend himself or fight back. All
he could do was take his beatings under the eyes of the whole town. Until at
last he was too deflated to get back on his feet, and crawled on his belly to
safety out of the arena. When he could stand again, he staggered home and up
the stairs to his room, too beaten and exhausted and ashamed to do anything but
throw himself on his bed.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="line-height: 120%;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: large;">HAPPY
RETURNS<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Lump stood at the crest of the hill and took in the view.
The ribbon of road ran in one long curve down into the dingy town that
straggled between the headlands. The green sea rolled beyond. He could still
name the larger buildings: the academy, the dance mistress's school, the
mayory. Off to the left stood the round stump of the arena, with its flag, where
he had suffered such a beating on his introduction to the town 18 years before.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The memories -- and there had been so many beatings dealt to
him in this place -- moved him in no way. He merely remembered them. They left
no mark on his body or mind. His purpose always was elsewhere, and his own.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">And now the path led back to this place. He thought of how
his new friends had shuddered or frowned when he told them where he was bound
-- they had heard his stories -- but he had set out with the same calm good
nature he brought to every task.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">His first purpose here was to again find the one friend he
had made in those years. It was an odd friendship, even he would admit, but he
had kept up his correspondence with her, though they seldom talked of their
realities. She, like he, had lived for the future, in hopes and ideals.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">When he had come here first, a young stranger innocently
walking into a den of menace, he had taken work as a serving boy in a tavern
down the alley from his room. To call it seedy in a place where all had gone to
seed was redundant. But he never saw things as such. It was work done for
silver he needed, and he did it dutifully. Even if on many nights he seemed to
serve more as the sport of the patrons than their server.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Alise Miral had worked the taps and rinsed the pots in the
cellar. She was an orphaned distant cousin of the owners', a little younger
than Lump but already a tall, strapping, strong-minded girl. She was bound for
better things than this scullery work, she would let you know. When she had got
Lump to speak of his own ideals and desires, she instinctively latched on to
them as if they were her own. Some days he felt she was the only other person
in that town with a heart.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">So he would stand at the tables, with his large belly
looming out at eye-level, inviting the attention of the roughs who took the
place for their pleasure den, and patiently take their orders for drink. And he
would go down to Alise and help her pour or prepare what was wanted. The space
for their work was cramped and tight, and close contact simply was part of the
job. It would be nothing odd for Lump to find himself answering her questions
about his destiny, or listening as she described the art she would make
someday, with her pressed up to his belly by the wall behind her, one hand
resting on his upper stomach, the other pointing or gesturing in front of his
face.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">They passed hours in each other's company for two years.
When the owners first noticed, they grumbled that there would be trouble from
such intimacy, but though they watched, nothing ever "progressed," as
they could see it, and soon they lost interest and forgot the pair of oddities
in their employment. Invisible to the world, Lump and Alise in their way had
formed an intimacy all their own.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Often when he came out of the cellar to deliver his orders
his mind was still back with her, formulating the answer to a probing question
Alise had asked, intending to continue their conversation in the cellar. And
often that conversation had to wait.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Some customer, with gnarled fists and a cruel eye, would
have marked him for prey. They resented him for so many reasons -- his quiet
intelligence, his superior manners in an inferior position, the way he casually
wrote what they could never read.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">As Lump walked across the room, the man would veer into him
and bump him hard, then turn on him.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"What do you mean tripping me, you big-bellied
clown?"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Lump would pull himself up and answer mildly, "but I
didn't ..."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"So you call me liar, too?" the thug barked.
"So you think to make an ass of me here in front of all these fine
gentlemen?" A flurry of laughter from the house, where every eye had
turned to get a view of the coming scene.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"No, sir, I merely would point out that
gl-UUUNGHHH!!" which was not at all what Lump had intended to point out,
but which was the sound he was forced to make by the ruffian's bare fist
clomped firmly into his unsuspecting belly.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Lump would flop back into a post or table, instantly helpless
and hurled deep into agony, cradling his belly and making faces. It was his
nature to feel intensely. It was his nature to always be abstracted from the
immediate moment. And sudden attacks froze his mind to the core, left him
unable to anticipate or control anything. He became a mere body -- the big wise
kid had become a tall dummy with a round moon of a belly that pleasingly soaked
up their fists.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The open room, with its hard, stained wood floors, became Lump's
torture chamber, where the tight-fisted fighting man measured up the rage and
resentment of his day, his week, his life, and paid it out in harsh pummeling
fists, plunged one by one into poor Lump's soft belly.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">He'd gore one up into him that hoisted Lump to his toes,
then wrench it out and leave the helpless man leaning forward, mouth hung open,
and before gravity brought Lump down again, the thug would spear the other fist
into Lump's helpless stomach, jiggle his loins and drive him clear across the
room and back to the wall.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">And as Lump stood there sucking air, eyes unfocused, the man
casually strode up to him, looked him up and down, and pronounced his judgment:
"Soft-bellied wimp." Then he walloped Lump in his belly with his
fist, a kettle-drum thump of a stomach-punch that produced another robust
bellypunch grunt.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">His punch was like a hot iron in Lump. The pain and
violation were intense, but the shock went right to his core. He doubled far
over. The crowd laughed richly as they watched Lump do another suffering
stagger-dance, dissolving into softness in front of them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Lift him up," someone called out. "Let's see
your fist-mark on his belly."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">He reached down and hauled Lump up by the collar. Lump's
mouth gaped and he whined, but he had no voice. His hands hung useless at his
sides. The defenseless curve of his belly thrust out, with a visible fist-stamp
pink on his pale flesh.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The thug spun him around and quickly bashed the flat of his
fist against Lump's open belly. When the suffering boy started to fold over
from that, he swung an uppercut under him, caught Lump right in the stomach
with it, and knocked him back upright for more bread-basket punishment.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">He gave Lump a hard uppercut jab high in his stomach. Lump
barked out a sharp "UUH!" and jumped up and backward, smitten with a
wicked belly-ache and breathless lungs. He took the thug's next bellypunch with
his gut pushed out. He doubled over completely, jack-knifed at the waist. His
hands went up under the fold of his body, gripping his stomach where he had
been hit. His mouth gaped open, but no sound came out.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The thug casually tripped him, and he fell to his knees and then
pitched himself forward to the floor in agony. Lump flipped flat on his back,
his manhood flayed. His legs kicked like a coward trying to run away, but they kicked
only air. His mouth made nothing but gaspy, loud, mindless sounds.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The ruffian had had his fill. Sated, smiling, he sauntered
back to his table and returned to his drink, hardly even casting a glance back
at the ruin he had made of the serving boy.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Lump stayed down a long time, but the calls for drink began
to ring out. He fought to his knees, crawled to a post, used it to right
himself. He wobbled to the table and straightened his shirt as best he could,
though his lower belly still protruded, and took the order. Then he shuffled
painfully off to the cellar.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">While this happened, he noticed, the cellar door had stayed
open a crack, even though he always shut it. When he came down the stairs
moaning, he found Alise busy at something. But her hands trembled, and she
could not look him in the eye for some time and her voice had a deeper, quieter
tone. She never spoke a word to him of his frequent beatings and abuse. But he
noticed, too, that after he had gotten his stomach pummeled in the tavern she
found more occasion to have her hand on his bulging belly, and he often felt
her palm rest there, trembling fingers touching him undercurve or upper curve.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="line-height: 120%;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: large;">OLD FRIENDS</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Lump and Alise were to meet at the tavern where they both
had slaved, long ago. This was her idea. He knew she had moved on from the
tavern shortly after he left the town, but she still lived in its neighborhood.
Alise had written him, however, that he wouldn't be able to find her house in
the town's labyrinthine streets. "Meet me in the tavern. Be there in the
morning, before there's a crowd," her last message said. Lump thought his
memory for such things was excellent and he easily could find her new home, but
he went along with her suggestion.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">He found the tavern little changed outside; the same wood
and plaster, only darker and dingier, if that was possible. He stood there lost
in harsh memories as clouds and sun passed over him, with his hand against the
battered door. He remembered Alise's hand laid on his stomach in just that way.
He sighed and pushed inside.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The warm, stale air of the place hit him like a remembered
perfume from hell. He stood blinking in the dim interior. A young girl he did
not recognize stood nearby with a broom in hand, dully sweeping the boards. She
glanced up at him then resumed her work. He tried to place her, but then he
remembered, of course she wouldn't even have been born yet when he last was in
here. He began to hope the town had forgotten him entirely.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">No sooner had the thought come to him than he heard a harsh
cackle and a man's voice said, "Well look who's back in town! The Belly
Wimp himself!"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Lump knew the voice, and at once remembered the sneer of the
man's lip and the force of his punches. The speaker stepped out of the gloom
into the space in front of the door. His black hair was salted with gray now,
but he had the same sinewed arms and he looked every inch the the horny-fisted
brawling sailorman he had been when he dealt Lump a dozen beatings in this very
room.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">But now he smiled, held out an open hand, and offered,
"here, shake." Lump innocently accepted the grip, which instantly
clamped hard and pulled him forward into a harsh jab in the stomach from the
man's other fist. Lump doubled right over with a gagging groan.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The serving girl, broom in hand, watched wide-eyed and said,
"oooh!, right in his belly!" It seemed to inspire the bully.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Just as slow-witted and pot-bellied as ever, I
see," he said to gasping Lump, who simply stood bent double, as if submitting
to the man who had just stomach-punched him.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">All Lump could manage in reply was "oooooooaah, my
belly!" He had never known to restrain his reactions; when he got hit, his
mind entered a sealed world of his own and whatever flooded his thought spilled
out his mouth, if he had breath to speak it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The thug grabbed Lump by the scruff of the neck and hauled
him deeper into the place, then threw him forward into a wall. A wooden shelf
jutted out from the wall for patrons to set their drinks on as they stood, and Lump
hit it belly-first. It jutted right into his stomach. He took it with an OOF!,
wheeled breathlessly, and sagged back against it, his knees buckling. The old
tough caught him by the throat and held him up. Lump's big moist hands flew to
the choking grip around his neck, forgetting entirely to guard his round belly.
The sailor made something of the occasion.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Somebody said Belly Boy was coming back to town,"
he hissed. "Did you expect a parade? Here, I'll give you a fireworks show,
right in the gut."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">With one free hand he gave Lump a cruel belly-whomping.
Uppercuts, jabs, chops with the side of the fist -- his knuckles did a slam
dance on Lump's poor belly. Lump himself called out in time to the punches,
OOF! UUH! OOUGH! HUNNH! The thug clouted him over and over, bouncing fists off
his big belly with hollow drum-thump sounds.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The serving girl stood transfixed, forgetting her work. The
other patrons shouted encouragement. "Give him another one!"
"Yeah, that's it, right in the stomach!" "Knock the wind out of
him." "Look at his belly!!"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">At last Lump's tormentor let him drop. Lump squirmed on his
knees, bobbing his body, both hands cradling his punched stomach. The bully
grabbed the broom from the serving girl's hands and said, "watch what I do
to him now. Just for you." He blew her a kiss. "I'll give him a
belly-ache to remember you by."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">He stepped behind Lump, pulled one of Lump's arms back
chicken-wing, and slid the broom-handle under it, then forced it under the
other arm, at the shoulder. Now Lump's arms were pulled back helplessly. He
tried to clutch his stomach, but could only reach to his flanks.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The brute pulled him up by the hair and made him stand. Lump
looked ridiculous as he tried to writhe himself out of this horrifyingly
vulnerable position, but he couldn't find a way. He gave up and simply hunched
forward, gasping, his arms pulled back, as defenseless as if he had had another
foe behind him, gripping and holding him open.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The brute chuckled, eyed him, and then went to work. Act Two
of Lump's Bellyache. The belly-beating that followed was twice as long and
sharp as the first performance. Fists seemed to pummel Lump's open belly from
every direction; he lost himself in the suffering and felt himself
drowning<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>under attack from a swarm of
enraged disembodied fists, clouding him like hornets, clouting his soft flesh.
The jabs sank to his core and demolished his self-control.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Somehow he became aware that it had ended. The thug wrenched
the handle out of his arms and handed it back to the girl, who was watching the
sailor with a gleam in her eye. Then he bullied Lump back to his feet and
shoved Lump back against the door.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Come back any time you want your belly beat up!"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">A woman rose quietly from the dark booth at the far end of
the place. You never could see who was in that booth. At first Lump saw only
her silhouette. Then she stepped into a shaft of light. It was Alise; Lump knew
her at once by her face and shape and by the style of her clothes.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The thug gave Lump a standing kick in the gut that tumbled
him out the door and onto the street, flat on his back. He lay there under the
sky, suffering. After a minute Alise emerged. Her face was blank, tight,
expressionless. She helped him up to his feet. He wanted to say you look the
same, you're still yo, I missed you. All he could manage was a croak:
"ooh, my belly!"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">She replied, "come to my place. I will help you."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="line-height: 120%;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: large;">THICKENING</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Her house was a short walk away (he could have found it
easily), small but elegant. But as they reached it she gasped: The wood had
been splintered at the lock, and the door hung open.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Lump stepped ahead of her, but as soon as he passed the
doorway he met two men charging out. The first held a two-handed sledgehammer.
The one behind him carried an iron-bound wooden chest on his shoulder. They
hardly paused to size him up. The one with the hammer swung it at the waist and
mashed the heavy head of it smack into Lump's large belly, flattening him
against the wall with a pitiful OOF!<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">He held the iron mass firmly in place while Lump squirmed
and flailed breathlessly, to allow the other man to pass him and run off with
the chest.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Alise tried to grab him, but he shook her off, and the
hammer-man then dropped Lump on the floor and took off himself, deliberately
knocking Alise hard to the ground as he passed. In a second, they were both
gone.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Lump, still breathless, got to Alise and helped her up. She
tried to run after the men, but he restrained her. She was sobbing and
breathless herself, but not from the knock she had taken. "They got
everything," she wailed, "they got it all! They knew, they knew just
where it was."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">She sank to the ground and he sat beside her. She looked at
him guiltily. "Your object, what you came back here for is gone. It was in
the chest. They took it, I'm sorry." Then she seemed to panic again.
"And I ... they took from me ... oh!" she broke down in tears.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Who were they?" Lump gasped.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"I know those bastards," she wept. "They sulk
around the temple. They did this for the priestess, Sonia, I am sure. She is
behind this. But they don't know about my ... But now they will ..." She
wept again.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Lump steered her inside, made a hot drink for her, tried to
calm her. In flurries, between her rage and sorrowing, he tried to piece it all
together. She admitted she had told ... certain men ... that Lump was coming
back to town. But nothing more. "All I said was that you wanted something
important to you and that I had it and that we were meeting in the tavern.
Thar's all, I swear. I said it was valuable only to you, it had no worth
here."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"That would be information enough, if it got to
Sonia," he told her. During his first time here, Sonia had been a junior
in the sodality of the temple, as well as a prima among the dancers. And she
had taken an unusual interest in him, though hardly a kind one. She, of all the
people in the town, seemed to guess that Lump was more than he seemed, that his
secret was bigger than this place and worth stealing. That he allowed himself
to be beaten and abused by these louts because he had his eyes on something
big.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"She never learned it, but I doubt she ever forgot that
it existed," he thought. "Not her. She would have spent the years
spinning her powers, guessing and testing, keeping her spies on all the roads.
She would test her theories, dancing closer to the truth."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"What did they take from you?" he asked Alise.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Nothing ... everything," she said mournfully.
"I kept only secrets in that box. Your object. A few personal things. And
my art. There was art in it."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Your art? But your art isn't ..."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"It was not the art anyone sees. It was only for me.
Deeply personal. I didn't want anyone ever to know, but now ..." her tears
welled again.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"I will go and deal with Sonia," he said,
standing.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">She looked at him doubtfully. But what other hope was there?
"Promise me one thing. If you do recover what is mine, don't look at it.
Promise me?"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"I do."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="line-height: 120%;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: large;">LUMP'S
GAMBIT</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">He did his best to put her door back in order. Then he
rummaged her kitchen and made dinner for both of them. She ate glumly. He tried
to distract and cheer her with questions. Alise showed him her art, hung on her
walls. He wondered at the beautiful scenes full of light and the lovely forms
she created that never could have come from any inspiration in this dingy town.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Then she pulled out the pillows and he made himself a bed in
her front room, while she retreated into the back with the lantern. He lay with
the moonlight on him and tried to think of a plan. Surrounded by the joy and
beauty of Alise's art, and with her sobs seeping through the walls behind, his
heart felt like breaking.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">No plan came to him, so he slept. He awoke before dawn, and
slipped out the door, with his hood high over his head, before Alise awoke.
Better this way.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The thing that had been stolen from him was a small piece of
a large creation. It had been something he carried with him from his home, and
he left it in the care of Alise. But over the years, more and more of that
larger creation had died or been destroyed. The little piece now loomed large.
Much of his own hope and destiny was wrapped in it. At any minute he expected
to feel a piercing sensation, like an icicle in the heart, when it fell into the
hands of Sonia, who knew well how to turn any magic against a man.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Yet that moment did not come, and as he walked the streets
he drew a little hope from that, though it puzzled him. He made his way by side
streets, always in the direction of the temple.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">As his mind groped for a plan, it also filled with Sonia.
The sun was rising. With every step he drew closer to her. He knew well the
ways and rituals of the high priestess. She and he might be the only two in
this lazy town awake and active at this hour.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">She would have risen from sleep in a state of mind unlike
his. From the second she opened her eyes she would be whole, complete, knowing
herself in full, never a doubt. Unlike him, Sonia lived in entire
self-assurance.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Now she was stepping into the ritual bath in the temple
omphalium. Now she was rising from it, glistening; now the acolytes were
toweling her gently. Now she was performing the ritual ablutions, now perfuming
her dark and elegant navel with the sacred nectar. Now she was sliding her
delicate arms into the gown, of finely-woven, well-wrought stuff, colored over
with arcane designs and open at the center to bare her belly; now she was
strapping the golden sandals to her feet.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">And now he stood in the shadow of the temple itself. He had
expected to meet the two thugs standing guard, as usual -- Alise had told him
to expect that. But there was no guard, only a girl's face in an open panel of
the ancient double-doors. She stared at him, expressionless.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"My name is Lump, I would like ..."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"You are expected. Follow me."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The panel snapped shut, then the door opened. The girl
walked down the hall, not turning to see if he followed. As she led him deeper
inside, the heat and the perfumed air grew stronger. He followed her into the
sanctum, and then she bowed and left.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">He took a deep breath in the warm, damp air. It was as he
remembered, from when another woman had reigned here and Sonia had been just
one of the sodality. The red and gold; the lotus pool bubbling quietly in the
center of the room, the canopies and pillows around the walls. The acolytes sat
cross-legged by the pool, four on each side.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">And between them stood Sonia, tall, lithe, regal,
aquiline-nosed. Her black eyes flashed at him under the arches of her brows.
Her face was lined and her waves of inky hair bore streaks of gray, but she was
the same lightning bolt of a woman. She wore a crimson gown, and her sensual
slit of a navel seemed to mock and beckon him, as ever.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"So kind of you to answer my summons, Lump," she
purred.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Sonia, I ..."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Yes, I was Sonia to you once," she raised her
voice. The acolytes exchanged furtive glances. "Now you may address me
correctly as Regina Umbilica -- Lady Belly-Button, to you," she added with
a turn of her lip.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">She walked slowly toward him, around the ring of girls. Her
every move and gesture called constant, if subtle, attention to her bared
navel, the core and source of all her power and magic. "You remember me, Lump?
You remember how I once held you here? With this?"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">She flourished her hips and her long, elegant belly, He
swallowed hard and took the chance. He had only a guess, but it was all he had.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"You haven't got it," he said. "They didn't
bring it to you. The louts ran off with it themselves."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"You pot-bellied FOOL!" Her voice rang out. He had
guessed right, but now he knew he would pay for it. "Do you think I need
anything from YOU?" And she flung her arms up high, and as she did the air
flickered around her and out of it congealed eight slender fists, a fan of four
at each side of her, magically conjured. Each one was her hand, painted nails
and all. Lump knew this magic, and he startled. He had never seen this from
her. She had grown so strong.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Sonia turned her wrists and wreathed her fingers, and as she
did the conjured hands fell into formation and swam through the air toward him.
Four darted forth and grabbed him, wrists and ankles, and held him in a grip
unexpectedly strong, an open X. But the others came soft-handed. One tousled
his hair, two caressed and teased his belly.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The fourth reached low and stroked him hard in an instant,
as Sonia took a seductive step toward him and smiled.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Your will-power is still as weak as your soft belly, I
see."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Sonia, I ..."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Her eyes blazed and she scribbled in the air with her
fingers, her lips set tight, and the caressing hands quickly clenched. The one
in his hair turned to a grip and held his head upright. The three below arced
out and torpedoed back into him, one after another in rapid succession,
plunging their knuckles into the meat of his belly. "OOF!"
"UUH!" "OOGH!"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The small, sharp hands hit as hard as the sledgehammer. They
circled quickly and lunged at him again, hit him again, an uppercut bellypunch,
a pounding clomp down into his stomach curve, and a furious jab right in his
core.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"OOH! UUFF! h-OOUFF!"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The sub-priestesses stared transfixed as Sonia punished him,
writing out her wrath on his belly. Sonia flicked her hand, and the fists
paused. "Would you like to try again?"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">He gasped for air. When he found enough he croaked,
"Yes, Lady Belly-Button."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Better." With a clap of her hand she dismissed
the acolytes. They filed out with a swish of perfumed silks. When the last of
them had vanished down the corridor, she said, "Ariadne, join us."
The young girl who had admitted Lump into the temple stepped out silently from
a door behind one of the tapestries and came to Sonia's side.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Those stupid geese have no skills suitable for a
priestess," Sonia said. "Only the wealth of their parents keeps them
here." She turned her glance to the girl beside her, still watching Lump's
reaction to her.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Aria, here," she said slowly, "will be my
heir and successor as Regina Umbilica. I have begun to instruct her in the
finer ways. Her power is formidable, but raw. As you shall see."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="line-height: 120%;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: large;">PLOTTING</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Explore him, darling," she said to Aria.
"He's mine now. Someday perhaps he will be yours."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Aria walked a slow, precise circle around the hanging man,
eyeing him up and down. As she stepped out from behind him she laid a cold hand
on his flank and let it follow the curve of his round stomach. She rested it on
him, then gave a sharp shove with the heel of her hand against Lump's upper
stomach. He let go an involuntary "OOF!"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"His belly is just as you described it to me, my
queen," she said at last. Sonia smiled.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Firm as a pillow and taut as a sponge," Sonia
mocked. "Every time he gets a real man's fist slammed in his gut, the wimp
loses all his breath."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"What a soft-bellied wimp," Aria said.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"And ideal for our plan, isn't he?" Sonia smiled.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The priestess herself now walked a circle around Lump, a
hand on his belly the whole time, one then the other touching him there; he
felt her heat.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"I don't even want your magical trinket, bellywimp. Not
now. All I want is my revenge on those two louts who think they can thieve from
me. Do you know how furious it makes me?" Lump could feel the tremble in
her touch. He pictured the eight floating hands, each armed with a sharp knife.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Frankly it was only ever curiosity that drew me to try
to steal it from your painter-girl. But my former captain of the guards, and
his idiot sidekick, think I would pay a queen's ransom for it. Of course,
they're just smart enough to not trust me. They demand that I send Aria, alone,
with the gold."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">She stopped in front of Lump and locked her eyes onto his.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"And so I shall. But you'll follow her."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Why," he said. "I'm not good at spy work.
They'll find me."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"You want your precious object back? You will do as I
require. I told you I don't need it any more. You can have it, and whatever
else is in that chest. I want those men."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"They will discover me."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Of course then will, you big-bellied oaf. That is what
I intend. Your capture will allow Ariadne to delay their flight, long enough
for me to snatch them up."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"I don't understand."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Understanding is my business. Your business is
blundering into a trap. Something you do quite well. I will need time, and your
weak belly is going to buy it for me."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"What if I refuse?"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"What other hope do you have?" she said,
scornfully. Then added, with a cruel flicker of a smile, "And what will
your Alise say if you fail?"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">He hung silently. Then he drew up what strength he could
rally. "I need to know more. Now. If I am to play my part properly."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Sonia ignored him, turned and walked to her desk, reached
into a drawer, her back to him.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Aria spoke. Her voice high, angelic, and cold as crystal:
"They will beat you up. For me. The captain is very desperate to please
me; he has tried again and again to gain my favor ever since the day I arrived.
He is a fool to desire so; he has no notion of my power. I would freeze his
heart. But he is a man. I have shown him nothing but the coldness he deserves.
That is why he intends to take me with him, along with the ransom and the
magical secret."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Lump looked at Sonia, at her desk still. She answered
without turning. "Do you wonder why I want my revenge on him? But he is so
transparent, so ... male. Why else would he ask for exactly Ariadne to bring
him the gold? He is beautifully sadistic, but very simple, even for a man. He
is the one who plunked his hammerhead into your belly last night. Yes, I know
that, too. I know many things, Softbelly."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Sonia flourished one hand; the magical grip finally relaxed
and Lump fell heavily forward to his hands and knees. The magical floating
hands melted into nothing. He knelt, rubbing his wrists.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Go now," Sonia commanded. Lump rose unsteadily to
his feet. "Aria will show you out and tell you what you will do
tonight."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="line-height: 120%;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: large;">TIME TO MOVE</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">He approached Alise's house from the back alley, and stood
beneath her studio window and tapped. "Alise, it's me," he spoke low
and hurriedly. He heard the back door latch rattle, and he slipped inside.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Have you got it?" she asked breathlessly.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"No, but I will tonight. At least I think I will."
She dropped, crestfallen.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Sonia doesn't have it, either."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Then who --"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"I can't tell you, but there's a plan to recover
everything, and I must play a part in it, it seems."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Whose plan? You tell me nothing. I have a stake in
this, too, remember? You owe me the truth!"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">He looked away from her gaze.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Lock the door. Come in to the middle room and I will
tell you what I know."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">At the end of half an hour, she still had many questions,
but Lump was out of answers.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"First, Ariadne will go to the rendezvous," he
explained again. "If she is alone -- and they will be watching -- she will
be told the meeting place."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"And you will be on the next street or alley, watching
her," Alise said, repeating what he had told her. "And you will
follow her to -- wherever the deal is to be done. And they will capture you.
And I still don't understand how you get my chest back. I am going with
you."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"No you are not," he shot back. "It is a
trap, I go to be captured and beaten. If Sonia fails, there's no telling what
they will do to me."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"If Sonia fails, I won't. I am going with you. You said
sunset? There's no time to argue. Get on your feet. Let's go."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">They tracked Ariadne as she made her way to the east end of
town and down a blind alley between two shops.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"I can't see her," Alise whispered to Lump as they
stood at the end of the row. "She could be playing a trick on us."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"This is part of the plan," Lump assured her.
"There's an old well back there. She'll find a scrap of parchment under
the stone curb of the well. It will tell her where the deal is to be done. She
has to move quickly after that; they only gave her a short time. And she has to
signal to Sonia."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Ariadne soon stepped out again on the street, pulled her
cloak tight around her neck, and walked quickly down the road toward them.
Alise ducked into a darkened doorway and grabbed Lump around the waist and
pulled him in with her. There in the tight space he felt Alise's heart pounding
against his back as her hands held his stomach. Ariadne passed without a
glance.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">When the echo of her footsteps on the cobbles had faded, the
peered out. They saw her ahead. "Going toward the docks," Alise said.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">They had to walk quickly to keep up, and carefully to keep
their distance. When they got in sight of the water, the moon had risen and in
the white light they saw three hukling merchant ships, fat and dark. And at the
far end a trim-keeled two-master with a full cloud of sail, straining like a
hound on the leash and ready to bolt for the open sea. And Ariadne had just
gone up the plank and stepped aboard.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Alise and Lump hurried from shadow to shadow till they stood
by the ship, and they read "Falcon" in gold paint on her taffrail.
They listened. A man's voice, from below decks, the words indistinct. Then
Aria's clear laugh.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">They crept up the plank and onto the ship's wooden deck.
They crouched behind a coil of rope and peered in the direction of the voices.
Through an open door, lantern-light shone.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"I can see my chest," Alise whispered. Lump
looked. Through the doorway he saw a wooden box. Its lock had been smashed, but
the lid was closed.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">They heard the man's voice again. "Now let's have a look
at that gold."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Wait here," Lump said; "you don't want to
fall into their hands. Or Sonia's."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Lump crept toward the door.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="line-height: 120%;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: large;">DANCE of
PAIN</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Alise saw the dark shape leap down from the spar and land on
Lump's back, knocking him to the deck. The thud of his body dropping shook the
slender craft, and with growls and curses the captain of the temple guards
surged up the stairs, pulling Ariadne with him by the wrist. Lump was on his
knees, rubbing the back of his head.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Alise shrank back as far into the shadows as she could.
Evidently the captain's henchman, up in the rigging, had not seen her. His view
was blocked by the spread of the sail, and he had seen Lump only when he
approached the door.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Found your spy," the other man growled to Aria.
"Caught him lurking."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Ariadne pulled away from the captain 's grip. "He's not
with me. He's a pot-bellied fool who thinks this magical treasure is his. And
he thinks I should be his, too."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Oh, is that so?" The captain said, grabbing Lump
roughly by the collar and hauling him upright.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Then he paused and looked around. "Where's the girl?
That painter-slut. She was with him, following you."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">That wasn't in the plan, but Aria took the news without
missing a beat. She shrugged. "Ran off. Got cold feet. Who knows? She has
no spirit."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The captain looked suspicious. "Ran off to tell Sonia,
perhaps? When you double-cross a witch, you trust nothing."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The other man said, "too many spies already. I don't
like how this is going. Let's kill him quickly, bind up your wench, and be
off."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Ariadne ignored him and turned her body to the captain.
"You think you're worthy of me, captain? Prove it and I'll go
willingly."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The captain hesitated a second. It was all she needed.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"I hear you're a handy man with your fists and a
staff," she cooed. He straightened up and held his chin out. The captain's
henchman stood with his mouth open. She gestured with a white hand to Lump.
"I don't care what you do to this big-bellied oaf here. But before you do
it, I'd love to see you give him a belly-ache to remember me by."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">In one gesture the captain flung Lump away from him and grabbed
up his fighting-staff from the rack where it hung in the cockpit. Every man in
town had such a weapon: They were cut from saplings, six feet long, with a
rounded club at one end six inches across and tapering to three inches wide at
the base. The base, too was rounded; the whole was polished and hard as bone.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Lump remembered well what that thing could do to his soft
body. The captain took down another staff and threw it to Lump. He fumbled it,
dropped it, picked it up again, held it awkwardly.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Hans, get below and guard that damned box with your
life," the captain said. "The artist-bitch may be hanging about yet,
and who knows who else."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"We should be ten minutes out to sea and headed for the
Southern Isles by now," Hans muttered, but he obeyed.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"This won't take but a minute," the captain said,
spinning his staff deftly in his hands, twirling it in front of him, and eyeing
Lump hungrily.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Alise feared the thumping of her heart would give her away.
She stilled her breath.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Ariadne stood staring at Lump with a serene smile.
"Look at his belly," she said.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Lump shifted his feet. The captain laughed. "His belly
is the perfect target, my dear lady. Let me show you what I do to such
worthless men as this. <i>En garde</i>!"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The captain took a menacing stomp forward and poked high
with the small end of his staff. Lump took the fake entirely, raising his arms
up, holding the staff crossways, as if to block a blow to the face.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The captain, laughing, clacked his own staff against Lump's
knocking it clear out of his hands, then he spun on one heel and with his back
to Lump jabbed the thick butt of his staff firmly into the other man's curved
out stomach.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Ooooh!" Aria cooed approvingly.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"UUUUUH!" Lump bellowed miserably. He tried to
draw a breath, but nothing happened. Another involuntary moan let out the last
of the air in him, and he stood now breathless. The captain was still in
motion. He pivoted away from Lump's helpless bulk, jabbed the small of the
staff on the deck with a hollow thump, and lept into the air still gripping his
weapon. His momentum carried him in a full rotation around the rod, and as he
swung around he lashed out his leg and rammed his boot-heel into Lump's
stomach.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The force of it flung Lump back into the rigging ropes, and
bounced him forward again. But the captain was on his feet again, with his
staff stuck out like a lance and Lump got it right in his round gut. Really it
was his own force that impaled his weak belly on the thing, but the captain got
all the credit for it in Ariadne's eyes.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The thudding force of the blow pushed Lump back into the
rigging ropes, and he clung to them, suffering horribly from the breathlessness
and the withering belly-ache he had. The captain punched the staff into him
again, high in the stomach, and that dropped Lump to his knees, huffing and
sobbing.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The Captain stood over him a long second, to see if he'd
rise. Lump only bent over further and moaned.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">With a laugh, the captain turned and walked to the dock side
of the ship, and began to loosen the rope. "That was easy." He made
as if to kick off the gangplank that led to the shore.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Get up, get up, you weakling," Ariadne hissed at Lump
through gritted teeth. But he was too winded. He looked like he was trying to
find his stomach, somewhere up inside him.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">She wheeled to face the captain and the furred hem of her
robe slapped Lump's face.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Oh, but surely you can do more? I have seen such
skills often in the arena. Surely you know more than one way to beat a belly so
... deserving as his. Show me how you use your bare fists."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The captain grunted doubtfully, but he obeyed. He walked up
to Lump and began prodding him with his boot. "Up, Softbelly; the lady
commands it."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Lump wanted nothing more than to stay down, but he knew he
had to perform his part. There was no other way. He found a grip on the
foremast, just a few feet from Alise's hiding place, and slowly pulled himself
up. His breath was coming in long gulps now, and he could not help himself from
bleating pitifully, "my belly! my belly!"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The captain took his proper fight stance and raised his
fists. Lump tried to mimic what he saw, but the attempt was woeful.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Aria threw in a taunt: "Lump, dear, did you really think
I would want to be the mistress of a man with a soft stomach?" And she let
her icy laugh ring out.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">When he heard that, the captain flew at Lump. He threw the
first punch at him overhand -- swung his arm, and POW! socked him near the top
of his belly, on the stomach-curve. Poor Lump said "OOPh!" and froze
in place.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Ariadne let out a lusty "Ooooo, right in the
belly!"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The captain really was an expert at this art. He hoped
Ariadne appreciated the subtlety of this strike. The punch had been a
"stunner." That is, it left his opponent helpless, but with his back
arched and his belly wide open. It was a set-up punch.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The captain stepped in and jabbed his fist straight into Lump's
gut. It mashed his stomach, and the force of it drove him back against the
mast, suffering and bellyaching. And the captain followed that up with a
two-punch combination, straight in the stomach.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Lump folded in half with another "OOPh!" and stood
there clutching his belly with his tongue hanging out and a sick look on his
face.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The captain straightened up and put his hands on his hips.
"Yes, my lady. Right. in. his. belly!"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Four belly-slammers in 10 seconds. He hoped she'd been
counting. Lump had no breath in him, and his knees began to buckle.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"You're not going to let him go down so easily, I
hope," Aria teased.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The captain slung his fist in an uppercut motion and socked Lump
in the belly. The blow caught Lump's body in the act of sagging forward, and it
connected with enough force to drive him back upright. It also made him say,
"OOP!" in a way that made Ariadne laugh.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Pain rose up visibly in Lump like a shock wave. He turned
away, grimacing, but the captain whipped the other fist and caught him with it
as he turned, right in the stomach. "OOP!" By then he was in a
complete bellypunch-panic.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The captain gripped his collar, pulled him out, then shoved
him into the ropes again. Lump bounced back and the captain just let him ram
into his fist. The punch got Lump -- again -- right in the belly. It stopped
him in his tracks and dumped him on the boards. He rolled around like a
scorched bug, kicking his legs and cradling his belly and moaning.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The captain wiped his hands like a man at the end of a job.
Aria grabbed his forearm. "More," she purred. "For me."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The captain was a raging bull. He hauled Lump upright and
bullied him some more. Lump's hands never left his gut. Then the captain pulled
him up in front of Ariadne, and said, "Never offer yourself to a real
woman if you've got a soft BELLY!" and with that last word he rammed it
into him again. From close range this time. Lump's hold on himself had sunk
low, under the belly-button, and that gave the captain a perfect window of
stomach. He hit that pot belly right where it counts.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The punch drove another satisfying OOF! out of Lump's
humiliated belly. He backed away, bobbing and making pathetic sounds.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">But the captain stayed with, him, swinging when he saw his
chances. He jutted one up into Lump's doubled-over belly. That made Lump pop
upright in shock. Alise saw his big-eyed agonized face for a second, then the
captain swung his arm and gave him a side-of-the-fist bop in the stomach. It
was just a rap, but it hit him right on the solar plexus and there went Lump's
breath again.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">He put that pot-bellied wimp through his paces. He
thoroughly humiliated his belly. Took him apart slowly, sadistically. Tortured
him with wringing bellyaches and long, gulping bouts of breathlessness. All the
while the captain poured a torrent of verbal abuse on him. He called Lump a
"pot-bellied wimp." Even if he had had breath to speak, Lump couldn't
have denied it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Ariadne was openly cheering the captain now. "That's
it! Shove your fist in his belly!"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">In the end, Lump was on his hands and knees again, staring
at the rough boards with his belly hung down, pulsing out and in, as he moaned
-- "oooooh! ... oooooh!" with all the wind knocked out of him.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Kick him in the stomach!"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The captain obeyed. The boot-whomp lifted Lump into the air,
flipped him over, and dumped him flat on his back in the middle of the deck.
The captain planted a heel on the bulging curve of Lump's stomach, and ground
it down to pin his victim to the boards.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Just then a flight of eight fists surged over the gunwales
and before the shocked captain could react, three of them took him by the arms
and hair and gripped him and slammed him back against the mast.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="line-height: 120%;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: large;">REVENGE</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">The captain hung eight feet off the deck. Another Sonia-hand
closed tight around his throat. Hans, who must have been watching from below,
ran up and three more disembodied hands flew at him and held him helpless while
a fourth began choking the life out of him.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Sonia strode regally up the gangplank and boarded the
Falcon.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Get the chest," Sonia commanded, but Ariadne was
already in motion, hurrying down the steps.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Her chest! Alise's heart jumped in her throat. She dashed
forward, toward the open door, after Aria, but Sonia caught her by the hair.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"What have we here?"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Lump saw Alise stagger back, hair pulled, mouth twisted in
pain, and his heart roused itself. He could suffer anything himself, but this
was too much for him. He willed himself to lunge out at Sonia's leg, to try to
trip her, but before he could move a sharp jolt cleaved his body. A pain that
seemed to come from within him. His vision dimmed and purpled and he felt
himself without strength.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Sonia hardly noticed him. She was focussed on Alise.
"Why did you come here, slut! You could have spoiled everything."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"You took what was mine!"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"You! Miserable bitch, you had something too good for
your feeble soul to ever comprehend. I took what was MINE. Whatever else is in
that chest is trash to me. But if it is so secret to you, we'll have it all out
in the open soon enough."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">She turned to the doorway. "Aria, come!"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Ariadne already was emerging, stiffly, eyes gleaming. Sonia
flung Alise down beside where Lump lay prostrate.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"Where is it? Aria?"<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Ariadne flicked her hand and the captain's discarded staff
flew into it. Sonia stared, open-mouthed. Then, with a lunge of her arms Aria
plowed the staff-head into Sonia's elegant belly.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Sonia folded and fell with a sharp "OOF!" followed
by a long, wailing moan. Lump and Alise lay still. They saw Sonia's hand
scratch on the deck in front of her bent head. Her other hand was pressed to
her navel. She wailed like an animal.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Ariadne threw back her arms and shed her cloak and revealed
herself richly arrayed in a full gown, shimmering gold and silver in torchlight
and moonlight, radiantly bare-bellied, her navel deep-set, her curves
goddesslike. And clasped at her throat was the magical object from Lump's
world. All the power of that lost place funneled through that artifact and into
her. Lump could feel it at once.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Sonia's magical hands melted into air, and the limp bodies
of the two men sed to the deck of the Falcon. Now it was Ariadne who flung her
arms high and spun out eight forms of her own hands into the night air. They
pounced on Sonia and rifled her body as she sobbed "no, no, no." They
took rings, bracelets, necklace -- every magical element and ornament. Two
hands brought them to Ariadne, who donned them one by one.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">And then the gripping fingers raised Sonia and held her
upright in an open X.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">And then the free hands started punching her hard in the
belly. Aria seemed to have no need to direct them with her fingers, as Sonia
had done. They obeyed her mere thought. She turned from Sonia's torturous
"OOFs" and looked down at Lump and Alise.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"I have appropriated your item. It was the final piece
of power that I required to gain mastery over Sonia. Poor Sonia, who never
could rule herself."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">Sonia gasped out half a curse as Aria, but a fist in the
stomach silenced her.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-weight: normal;">"You have proven useful," she told Lump and Alise.
"I have no further need of you. You may go."<o:p></o:p></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div>bellypunchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15626322785267248362noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3692525029190577226.post-41800465682120043052022-09-06T12:22:00.003-04:002022-09-06T12:22:37.522-04:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuHsiTc8v0ikWWUomHhS8MywC6c_Z5cZic0mFaYA0DXAWRcYxQXEVQLeRZ5IaNCi5fSbtf4OLihukkfvOvSSwEsYlfSfwq8h1bAJXJLcSOSfdzcgL6PwGHLtnHQo0w-JTJVqog9QGj4VItQ5DkA_jW3rsG3Yi27RkNqJzgf0rl8S2cpEOphC8d2StmOQ/s504/Yohhni-navelheart.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="504" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuHsiTc8v0ikWWUomHhS8MywC6c_Z5cZic0mFaYA0DXAWRcYxQXEVQLeRZ5IaNCi5fSbtf4OLihukkfvOvSSwEsYlfSfwq8h1bAJXJLcSOSfdzcgL6PwGHLtnHQo0w-JTJVqog9QGj4VItQ5DkA_jW3rsG3Yi27RkNqJzgf0rl8S2cpEOphC8d2StmOQ/s320/Yohhni-navelheart.JPG" width="305" /></a></div><br /><p> Before I turned to face him and fight, she put her hands to her waist, and her fingers framed a perfect heart around her belly-button. Damn her. She knows what that does to me. I noticed her nails, freshly done to perfection. My eyes lingered, my muscles relaxed toward erection.</p><p>And then I felt his fist in my belly.</p>bellypunchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15626322785267248362noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3692525029190577226.post-4611950648569470362022-08-23T20:55:00.002-04:002022-08-24T14:26:25.361-04:00HER BELLYBOY<br />
Diana set down her empty wine glass and slid trimly off the broad metal desk that served as her chair while she directed us in the basement theater. She walked toward me.<br />
<br />Here, she forbid us to call her "Professor Morgenstern;" it had to be "Diana."<br />
<br />
"I need more from you," she said. She carried the script in her right hand. Her hips swayed in her long, low gypsy skirt. Stylish leather boots ticked her footsteps on the floorboards.<br />
<br />
The humidity was insufferable in the college studio theater that summer. The administrators conveniently forgot that summer theater productions would rehearse here, so they didn't pay to keep the AC running.<br />
<br />
Diana had pulled up her long white T-shirt and knotted it firmly between her breasts. Her bare belly-button whispered kisses as she moved toward me. Her hair, wild with gray ripples and streaks, looked like she had never touched it, as natural as wildflower meadows. Her eyeglasses were prim and purely functional.<br />
<br />
To a young man in my condition she was the perfect poison: a doctorate in literature wrapped around a confident, exuberant female eroticism. I felt it just in passing her on campus. And of course I'd heard the gossip.<br />
<br />
I really didn't need the grade credit. I had taken her summer theater course expressly for the chance to work closely — intimately, even — with Professor Morgenstern. The course consisted entirely of us 5 students staging a one-act play, written by her, under her direction.<br />
<br />
I visited her during office hours at the first opportunity, and by skimming her bookshelf discovered we shared a love of belly-dancing: she as a performer and instructor, me as a respectful and studied admirer of the artistry and athleticism of the women who dance — that's how I unfolded my connoisseurship it to her. The truth is I have a deep and incurable erotic fetish for female belly-buttons and shapely, well-hipped woman-bellies. Pure aesthetic fetish. My mask was no doubt transparent. I probably didn't really care.<br />
<br />
She regaled me with tales of the classes she had taken with this or that legend of belly-dancing. But she was glad of an appreciative listener, I believe. "Legend of Belly-Dancing" is a title that doesn't carry very far; most people can't name you one besides "Little Egypt."<div><br /></div><div>And in me she had at least an audience of one who could understand what a thrill it must have been to dance on stage with Ansuya or to have taken a class in arms with Rachel B. herself. No need to tell her that I knew this out of a perverted lust to kneel and kiss their belly-buttons and worship them erotically.<br />
<br />
She also shared with me some of her own writings on belly-dance, which had sometimes been published in belly-dance publications. I copied down part of one poem that struck me:<br />
<br /><i>Voluptuous undulations of lovely<br />
belly; I know men's softnesses<br />know what melts him within.<br />
My wrists twine like the vines in Eden.<br />hips rise in tides,<br />
and bare belly blossoms, all<br />
unfurled in dark erotic ecstasy</i><br />
<br />
I should have paid more attention to other passages. The truth of her was more cruel, bellyslamming, and lusty than my dreamy romantic fantasies of women could have anticipated.<br />
<br />
When the casting of the play was announced, I got an e-mail simply listing my part: "unnamed male, Act IV, scene 5." I had expected her to give me something more central. I thought we were friends. There was one romantic role — not the lead male, but a guy who made love to his wife, a very hot role — that I thought was just right for me. She gave it to another guy in the class.<br />
<br />
She sent me a follow-up, personally, asking me how I liked my role. I feigned a little enthusiasm, and also made what was supposed to sound like a light-hearted "boo-hoo" over the other boy getting the part I coveted. But she wrote back and replied, simply, "wait and see."<br />
<br />
Turns out "unnamed male character" had rather a lot to do. Professor Morgenstern's play was an extended metaphor, based on the interaction of a coarse, violent young married couple (I wrote a paper about it later, got an A, then reworked it into a masters' thesis). On the stage they bicker, tossing lines to each other. At the same time, incongruously, they are acting out their various ways of cheating on one another, onstage.</div><div><br /></div><div>They deny the very things we see them do. You see him flirting with showgirls. You see her seducing the husband of a friend. You see him sneaking through her drawers, looking for evidence of infidelity. You see her do the same to him.<br />
<br />
And at one high point — my big scene — you see him beat up a guy for having an affair with his wife. Except it's the wrong guy. It's not the guy you saw his wife actually fooling around with — because she's still fooling around with him, hot and heavy, while this beating is going on across the stage.</div><div><br /></div><div>And the couple, in their dialogue, divorced from the action, are throwing their biggest verbal jabs now, shouting with their rages and passion. It's as intense as the balcony scene in "Streetcar." And their actions on stage are ramped up to match the fury of the words.<br />
<br />
She is really in the throes of passion with this adulterous man, and he is really pouring the punches into the belly of this hapless victim.<br />
<br />
Who happened to be me. By Professor Mor- by "Diana's" choice and election.<br />
<br />
Obviously, it was a very physical play to stage. Most of the play was rehearsed without me, because I wasn't in it. But Diana set aside a special hour each day to work on just this scene. Which was a lot of focus, in proportion to the length of it. But she said it was the most important scene in her play, and the one she was most interested in getting right.<br />
<br />
They rehearsed my part separately at first from the action on the other side of the stage, where the wife and her lover were getting it on. But as the wife's lines were part of the husband's dialogue, Diana made the actress who played her attend these beating rehearsals, and stand there and deliver her lines, in character, facing us.<br />
<br />
And the husband responded to them, while enforcing his point with punches into me. The timing of the beating had to be woven into the rhythm of the dialogue, as Diana explained it. That's why she was taking such care with the details of this beating. "When he MEANS what he SAYS, he literally drives home the point with the hammer-blow of a FIST," she told the other actor, all the while pressing with her own fist on my belly.<br />
<br />
Diana also explained that the space constraints of small stages effectively limited the kind of action you could stage on them. So she had written this explicitly as a belly-punch beating, which can be staged pretty much in one spot. And if this play was going to get on stage anywhere, it was going to be a small stage.<br />
<br />
So that was what I did with my summer vacation: Sweated and lusted after a professor and let another man beat up my belly for hours for free.<br />
<br />
We were in the third of our four rehearsals before the staging of the play. In the first, Diana taught us the intertwined dual rhythm of the punches and the dialogue. And she drilled us in each line and each punch till we all three had the scene by heart. (When it got to the stage, the wife actress would have to perform with her back to this beating, so it was important that she memorize it, both visually and by the dialogue).<br />
<br />
She made them say the lines over and over, to one another, while he slugged me in the belly, till they had the timing by rote. And my reactions were part of it, too, so she coaxed me in how to take it — how to <i>take</i> it — how to show the whole house that I'd just been gutted in the stomach by his fist, in spite of the pulled stunt-punch he had actually given me. The vocalics of my reactions to being bellypunched were essential to the scene, she explained.</div><div>
<br />We did that, over and over all one hot afternoon, taking it from the top when any of us flubbed. The wife actress was a self-absorbed junior who frequently lost track of her lines.<br />
<br />I had to convincingly take not just one punch in the belly, but a whole beatdown-ful of them. In between I had to spend long periods of being doubled over, breathless, winded. All as determined by the pacing of the lines in Diana's script, and the need, as determined by her, of the husband actor to emphasize his words by an emphatic punch in my belly.<br />
<br />
That microscopic moment out of reality became the essence of who I was, during that time. For I deeply longed to impress her as a serious talent, and she knew that. She had me in her office for coffee and to talk about it. It was the first time in my life I'd ever had espresso. She described my part to me again and told me, "you aren't just a guy who takes a punch. You <i>are</i> the punch, the impact of the punch, in the form of a man on stage. That's all you represent; that is the only reason you are even here."<br />
<br />
The title of my thesis was "Existentialism as Stage Combat."<br />
<br />
Diana said "action," and I became "punched belly," until the scene ended or she said "cut." I became completely, body, voice, and mind, the platonic ideal of "belly punch" that existed in the minds of enough people out there that you could count on it being recognized by most of them. I was "the guy who can't take it in the belly."</div><div><br /></div><div>You'd seen him somewhere: old Westerns, pro wrestling, interrogation scenes in gangster novels. Those years, with tiny television screens and big, dim arenas and gyms, the wrestlers and the stuntmen — who were purveyors of the only violence we were allowed to see — over-sold every act and move. The key to a stunt bellypunch, of course, is the "take." Even the lamest attempt to throw a punch can look like Rocky if the taker receives it with body blown back from the center, air rushing out of lungs, face contorted with bellyache suffering, arms flailing helplessly.<br />
<br />
And now the authoress herself stood there in front of me, speaking the lines she had written for the wife to speak as she watched me get my belly beat up. Diana held the script in her hand but never glanced at it. She spoke them from heart. And her eyes riveted me.<div><br /></div><div>That's how she had instructed Emma, the junior-class actress, to look at me for this rehearsal of the scene. But Diana moved so differently from Emma. She moved as she spoke, took a step this way and that, put her hands on her hips, and when she moved her hips slid this way, then that, and my eyes couldn't help but follow them.<br />
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During a break I asked her why she did it like that, when it wasn't part of the play.</div><div><br /></div><div>"I'm directing you," she replied. I must have frowned.<br />
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"Because I know you understand belly-dance so deeply," she smiled as she stroked back her hair. "I'm watching a man doubled up and suffering from a punch in his belly. And I'm flaunting my bare belly-button at you, taunting you with my bare belly, even as you burn in shame because this lovely woman is absorbing the sight of you as a pathetic humiliated wimp who can't take a punch in the belly. My belly-button is mocking you, isn't it? She's laughing silently at your suffering."</div><div><br /></div><div>When we went back to work Diana turned her attention to the hero. Sternly, coyly, she got him worked up for his role, let him see how much she depended on him to make her theatrical climax succeed.</div><div><br /></div><div>Then we found our marks on the stage, and Diana plunged right into the scene and commanded the other actor to belly-whomp me right there and drop me to my knees. "Hit him like you mean it."</div><div><br /></div><div>He does, and I performed the drop to my knees very well, I thought, very realistic. And as he rants his lines, periodically, he hauls me up off the floor and beats my belly some more for emphasis. I'm nothing more than visual flourishes for his egotistical rant. But those flourishes cost me a belly-punch humiliation. And I put my whole self into them.<br />
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We finished, and took our places to do it over again. But now Diana walked between us, peering over her eye-glasses at me, circling her hips, flaunting bare belly, and saying,<br />
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"It's got to have more."<br />
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And she was talking to him but her eyes stayed on me. She explained how this was such a key scene, and we all were wonderful but it still did not match the vision in her mind. And that this sometimes happened in theaters. And there was a way professionals handled it. And she knew we, all of us here, were professionals. She was watching my eyes watching her. She was reading me like a secret.<br />
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And she was right in front of me now, and she leaned forward and stood tiptoe, and I felt her belly, her bare belly, pressed damp and firm against me. Her bellybutton laid a deep, long, deceitful kiss on mine.<br />
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"From now on, when you beat him," she said, "I want you to give it to him. Really slam your fist into him. Right in his <i>belly</i>." And finally, to me, almost a coo: "You're a big boy. You can take it."</div></div>bellypunchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15626322785267248362noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3692525029190577226.post-44906528330956517442022-08-22T12:34:00.001-04:002023-05-05T14:20:35.020-04:00Initiation<div style="background-color: white;">
My first job out of college has nothing to do with what I studied. It doesn't surprise me; life's like that for young guys.</div>
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A friend says newspaper are always hiring anyone willing to put up with high stress and low wages. His dad is a copy editor. I mail out the resumes, interview a few places, and within a month I'm working at a small paper at the New Jersey shore. I chose that one because I want to be near the ocean and girls. I rent an apartment over Treasures of the Sea, a shop where people buy flip-flops and inflatable sea horses. Two years later I’m not making as much as most of my buddies from college, but I seem to be having more fun. Especially in the summer season, when the girls from Philly come down.</div>
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My co-workers are a bunch of young guys like myself, some already tied down and miserable in marriage, all of them cynical, rammy, argumentative. The editor, Don, has worked at big city dailies since he dropped out of high school and has come here to decelerate from 60-hour work weeks. A chance for his heart to slow down enough so he can live to retirement. He pretty much lets us run the ship, though he drills us in the rules and collars us when we get sloppy. The one thing he fears is that we’ll get him sued. The one thing we don’t like about him is that he brings in Ellen Sabatini twice a week to grind up our writing and spit it out.</div>
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Don and Ellen had worked together for years in D.C., and he says she knows all there is to know about style and content. She is divorced and lives with her kids, and Don made enough room in the budget to pay her to come in twice a week. The reporters repeat a rumor that Ellen had worked as a stripper, maybe still does. Just something someone thought he had overheard. There are always rumors. Like that Don and Ellen had been lovers. You never believe them, but they sink in and you find yourself acting as if they were true.</div>
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Ellen is harsh, sour, brusque — the Blue Pencil Bitch. It gets to be a joke. But you have to be quiet about it because Don won’t stand gripes about her. Secretly I like what Ellen does. She takes my half-thought-out stories and lazy language and slaps them into shape, makes them stand up straight and pay attention. “Say it like you mean it,” she’ll order me.</div>
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I think Ellen is about 42. A few strong gray hairs curl in her mane like dolphins. Ellen’s face makes me think of a wolf. It pushes toward a point. Above sharp brown eyes, her brows angle toward the bridge of her long nose. Her mouth is small and puckered to a purse by crowded teeth. It works more easily into sneers than smiles. Her small shoulders are girl-slender, though she has weight in her hips. She wears black dresses and silver bracelets. Her gestures are swan-smooth. Her walk, in flats, is erect, perfect. I can imagine a big atlas balanced on her head.</div>
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The reporters are usually relentlessly rational, but they let their loathing of Ellen lead them down crazy paths. Beer talk after work always finds its way to Ellen, before rock ‘n’ roll trivia but after ice hockey. Steve, who can pick apart the cover-ups in a police chief’s report, paints Ellen in the same conversation as a man-hungry slut and a man-hating dyke. Another time two of the guys try to convince me that, because Ellen never wears make-up, it proves she’s a tease trying to turn us on. It’s so nutty I can’t resist arguing.</div>
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I have a buzz on by then, I guess. Finally I say, “Well, I don’t care what she is; I like her.”</div>
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Faces wrinkle around the table. “Why don’t you go for it, then,” Steve says and he punches my arm. Then the debate begins again about whether she is a lesbian or a slut and what kind of chance I’d have with her. But I stay out of it because I really am going to take a stab at seducing her.</div>
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She’s in again on Thursday. Ellen works us over in the lunchroom, amid the quiet gurgle of coffee pots and the clicks and hums of snack machines. It’s the only room in the building that has plants. People assume they’re plastic because they never grow or change, but they are real; I know because I touched them one day.</div>
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We sit on aluminum chairs with yellow plastic seats, at a round table of faded, scratched orange formica. I sit squared, my feet wrapped around the chair legs, hunched over a photocopy of one of my stories, which Ellen has scarred with small red handwriting. Ellen leans back in her chair, sitting side-saddle, legs crossed, her head turned to me but her body facing the window.</div>
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I try to divert her into flirtation. I’ve always chased girls a year or two younger than me. They seem easier to talk to, easier to impress. Ellen recognizes each attempt to manipulate the conversation, and she plays chess to my checkers. She keeps steering me back onto work.</div>
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She explains a word I had misused—gregarious—by referring to its Greek origin.</div>
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“You know Greek?” I say.</div>
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“I am Greek,” she smiles. I notch a point for me: I got her to smile.</div>
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“I thought you were Italian,” I say. “But that would be your married name, right?” I know I’m blowing it even as the words are coming out of me.</div>
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She waves me back to the clip.</div>
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“Never start a sentence with ‘it,’ “ she says. “You have here, ‘It looks like taxes will have to be raised.’ Just say, ‘Taxes may have to be raised.’"</div>
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“What’s wrong with the first way?”</div>
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“It sounds too passive.” As she says it she twists her wrist and her fingernails curl across the air like a flight of shore birds.</div>
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“Never start a sentence with ‘it,’ “ I tell her.</div>
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She tosses her head back and laughs, a deep, rich laugh.</div>
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I’m her fourth victim that morning and I take a chance that she’s ready for a break. “Smoke?” I ask.</div>
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“Sure,” she says. She and I are the only two in the newsroom who smoke, though lots of advertising people do and the guys in the press room. You can’t smoke in the building because of the federal regulations, so smokers all wander out to the back entrance and stand around by the bushes, puffing. It looks like high school. Except no one has to keep an eye out for assistant principals.</div>
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We leave the clips on the table and walk past the roaring printing press and out the back door. The sun is bright and warm now. It’s one of those shore days where the weather changes every five minutes and you can forget about having the right clothes and just resign yourself to being hot or wet or cold much of the time.</div>
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I light my smoke and light hers as she cups her hand around my match. It’s smoker etiquette, but our hands touch. I lean back against one brace of the door, and she stands at the other. A sea fog washes silently over the building and shrouds us. It will be gone soon. We say nothing. I watch her dark features through the wet mist. Her hair is like a cowl.</div>
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I know a few things about Ellen the others don’t know because she and I have found ourselves alone out there a few times before and I’ve made conversation then, asking her about her kids, her career. Her kids are 11 and 13. She has a degree in classical mythology from Bryn Mawr. She edits book manuscripts. She rattled off a few authors’ names once: I recognized one of them. So she doesn’t need the money she gets from editing our clips. When I told her Don thinks he’s doing her a favor she laughed because she thought she was doing one for him.</div>
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I recall all this while we’re smoking. And I also remember a robin’s nest that no one else has noticed, even though it’s right where they all smoke. “Here, let me show you something.” I reach into a bush and part its stiff twigs and little white flowers.</div>
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We both lean. “Oh, look at that,” Ellen says. Two nests sit one inside the other, dirty teacups. I tell her how the robin built one last summer and hatched two eggs in it. Then one day they were all gone, the babies, the mother. I figured a snake or something ate them. But the next year she came back and built a new nest inside the old one. She hatched there again, but again they all vanished. While Ellen studies the cups of mud and grass I let my cheek brush against her hair.</div>
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All morning I’ve been pressing my fingers to the bruise on my sternum, which is where Tina beat on me the night before. We had met at a bar, and we seemed to hit it off. It was just a lot of fun walking the beach at night, just letting our ankles get wet, but once we got intimate she wanted to cling like glue and everything melted. Like I was suddenly not dealing with the same woman, like she turned into a space alien or started speaking another language. I tried to get her to recognize that it was just a fling, a shore thing that we’d both outgrown. She insisted on driving down all the way from Philly, just to go crazy and beat on my chest with her fists, then leave. As I press on the sore spots the sound of Tina’s sobs echoes in me, like a talking doll.</div>
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“What happened there?” Ellen asks.</div>
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I realize what I’ve been doing, and that this is the first time she’s ever asked me anything about myself. I wish she had started with a different topic. “Ah, this girl,” I say. “Real nut-case.” We both stand up straight but when I tell her the story it comes out wrong, like I’m the bad guy. I keep trying to tell it over until it sounds the way I want it to. I concentrate on the part where Tina’s hitting me, because at least I’m the victim there.</div>
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“Maybe she was trying to give you a ritual wound,” Ellen says, and she smiles.</div>
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“What?”</div>
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“The ritual wound makes a man out of a shy child,” she says. She speaks slowly and crisply. “In the ancient cultures the village fathers, the old men and the hunters, would chant and mark the boy with something painful, like a scar, a burn to the flesh, a knocked-out tooth.”</div>
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She isn’t smiling. I want to say something clever.</div>
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“Yeah, well thank God she didn’t go for my mouth,” is the best I can do.</div>
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Ellen takes a long drag, turning her head a bit to the side, but keeping her narrow eyes on me. “You want to know what’s wrong, why she hit you?” she asks, smoking out the words. She doesn’t wait for an answer. “She’s angry because you fooled her. And not about that. You fooled her because you’re not a man yet.”</div>
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I feel hair on my head bristle.</div>
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“I would say I am,” I say. “President of my frat, I played three sports in high school, I’ve been hunting with my dad a million times. Because I don’t send flowers after every date that makes me not a man?”</div>
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“You do the easy part,” she says. “You probably fool a lot of girls down here. But you’re not finished. Some things about being a man women know better than men do.”</div>
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I don’t say anything and I look at my shoes, because I’m trying to stack up her words again and figure out how to prove she’s wrong.</div>
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“Do you know I dance?” she says.</div>
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What’s the right answer? I think about the strip tease rumors. “I guess I do," I say. “No, actually I don't. What do you mean?”</div>
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She laughs a little. “Belly-dance.” “Belly” comes lush and warm out of her mouth, like hot honey. She lets it flow, lets her tongue linger and turn on the double “L” I feel a shudder in my shoulders.</div>
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I nod. “You like it?” At once I know it's a stupid question.</div>
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“I’m giving a performance tonight, at the arts center,” she says. “Come and see me. My kids are with their father. I want you to come up. I know a place we can go afterward.” My mind jumps. I’m thinking I’ve lost her, and then she turns around and practically pulls me into her bed. I swear that from now on I’m only ever going to seduce older women, divorcees. Why hadn’t I seen it before? They’re still desirable, and so much more worldly, and they’ll be so grateful.</div>
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“OK, great,” I say, trying to sound like it had been my idea. “It’s a date.”</div>
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Ellen’s performance is part of the annual open house at the arts center. Ellen, it turns out, is one of the directors as well as a dance instructor there. The art center is an old seaside mansion that was willed to the county. Its huge rooms have been diced up by erected drywall into gallery space and recital halls. The dance studio is the former master bedroom, at the front of the second floor. It bows out in bay windows with a view of the sea. The crowd is mature, well-dressed, chatty. They walk through the galleries, nodding at the watercolors and pastels, pausing just long enough at each one. Then they mount the wide oak staircase to the dance hall. Steel chairs are arranged in rows, facing the window. I sit off to one side.</div>
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Soon the lights dim. A spot focuses on a small parquet stage in front of the windows. Ellen runs in, on balls of her feet, trailing veils of pale blue that match the gauzy silken dress that snuggles down on her hips. Her top is a shapely band of jangling gold. She stands still in the spotlight, and, as Middle Eastern music jitters from speakers, she begins to dance.</div>
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Her dance shows me at once the source of Ellen’s daily grace in gesture. But here there’s more. There are tides in her dance, and sunshine, and ancient wild places. Her wrists twine like vines in Eden. Some part of me feels awkward, like I’m seeing something secret or private and I ought to turn away. Like I’m hiding in ferns, watching a wise-eyed young woman swim nude in a pond. I can’t understand that because Ellen is more decently clothed than girls I see on the beach or in Ocean City Mall on summer evenings. So why is it scary?</div>
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I’m struck by her familiar face, hard, creased by lines at the lips and eyes, above a supple, smooth olive-brown body that plays hide-and-seek in the veils.</div>
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The veined hands that scribbled on my copy now make veils float away like living flames. Ellen, I think, is dancing for me: bare and heaving, belly-soft, deftly displaying her quivering landscape. It arouses me to think that. But I also know it isn’t for me and she doesn’t even know I’m in the place because all the lights are on her. She doesn’t seem to notice anyone. She’d be doing this if I wasn’t there or maybe if no one was there.</div>
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The music slows. Ellen stands still and wreathes her hands over her head and concentrates on flourishes of her oval belly. Ellen’s belly has a firm curve, and she lets it ripple and roll and undulate like wind over ripe wheat—I think of the line from the Song of Solomon, the sexual part of the Bible that I dug into it to find when I was 14 and heard it was there, about how thy belly is like a hill of wheat, and it makes sense for the first time.</div>
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The music stops, and I clap hard as I look at my wrist. I realize she has been dancing, and I’ve been motionless, for half an hour. Ellen bows deeply forward, her hair sweeping the floor, and stands upright, tossing her head back. She smiles, and prances out of the room before the applause ends.</div>
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The crowd sifts out of the room, flows back downstairs for a wine and cheese reception. I sip a plastic cup of red wine and chat with county officials I recognize. My eyes flicker from their faces, eager for a glimpse of Ellen. Then she’s standing beside me. “Hi,” she says.</div>
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She wears a dull gray outfit, cashmere sweater and a skirt, but they don’t meet. The skirt is slung low on her hips, like the one she danced in, a few inches below her navel, and the top is cropped short above it.</div>
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“That was beautiful,” I say, but then some people crowd around Ellen and start gushing. I watch as Ellen stands, smiling, and lets the crowd spiral to her. I expect some man to make a move, but most of them, even the unattached ones, stay back, though they look and look. It’s the women who seem to be in love with her.</div>
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So I pretend to be interested in the paintings, and use the trick I learned earlier in the gallery: how many seconds to stare at something to seem like you’re actually looking at it. But as the room starts to clear, Ellen comes up to me and says, “Are you ready to go?” We walk across the street to a restaurant and go in through the tavern door. It’s dark, paneled, and plush. She slides into her chair. We order glasses of wine. I ask her where she learned to dance like that. She tells me her aunts taught her, and their aunts taught them, on back to Eve and Lilith for all she knows.</div>
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I don’t even plot my conversation strategy. I just dive in. I tell her that when men talk about a woman’s body and its sexual qualities they skip right over the center: “Lips, tits, ass, legs, thighs, whatever. The only compliment they pay a girl’s stomach is if it’s flat. That always bothers me.” Actually, I’ve just now thought of it. “It’s like everybody’s missing a mid-section. Except you.”</div>
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She passes over the compliment. “Not for me; women with gut-muscle, washboards. I once taught a woman who told me, ‘I don’t like to call it belly dancing because it’s not just about that,’ " she imitates a flat nasal drawl. “Wanna-be instructors advertise classes in 'Middle Eastern folk dance' or 'ethnic dance' and no women sign up. It’s not about folks; it’s not about ethnics. It’s about bellies; big, beautiful, bare, brazen universal bellies. I don’t know why everyone’s afraid of that word.” In Ellen’s mouth it sounds like the most sensuous word in the language.</div>
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We have more wine. My eyes keep slipping from her face to her belly. It pulses when she laughs, or lolls on the lip of her tight skirt, the navel puckered and beckoning like a buxom courtesan from a Spanish balcony, like a lazy, wise Juliet. I keep imagining our bodies fitting together. Cool arms and hot breasts, slide into her, crush against her, thrust and reach up into her belly to just touch with the tip of me that glow, that quivering secret heart in her center.</div>
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“Time to go,” she says suddenly, standing.</div>
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“Where?”</div>
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“You drive. I’ll tell you how to get there.”</div>
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She directs me back over the marshes, then we drive five miles inland up among the stiff red pines. At last, she steers me into the sandy parking lot of a low roadhouse with one red Budweiser sign in the window and a row of Harleys by the door.</div>
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“This is your place,” she says.</div>
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“Doesn’t look like my place,” I say.</div>
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She follows me in. The bar stretches along the wall to our left, and before it, where I expect a dance floor, is a boxing ring. The banner above it reads “Thursday night tough man contest.” Then I remember I’ve heard about this place from one of the ad reps. It’s primitive. Any tough can claim the ring and take all challenges from all comers. Rivals brawl with knuckles, without rules. Well, if this is what turns Ellen on, I’m willing to watch, I think, but I don’t even believe myself. It’s not going to be that simple. I’m lightheaded, from the drinks, from dreams of swimming into the body I had seen dance, and now from the sense of having stepped into a space from a very different, older dream.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
“Him,” Ellen says.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
I follow her eyes to the ring. He’s bald, well-muscled, broad-shouldered, pale; he has handlebar mustaches like the tusks of a wild boar.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
“What about him?”</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
“You’re going to fight him now,” she says, she begins to unbutton my shirt.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
My heart goes cold. “Whoa, wait a minute,” I try to take her hands off me.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
“Shut up and do it,” she commands. She peels the shirt off my shoulders and bunches it up under her arm.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
“But I don’t ...”</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
Her eyes blaze and she stands up straight and squares her shoulders to face me with a small rippling of her whole body that makes her seem a foot taller. Was that a move from her dance? It’s like she reached in my head and grabbed something and threw it into a cage. I can see it clanging the bars and straining its mouth, but I can’t hear it.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
“Here’s what you do,” she says. “Are you listening?” I nod yes. Just then the jukebox kicks up and she had to put her face to my ear and yell. I feel the warmth of her breath tickling my neck and her small hands grip my houlders. “Protect your face and your head. Keep your hands up, and keep them close. Give him your body. Give it to him. He won’t kill you, but if he gets to your head he might. Don’t even try to throw a punch. Just stand in there and take it.”</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
“I don’t know if I can,” I say quietly. Dreams of the imminent lasciviousness of her body have drained out of me. Instead my mind is full of the mountain I have to leap over before I meet Ellen face to face in passion.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
She is trying to teach me this. She is trying to teach me to become someone who can find her.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
“You’ll do it. Give me your glasses. And your keys. Now go.”</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
I climb into the ring, so weak my wrists can hardly part the ropes. My mind has sheared away from my body, like it does in fevers. I’m hot but I’m shivering.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
Stripped of my shirt, in just jeans, I feel lights glare against my bare chest, and hear the biker women hiss. The man facing me looks like a fist, his whole body seems to be a huge disembodied fist and my hands move to mask him from my face. I offer him my bare belly, the pale un-muscled meat in the center of me.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
He quick-steps toward me, unbends his elbow, and sinks a solid fist plump into my stomach. He slings his flat fist like a hammer, and drives the punch deep into me.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
I hear my mouth utter a guttural “OOUFF!,” a sound out of my core, more loud and deep than any I ever made. First I feel the shock and pain of being violated, then something swells rapidly inside me like a balloon, an ache that crowds out everything. Every second of my life, waking and sleeping, from the cutting of the cord, I had drawn breath without thinking. Now breath will not come to replace the one smacked from me.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
He whomps me with another belly-slammer. His knuckles grind like granite against my belly. No breath is left to lose, so the voice that comes out of me makes an empty sound like “illll.” The next thing I know my eyes are trying to focus on my fingers, which are splayed on the white canvas. I’m down on my knees, head hanging, mouth limp and wet, sucking air. My belly is a heavy, cold knot.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
I know there’s noise around me, but I hear only silence. Then a girl’s harsh laugh from the floor blows faintly through me. “Uh, right in the gut,” she says, and her voice rings in tones of sympathy but the words have the shape of a mouth that is smiling. The sound makes my heart damp with shame. My consciousness of posture rushes back and it wants to do something, to be something to make that girl stop laughing at me. But just as quickly something bigger whelms up over the shame and tells me to get up and take it again. I’ve been struck like a match. I felt the glow, then lost it.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
Now it is my choice. I moan and shake my buckled knees out straight and I stand. I catch my rival’s sneer that says, ‘You haven’t learned your lesson yet, punk?’ I am calm, though cramped with pain. I dare him on to finish. I can’t speak, but I can gesture. He seems to hesitate.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
I throw myself on the man, not to topple him but to seek impalement. I clutch his shoulders, leaving my body unprotected and his arms and hands free to work.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
He scythes punches up into my stomach with both fists, thudding my belly like a drum, convulsing it in violent ripples. The shock of the blows shatters walls in me. He is beating me like clay, breaking brittleness, yes, but leavening jelly into sinew, making stiff into supple. My jerking writhe is a true dance, which Ellen knows because she has danced it long ago and now she shadows it in her perfumed performance.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
He shoves my back against a corner, I catch the top ropes, steadying myself, but that grip poses my body arched and open, and just as I’m at my most vulnerable he torques a shoulder and pitches a punch that belts me full in the belly.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
I clutch my gut and bend far forward. My knees cave and I plunge down. My shoulder takes the fall, and I roll onto my back and lie prone, knuckles to the canvas above my head in the speechless gesture of full submission known of every beast that hunts in packs.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
That ends the affair. He strolls to his corner to take the glory of the boast and accept the hot caressing smiles of rifle-hipped redneck girls. But I have my own prize; an aching empty gut, hollow like a womb, that no joy will ever wholly fill.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
Soon I can draw a full breath and the ceiling stops spinning. Then, as my diaphragm works in deeper and deeper draughts, I find I’m gulping sobs. Not from pain, the pain is over. I crawl to the edge of the ring and drop out of it, finding the floor with my feet.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
“Ellen!” I shout, heedless of the crowd of shadows, the large music. “Ellen!” I throw my arms over her shoulders and she lets me and I cling about her and weep in her hair. She drapes my shirt over me.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
Then she pulls away and says, “We have to get out of here.” She grabs my wrist and quickly she pulls me through the door as I push my arms through the sleeves.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
She opens the car door for me, on the passenger side. I sink down into the seat and the movement shoots little knives into my body. She gets behind the wheel and sees me wince.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
“Any pain in the ribs?” she asks.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
“No,” I say. “He didn’t hit ribs. Just guts.”</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
She drives back to the art center. We don’t speak. I feel all the red and black things come surging back into my chest. I feel humiliated, opened, violated, stripped. Yet where they once would have filled me, now these things crouch in one closet of a mansion that seems much larger than I had known. I search for anger toward Ellen but I can’t find any. Instead I catch a sob in my throat. I don’t know where it comes from; somewhere down deep.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
* * *</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
She parks my car next to hers, turns off the engine, and gets out, leaving the keys in the ignition. She walks around to my side. I can’t see her face, just her belly framed in the open window. She tells me, “In a few days you’ll feel like yourself and I’ll have you over to my place for a big feast.”</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
bellypunchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15626322785267248362noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3692525029190577226.post-27218076061506864842022-08-21T12:07:00.000-04:002022-08-24T13:04:55.005-04:00PROFESSOR BELLYPUNCH<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEig51P8mCAtkcFFImaYCJ4npD9ds4h7_rjkWpxUUw92fknL1yTW5YIhudnx_neYNBjuJBHpL_wxAQGsclkEr5X8OAHGwfK_uoUZm6hmkNo77mE_liFVuEDywtfS1bGP9ZrNHnppmLrpCS1yZGn787cLtnxQYVIbZeyKcRp_SSDYq_Nr5CQSD9l1L0ZBIA/s1663/art-writhing.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1663" height="231" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEig51P8mCAtkcFFImaYCJ4npD9ds4h7_rjkWpxUUw92fknL1yTW5YIhudnx_neYNBjuJBHpL_wxAQGsclkEr5X8OAHGwfK_uoUZm6hmkNo77mE_liFVuEDywtfS1bGP9ZrNHnppmLrpCS1yZGn787cLtnxQYVIbZeyKcRp_SSDYq_Nr5CQSD9l1L0ZBIA/s320/art-writhing.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>The lust inhabited her, paced like a puma in a cage. Waking. sleeping, it glowed under her smooth surface like a hot nerve. It throbbed and hummed as her life followed a bland course. She skimmed over that life, but that was not where her soul lived. It dwelt alone in the opera in her head until once, in a lifetime, a dream came true. Or, you may say, a will and a lust as strong as hers forces the stars from their orbits to align in front of her astonished eyes.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
He stood in shadow by the window and watched the hip-swing of her walk, down the straight paved way across the commons, from the offices to the dorms. "No one cares if I stare," he thought.<br />
<br />
The college no longer denied its bad reputation for shameless wicca-ism and open pagan rituals. It had shed its "women only" status, but the staff and students were overpoweringly women. For a male professor such as himself, there were some advantages. And many perils.<br />
<br />
She was coming up the stairs. He could hear the tap of her heels. To the few men on the faculty, privately, in hushed tones, they were "the belly-button girls." The students who came on campus dressed in the then-fashionable street outfit of a belly-baring top and low-waist jeans or a hip-skirt. The name applied especially to any one of what the male profs had recognized as an alluring elite among the students: Angelique and Lin, and Laura and a few others. Always tasteful, elegant, aloof, and -- whatever outfit they chose -- they always went stylishly bare-bellied.<br />
<br />
He'd known it was Laura a long way off, by her stride. Laura was the only one among the belly-button girls who worried him; she was the only belly-girl who took advanced courses in his discipline, and who thus, just maybe, might end up in one of his classes.<br />
<br />
And here she was, not only in his class but right across his desk from him, in his faculty office, at the end of an autumn Tuesday afternoon.<br />
<br />
He had known this job had a great risk of temptation. He told himself he could handle it. He never expected something this precise, this rapid.<br />
<br />
She's wearing a short, tight, long-sleeved dark purple top and hip-slung low-waist jeans. She's saying she wants to do an independent study under him. The top stops just above her navel. He feels like he's hearing her voice from under water.<br />
<br />
Somehow he gets through the discussion of her idea (he remembers to be non-committal) without babbling. He fears he has blushed. He forces his eyes on her eyes, to keep them off her center.<br />
<br />
At last Laura rose to leave his office. He hurried to his feet. His hands fidgeted in front of him. She watched him with a smile.<br />
<br />
She half turned for the door and he resumed his seat. Then she swung a hip around and faced him again. "Oh, Professor Douglass," she said.<br />
<br />
She leaned her hips forward against his desk, a staring belly-button. Laura's navel bored a gaze straight into him. Professor Douglass seemed to have forgotten how to breathe. He shook himself into awareness and broke the stare. "Yes?" he gasped.<br />
<br />
"I can't thank you enough, professor, for taking my poem with you to the editors' meeting. I meant to submit it, but I've been so ... distracted ...."<br />
<br />
His soul has been sucked and he knows it. He is lost. Captivated. Integrity drowned, personality smashed; all the walls he built to shield himself from punishment swept away in the flood. He found his voice, if not his breath, and there was just enough wind left in him to say: "No, Laura, I'd be happy to take it for you."<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
Only a couple of hours later, in the twilight, Professor Douglass catches sight of Laura across the south commons, going up the steps and into the mock-Greek temple that disguised the common gymnasium.<br />
<br />
On a whim, as he told himself, he followed her in. But he saw no sign of Laura in his first sweep of the room, so he had no choice but to act like he belonged there.<br />
<br />
The old panic began to tighten in him: What if someone should ask him what he was doing in the gym. He couldn't admit he had casually stalked one of his students.<br />
<br />
So he stripped off his top, threw it in an open locker, draped a towel over one shoulder, and strode into the gym, trying to walk like the other men.<br />
<br />
He saw Laura, and he veered toward her, but then pulls up short. She is on the floor at the edge of a fighting ring. Inside its painted circle, fit male students were sparring and jabbing. The professor realizes he's wearing just his jeans. He looks down. His pot-belly is clearly visible. Just as he's about to turn and slink away, she hurries up to him. The boys' eyes follow her as she runs. "Hi, Professor Douglass!"<br />
<br />
"Oh, Laura! I didn't expect to see ..., that is ..." Her eyes sweep over him and he can almost feel the intensity. There's no point in sucking it in now. He starts to apologize: "My belly ..."<br />
<br />
"... is so beautiful!" she finishes, her eyes aglow, and then she laughs and runs back to the ring, calling, "come with me!"<br />
<br />
The shortest, tightest, most weasel-faced college boy in the ring turns to greet her. The others back away, respectful.<br />
<br />
Professor Douglass approaches, shyly. The college boy leans down to Laura and hisses, "Who's that?"<br />
<br />
Professor Douglass joins them. "Professor Douglass, this is Jeff," she says, formally. He bows slightly toward the younger, fitter man. "And, Jeff, this is ..."<br />
<br />
But Jeff interrupts: "Yeah, I know what this is." Then, to the older man, "Hey, prof. Care to go a few rounds?"<br />
<br />
The professor felt his stomach sink. He didn't dare say no. Not in front of that boy and his crew. Not in front of those angelic girls.<br />
<br />
Laura intervened on his behalf -- catastrophically. She stepped between the men and told Jeff, "It's not fair; he never fought bare-knuckled. You'll ruin his face and he has to teach classes."<br />
<br />
But Jeff's grin never flickered. He didn't even look at her; his eye was fixed on the professor's pot-belly. "Don't worry: We'll make it a no-face-punches fight. Right, prof?"<br />
<br />
Professor Douglass pushed out his chest and replied, "Of course! I accept."<br />
<br />
The trap was sprung. Without thinking, without understanding what Jeff was trapping him into by this challenge, he had run right into it.<br />
<br />
The professor's eyes dropped and he stared down at his pampered belly. "I'm not quite in shape, of course, but I can still teach you a thing or two!" And he held up two equally unimpressive forearms and fists.<br />
<br />
College boy says: "Great! Let's do it. Laura, you can ref. Best view in the house."<br />
<br />
Angelique and Lin, along with Laura and a few others. Whatever outfit they chose, stylishly bare-bellied. Constantly commenting on and complimenting each other's fashion choices.<br />
<br />
That half of the gym drifted over to watch. Some faces curious, some excited. Oh, it goes without saying that the professor is going to get his pot-belly beat up. They all know that. But they crowd close to see just how Jeff is going to give it to him.<br />
<br />
The professor, who fancies himself the intellectual superior of any of the people around him, is perhaps the only person in the room who doesn't know what's going to happen to him next.<br />
<br />
In the ring, the males stare at each other, faces grim, fists clenched. The poor professor's attempts to be chesty only make his belly stick out more.<br />
<br />
Laura signals the start of the fight. Jeff lunges and pounds four precisely placed punches into the professor's tender, wide-open belly.<br />
<br />
To be more precise, since it happened so quick, and to give you the finer points only: Jeff ducked his shoulder and planted a left straight in the professor's pot-belly.<br />
<br />
The hollow "thud" of the punch in his gut was a sound sweet as passion to Laura. So was the sound of the "OOF!" from his mouth right after his belly got socked.<br />
<br />
Rude boy followed that cruel assault with an uppercut right in the belly! It took what wind his belly still had, And forced poor professor upright, and exposed his stomach to a cannonball punch straight into his helpless pot-belly. Followed by a right-fist stomach-punch slug to the same spot -- the pit of the belly.<br />
<br />
Each one rocked him and winded him, and at the end of the stomach-barrage, he staggered, fell back, flailed, rolled, thrashed, clutched his belly, gasped, and groaned.<br />
<br />
Laura looked down at him, at her feet, lost in his own little bellypunch world, this weak man who had never known pain and humiliation, and who just got hit with an overdose of both, all at once.<br />
<br />
And she froze and melted all at the same time. Her muscles clenched and she couldn't look away from him.<br />
<br />
She knew Jeff was doing this -- beating this helpless man's soft belly -- to show off for her. It pleased her in ways he could never knew. And the poor professor was just going to have to get his stomach punched mercilessly, for her sake.<br />
<br />
College boy wades through the girls and hauls the bellypunched professor up to his feet. "Come on, I'm not done with you, wimp!" he snarls.<br />
<br />
The Professor keeps his feet, but wobbles. Jeff is just toying with his suffering rival now. He raises a fist and menaces the professor's face, as if forgetting the rule. The professor's hands reflexively fly up to shield his face. That leaves his belly wide open and Jeff just swings the other arm around and plunks him in the stomach.<br />
<br />
The most basic mistake. Jeff is making a fool of him, unmanning him. Doubled over and gasping and moaning again, all the professor's smarts can't help him draw a breath. Jeff shakes him back upright, Jeff raises his fists and says, "The trouble with you, prof, is you've got a big head ..."<br />
<br />
Jeff pops a jab that hit him on the chin. Professor Douglass looks straight up.<br />
<br />
"... and a SOFT BELLY!"<br />
<br />
And his punch socks Professor Douglass straight in the stomach. The shock wave shudders his whole body, and he blurts out:<br />
<br />
"OOUFF!"<br />
<br />
The professor bends and hunches over, gripping his stomach. College boy Jeff stands over him, hands on hips. The others group close around. Everyone is looking down at the belly-punch victim. Lin says, in mock sympathy, "Ooooh, right in the belly!"<br />
<br />
No one moves to help him.<br />
<br />
"Wow, he's aching!" Lin said.<br />
<br />
"She'll never look twice at him again," Angelique said. "Not after seeing him get belly-whomped like that."<br />
<br />
Lin laughed. "Every time he calls her name, that's what she'll see. Him like this."<br />
<br />
With his belly skewered by another man's fist. Or bent over and crying because he got winded.<br />
<br />
Angelique sneered, "What a belly-wimp," and everyone laughed.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
It was a favorite topic of the dorms for the rest of the semester. The female staff kept me updated. The writing prof told me she had assigned as her topic one day "Punching Professor Bellywimp" and the girls handed in stacks of stories, poems, plays, and even songs, all in some way celebrating or mourning, or describing, his belly-beating at Jeff's hands. She assured him the details of the punch-out were well and correctly known to nearly all the girls. And to prove her own fitness to judge, she recited them herself, correctly, with a great deal of descriptive force.<br />
<br />
The arts professor told him separately that she lately had assigned, as the day's inspiration, the same scene. And she showed him various drawings and illustrations her students had produced. The women seemed to find the whole situation amusing and tempting.<br />
<br />
The talk faded in time, but one thing didn't: The nickname he'd gotten that night: Bellywimp. Professor Bellywimp. That's what many students called him. The new ones heard it and were told the details. So it became his name.bellypunchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15626322785267248362noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3692525029190577226.post-72320715561516224162022-08-19T15:01:00.000-04:002022-08-24T15:06:50.248-04:00BELLY JOBBER<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxgCjIBe9f2R834G99Op1a2MEoAqGvE0_7PRdSHnSWvSwB8TR5i8VjJ_kN-FPaGYkKCcWy8ICD1EG_b7U55O-hDf-vbz-S-nu-KL6yzB7_gO7_7CISTplr7fvyfOHkjgfaQURqLwVdYCBl/s1600/impact1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="123" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxgCjIBe9f2R834G99Op1a2MEoAqGvE0_7PRdSHnSWvSwB8TR5i8VjJ_kN-FPaGYkKCcWy8ICD1EG_b7U55O-hDf-vbz-S-nu-KL6yzB7_gO7_7CISTplr7fvyfOHkjgfaQURqLwVdYCBl/s320/impact1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
He took a lot of time dressing. He was after a "look," and he kept changing outfits till he liked what he saw. Whatever it was, the pants rode low, down on the hips, to expose his belly. And the top, if there was one, was a short, open fest, or a tight T-shirt top that easily rode up. Sometimes he shamelessly wore a girls' bellyshirt in the ring.<br />
<br />
Then, after he oiled up, he headed for the ring. He always entered the same. Jeans slung low on his hips, gut thrust out, hands held up, like he was accepting applause (or surrendering). Head high, smiling, seemingly unaware that he looked like a walking target with his belly jutting out bare in front of him.<br />
<br />
Being the "jobber" in the match, he always was introduced first. While the better-known fighter got introduced, the jobber just slouched in the corner, looking bored, pot-bellied.<br />
<br />
When the bell rang and the fighting began, he had his hands up high, defending his face, and his belly stuck out like a hanging curveball over home plate.<br />
<br />
And somehow, he's the only one in the arena (and in 40 million TV living rooms) who doesn't see it coming.<br />
<br />
You know he isn't expecting it because the fist socks him right in his stomach and he doesn't flinch or brace. The fist just torpedoes his belly. It's in and out of him before the OOF! bursts from his mouth.<br />
<br />
After the punch-jolt and the OOF! there's that frozen, silent second of winded agony. Then he goes all to pieces, grips his belly-curve with both hands and staggers around the ring at a full flounder, all grimmace and gasp.<br />
<br />
Then he blunders back into his foe, who gives him a bop on the head to make him reflexively stand upright, and his hands go to his noggin. And while they do his rival winds up his arm and his fist does a cannonball in the wimp's bread-basket.<br />
<br />
This time he folds right over it, busted limp in his middle, lifted to his toes by a sock in the stomach. His face is down toward the floor but still the wimp gives up an OOF! that shakes the rafters.<br />
<br />
When the rival wrenches the fist out from up in his gut, the wimp flops to his knees, cradling his punched belly, and he keeps going down, falling, rolling, thrashing on the mat, his feet flailing in feckless kicks, his hands gripped to his soft belly. His eyes are wide in breathless panic, and his mouth hangs askew; the only sounds that come out of him are long, low belly-ache groans.<br />
<br />
He was still winded when his rival strode impatiently up to him and kicked his forehead and knocked him flat on his back on the mat. Like the jobber he was, his hands instantly forgot about his vulnerable gut and flew to his head. He even arched his back in pain, so his belly thrust right up and out at the booted bad-man.<br />
<br />
And once again, he seemed the only one unaware of what was on the way: the hard rubber heel of a size-12 Texas cowboy boot stamped down like a hot brand right smack in the middle of his bare belly.<br />
<br />
In the crowd, you could feel the electric second of anticipation before the stomp, and then when the boot came down it was like a thunderbolt. The poor potbellied wimp on the mat flailed arms and legs helplessly like a broken toy. His face looked mad and it seemed like his tongue lolled out at one point.<br />
<br />
It was painfully obvious that this beating was far past his ability to endure -- and that such ability, in his case, was embarassingly low. Yet he had put himself there. It was safe to laugh at him, mock him, enjoy his suffering.<br />
<br />
The brute reaches down, grabs the wimp by the hair, yanks him roughly up to his knees. Jobber sags weakly, kneeling, hands up trying to ease the hairpull. His belly protrudes dutifully for the brute to draw back a leg and swing a boot-kick up into his gut.<br />
<br />
Bellyboy hits the mat again in full-on stage-5 bellyache mode. He's flopping like a caught fish and crying. The brute does a few poses for the crowd before returning to his hapless victim, who has now gotten himself together so far as to rise to his knees on his own.<br />
<br />
The brawler saunters up, and lays a hand on his hair. The jobber musters all he has of courage and strength and swings a punch against his tormentor's stomach. It bounces off. Swings the other fist the same way. Same result. The brute laughs, and pulls the wimp upright, swings him by the arm, and tosses him back into a corner of the ring.<br />
<br />
The wimp turns as he stumbles into it, and hits it with his back, then slumps there, arms draped on the ropes. The thug approaches confidently. There's a lesson he has to teach this fool who took shots at his abs. He grips the wimp by the throat and bends his head back over the top turnbuckle, forcing him to arch his body, belly out. The wimp's hands are all at the wrist above the grip on his throat.<br />
<br />
The brute holds his other arm aloft, in a fist, and looks around the crowd as if to ask, "shall I?" Whistles, cheers, shouts of "do it!" For once, though he can't see it, the wimp knows it's coming and manages to bleat out, "no, not my belly!" just as the fist hammer-drops on his stomach.<br />
<br />
This time the bellypunch-grunt came out of him in a long, low UUH! that sounded like it started in the bottom of a kettle drum.<br />
<br />
<span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;">And there's still 15 minutes of TV time to fill until the next match!</span></span>bellypunchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15626322785267248362noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3692525029190577226.post-36561978263301534862022-08-18T10:42:00.000-04:002022-08-24T15:07:53.767-04:00CELEBRATION<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihIyqta74irJNJBJJVYtgEOJCdXlBzmfkdNKXpVVsJy0pjcwSuz9dl8SJTsDlANLs0d-4QIqS1Ot5JFRdCVuWoGle_gyyaE6tTPIISHnBlh_CNhhYJ5Lyvmw1dDcb7WLvgonVxz9RJMZHd/s1600/ah-IMG5732.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihIyqta74irJNJBJJVYtgEOJCdXlBzmfkdNKXpVVsJy0pjcwSuz9dl8SJTsDlANLs0d-4QIqS1Ot5JFRdCVuWoGle_gyyaE6tTPIISHnBlh_CNhhYJ5Lyvmw1dDcb7WLvgonVxz9RJMZHd/s320/ah-IMG5732.jpg" width="258" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
Brandy decanter shape, long, elegant torse, not a curve of her imperfect, ripe hips, narrow shoulders, arched in the back, proud in the belly. The long, elegant curve of her belly-dancer body. Navel like a deep sigh, hood and hollow. Flare of hips, wineflask below the waist. She chose low-horizon jeans to emphasize, Queen Omphale; the fabrics clung and cupped her at the widest, belly and hips all bare and out.bellypunchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15626322785267248362noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3692525029190577226.post-24754077260880175562022-08-17T13:26:00.000-04:002022-08-24T15:08:17.948-04:00Navel Eye<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisMuCdWY1qFQ1HTDt_0N-O-LWFunHODO9kbjF8SIAjvN-8OWizUXWFKJ3NDyb4tYyY_fJ_XY8CNZrJADppHNRxiz79fYYl9UQ5aR-eRGYzDFv51KiS7T8t4yZNzsUmbs4msNaF_rvskYzq/s1000/priestess.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="812" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisMuCdWY1qFQ1HTDt_0N-O-LWFunHODO9kbjF8SIAjvN-8OWizUXWFKJ3NDyb4tYyY_fJ_XY8CNZrJADppHNRxiz79fYYl9UQ5aR-eRGYzDFv51KiS7T8t4yZNzsUmbs4msNaF_rvskYzq/s320/priestess.jpg"/></a></div>
<br />
In our forties, bored with dull jobs in dull places, Amy and I pitched everything and moved south to begin again in a seaside college town. She took a position as professor of costume history at the small college there. The school was known more for its parties than its graduates. I worked from home, raking money from the Internet. We bought a small, secluded house there, just off campus and in walking distance of the beach.<br />
<br />
Once Amy was established in her post, she dusted off her belly-dance skills and organized a belly-dance club among the college girls. She danced group lessons with them in our house, teaching them the belly-button magic that came to her so naturally.<br />
<br />
There always were a half dozen or more of them, though the names changed. They were more disciples than students. The little priestesses came to the temple in our house to worship together. She taught them not mere dance and fashion, but the allure of a woman's belly, her erotic heart. And the bevvy of belly-dancers caught up some of her intensity, though no one ever came close to Amy. They watched her walk with breathless girl-crushes.<br />
<br />
She taught them not just the movements and the attitudes, but the deep roots of the dance, that the girl's navel is the eye of the goddess. That the man who is lured and enslaved by it is her ritual sacrifice.<br />
<br />
They strutted across the campus, bare-bellied in their cropped tops printed with the name of their troupe -- "Belly Pride" -- in gold letters.<br />
<br />
And at every full moon day, they gathered in our yard for their ritual. In the back yard of the house, set among a stand of pines, stood an old concrete swimming pool. It was turfed in now, and only about two feet deep. A circle in the soil, just perfect for our shared desire. I dug pit holes in the earth and set a sturdy steel railing all the way around it, with one entrance. Then I strung a mesh of rope from the rail, to complete the enclosure.<br />
<br />
Amy's belly-lessons plunged from dance to sensual sorcery, and the girls blossomed with her, from students to priestesses. They walked out with us to the pool, each bare-bellied in her own chosen way. But Amy led them, stunningly enlaced in a perfect belly-flaunting dress. She led me by one hand. By the other, she led my opponent. Both of us were naked.<br />
<br />
He would be a different man each time, typically some boy from the college -- a wiry, tough youth or a solid jock, all beef and muscle. Often the boyfriend of one of the girls, or some one they had chosen together and seduced into it. The priestesses trailed behind, in pairs.<br />
<br />
With the salt breeze off the sea and the hush of the trees above, Amy and my opponent and I stepped down into the navel-shaped pool. The girls then formed a ring around the railing. Their bellies gazed down at us, a ring of unblinking navels, each anonymously unique, some virgin-pale, some bronzed and brazen. Their voices commented and speculated. But Amy's witching eyes held my gaze.<br />
<br />
With a wise gaze and casual up-strokes of her long-fingered hands, she had both cocks instantly hard in her warm palms. And she held us both there as she explained the rules of the fight in her low, lascivious voice. She addressed both of us; I knew the rules by heart already, but it was my eyes she held with her glittering stare as she spoke.<br />
<br />
"You may grapple and shove and pull one another. But you may only punch with a closed fist, and only in the stomach. If one of you goes down from a belly-punch, the other will hold back until he rises again. You will fight till I declare an end to the ritual."<br />
<br />
Then she stepped back, but held her place in the arena, the queen of bare-bellied beat-downs. The priestesses began to cheer my opponent, and we raised our fists and set to work.<br />
<br />
I am expert at this. I know how to lead with my belly. I square my stance and keep my belly soft, and let my opponent drive right into it with his punch. I know how to fall back in such a way that my arms tangle with the ropes and leave me caught and exposed and vulnerable for a belly-whomping. I know how to get winded and go down, suffering loud and long, then slowly regain my feet for more.<br />
<br />
And he belts me with a punch right in my belly. His fist whomps me plump in the stomach, and my body folds right over. Bellyaching, staggering away from him, turning, I drop to my knees. Suffering like a bare-bellied wimp. My goddess just watched me get beat up by a bellypunch.<br />
<br />
I glance up and catch her eyes. I see the deep arousal in them as she watches me doubled over and belly-aching, suffering from that punch in my belly.<br />
<br />
He hauls me upright, and effortlessly buries his fist in my stomach. It catches me soft-bellied. He slams that fist into my belly and knocks the wind out of me. I double up again, with my hands pressed to my punched belly.<br />
<br />
Amy blurts out: "Oooh! Right in the belly!"<br />
<br />
The girls pick it up at once.<br />
<br />
"Slug him again," one says. "Hit him in the belly!"<br />
<br />
He shoves me back upright. He pulls his arm back and pounds another punch into my belly.<br />
<br />
My mouth flies open as my body slowly crumples. I stagger away from him, suffering.<br />
<br />
My lover needs me to feel the fullness of humiliation. She purrs, “Uh, right in the belly!”<br />
<br />
Her priestesses mimic her. "Uh, right in the belly," they say.<br />
<br />
I straighten up and try to fight him. But he just laughs, enjoying the attention.<br />
<br />
"I was hoping you'd get back up, so I can give you another punch in the belly."<br />
<br />
Instead of another big belly-slammer, this time he hits me with a series of sharp jabs, with his knuckles, right in the pit of my stomach.<br />
<br />
One-two-three! I can't even protect my belly. Each punch drives me back. Then he gives me a belly-full of fist.<br />
<br />
I slowly fold forward till my forehead almost touches the dirt. Both hands clutch my punched belly.<br />
<br />
And his girlfriend cheers him while he beats me up:<br />
<br />
"Go on, hit him in the belly. Give him a belly-ache. Oh, nice punch, right in his belly."<br />
<br />
There is no surrender in this fight. My belly-beating will continue until Amy decides I have given enough to please her. She allows him to have my belly for his personal punching bag.<br />
<br />
She looks down at me, doubled over and belly-aching. She says, "What's wrong? Can't take it in the belly?"<br />
<br />
He grabs me, pulls me forward, then shoves me and I stagger back. I flop back against the ropes, then bounce off them, belly-first, right into a ferocious punch.<br />
<br />
I clutch my stomach and bend far forward. I fall and I roll onto my back and lie in a pose of bare-bellied submission. Breathless and beaten by a punch in the belly.<br />
<br />
Amy looks down at me, on the ground. She says "belly-wimp." Then she holds his hand up as he stomps his heel down in my belly for his victory pose.<br />
<br />bellypunchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15626322785267248362noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3692525029190577226.post-47923193368696016022022-08-16T13:36:00.000-04:002022-08-24T15:08:50.313-04:00BELLY PUNCH HUMILIATION<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK4tXoeX2XXi6VT-QZWaAmIbOGJpA7AtIvumypoI1lxNDcfxjrGxr2la7e-8kkj9i83jJXJqpSjUtoqKcIi8AcLoQR5YqaoUfYz9_ElQHJXQxO1oEh06aHnxfTzx-x-v3FKJKfdWaCSVRR/s1600/wifeicon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK4tXoeX2XXi6VT-QZWaAmIbOGJpA7AtIvumypoI1lxNDcfxjrGxr2la7e-8kkj9i83jJXJqpSjUtoqKcIi8AcLoQR5YqaoUfYz9_ElQHJXQxO1oEh06aHnxfTzx-x-v3FKJKfdWaCSVRR/s320/wifeicon.jpg" width="218" /></a></div>
<span style="font-style: italic;">She adored arousing me, captivating me with my own erotic desires. She flirted with her hot eyes, her wiles, her smiles, her clothes. And she knew the way to get a straight grip on me was to flaunt her sensual bare belly.</span><br />
<br />
And she did. She was my belly-button girl. Her bare navel entranced me. I knelt reverently and, arms thrown back, leaned my face toward her bare belly for a worshipful kiss on her belly-button. But the goddess pulled back, wagged a finger at me, and said, "If you want to kiss this belly-button, you're going to have to fight for me."<br />
<br />
She exulted, holding me on my knees by the leash of my own desire. My lust for her sweet belly-button. Her lush hips. Her bare belly. Holding my leash, yanking me with a rude tug, to lure me and send me into places where I am sure to get my belly beat up. POW! WHOMP! THUD! Right in the belly! Then she'll watch me rolling on the floor, moaning like a slut, sucking air.<br />
<br />
And she'll smile.<br />
<br />
She dresses me for the fight. No shirt. Just my jeans. Low-waisted, too. My belly bare and vulnerable. She might as well have painted a bull's eye on my belly. I stuck my belly out; and I paid the price for it. Right in the belly! And that's how she wanted it.<br />
<br />
I rushed at my rival. And the next thing I felt was a cannonball fist fired into my soft belly.<br />
<br />
My mouth flew open. "OOUFF!!"<br />
<br />
He had simply ducked out of the way and slammed his fist right smack into my belly. And I ran right into it. Right straight into a punch in the belly. He simply ducked down and slugged me right in my belly.<br />
<br />
I felt his fist plunge in my belly, and my mouth flew open and I said OOUFF! and doubled up and grabbed my bare belly with both hands.<br />
<br />
And I heard her rich-toned voice furl itself around me, with a hot-blooded, cold-hearted "oooooh, right in the belly!"<br />
<br />
And now I'm standing there with my mouth hanging open, breathless, stunned, helpless, and he swings his hip and thuds another bellypunch full in my stummik. I let go another "OOOUFFFF!!" Then an uppercut thuds me right in the pit of my stomach.<br />
<br />
My mouth flies open. OOUFF!! His fist pulls out, but my stomach is still crushed. I can't breathe. All I can do is groan out long, low belly-ache moans. ooouuuooooh! No self-control. Hands to my stomach and doubled over, I'm totally vulnerable.<br />
<br />
And while I do that, my rival is posing for the girl who is watching this with a cruel, erotic smile. He knows he doesn't have to worry about me. I won't give him any trouble. I'm too absorbed in my belly-ache. I just stand there, trying to press my knees up against my punched stomach. I cann't help it. I just stand there and suffer like a wimp. Like a pot-bellied wimp.<br />
<br />
He could have put me out right then, but instead he chose to show off for her and use my stomach for a punching bag.<br />
<br />
And I'm owned, My rival is emptying all the male cool out of me, one punch at a time, all to my belly. Pumping me dry. And I'm giving it up. OOF! OOF! OOF! Right there in front of her. And she makes no effort to disguise the pure pleasure she takes in this. Seeing me like that and knowing my bellyache was her doing.<br />
<br />
Making sure I see the pure pleasure she takes in watching me get my belly beat up.<br />
<br />
He pushed me back and I fell into the wall. It hurt! I arched my back out. And of course that just made me stick out my bare belly.<br />
<br />
Another punch pounded my stomach. My humiliated belly swallowed the whole thing, and it threw me back to the wall. He followed through with a spin move that jabbed his elbow back into the pit of my stomach.<br />
<br />
UUUUUHH!! My poor belly. I clapped my hands over my belly and howled. Then I made empty noises with my wide-open mouth as I tried to breathe.<br />
<br />
He turned and pulled me upright, then he gave me two judo punches right in the stomach, one-two, with his fists hard and slim as the edge of a board. They stunned my soft belly, and I folded forward.<br />
<br />
Instant, devastating, humiliating agony. Publicly stripped of pride. Pot-bellied, beaten in the belly, punched in the stomach. Getting all the breath socked out of me.<br />
<br />
Revealed as a breathless, bellyaching wimp. Something no woman ever would desire or accept. Just a soft-bellied oaf. Easy to beat. Wind him with a quick punch in his belly, and keep him that way till you have him belly-up on the floor.<br />
<br />
I fell to my knees, in front of the rival who had just slugged me in the stomach. Kneeling and powerless to rise. The other man's fist in my belly hit the spring that held me together, and I fell apart. Just like that. Soft in the belly. While my rival stands over me.<br />
<br />
I took a humiliation-beating. Right in the belly.<br />
<br />
Once a man's given you a bellybeating, there's no going back to equality. Forever after, you are his inferior. Especially if beautiful girls see it.<br />
<br />
And if you ever want a girl to respect you, never let her see you in a fight that ends with the other man's heel planted in your belly. Because she always will see you like that.<br />
<br />
"You can't take it in the belly."<br />
<br />
To be so beaten like that, helpless, suffering, defenseless, and all in my belly! And with that girl's gaze watching, rapt, focused on me in that state. Such a humiliating way to be beat up. To be taunted and mocked and called names. To end up flat out with him taking a victory stomp on my belly. No one who saw that would ever picture me in any other position.<br />
<br />
She stood there, watching him use my belly for his personal punching bag. Clapping, laughing, encouraging him. She was the kind of girl who not only would tolerate a bully, she would egg him on.<br />
<br />
"That's it! Hit him again! Right in the belly! Yeah! Can't take it in the belly. Give him another one. Right in his belly. Go on, hit him in the belly. That's his soft spot. Oh, yes. Right there. Look at him! He can't take it in the stomach. Can't take it in the belly!"<br />
<br />
Through the whole fight.<br />
<br />
In the end he made me perform for her.<br />
<br />
"Go on, wimp. beg her for mercy. Beg her to make me stop punching your belly!"<br />
<br />
"Please, make him stop punching me."<br />
<br />
She waited, then smiled and purred, "Stop punching you where, darling?"<br />
<br />
"In my belly."<br />
<br />
"I can't hear you."<br />
<br />
"In my belly! I can't take it in the belly!"<br />
<br />
She sneered. "Beat his belly!" she ordered.<br />
<br />
He beat me slow and hard for another half an hour, giving me plenty of time to suffer and beg between the punches.<br />
<br />
He didn't even have to beat ME. He merely beat my belly. And the rest of me was nothing. He didn't have to think about my smarts or my strategy. All that brainpower means nothin to a man if he can't take it in the belly in a fistfight.<br />
<br />
A judo chop to my belly. "UUMMMPPPPHHH." Again I drop to knees as my deflated lungs suck air and ache burns in my belly.<br />
<br />
"Oh, right in his pot belly. Hey, wimp. You're gettin' your belly beat! Come on, hit the pot-bellied wimp! Hit his belly!"<br />
<br />
He reaches down and pulls me to my feet by the arms. "Say 'I have a soft belly,' " he hisses. I hesitate. Out of the corner of my eyes I see her watching. He drops his right hand to waist-level, snaps it into a fist and drives it full force square into the center of my stomach. His fist disappears. My belly swallows it whole before bouncing it back out.<br />
<br />
"H-OOOOOOOO!!" I wail as I fall and roll onto my side, clutching my knotted stomach with both arms. He looks down at me, grabs me and pulls me back up.<br />
<br />
He winds up and delivers one last punch into the meat of my stomach. The soft bellyflesh absorbs his fist. He lets me drop and curl into a fetal position, sobbing.<br />
<br />
He kicks me in the belly. With a sharp "UUH!" I take the boot to the belly and tighten up in my curl. The girls applaud and laugh.bellypunchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15626322785267248362noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3692525029190577226.post-35226065099521756852022-08-15T17:03:00.000-04:002022-08-24T15:09:17.304-04:00HER GALLANT<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWEgnDzaIiNvYnZzl2xr-pByzR3YDAvI0tKQDxx7GGYjBbISdha8OND1oSk9x9DtsbyxMieSmrihkzV9_UQ-3n3dfGRxOk2v45vLeYyfV_AvdXepWCEQ4WFuAsa5bbKaUyRmmLts0mjwV_/s2048/m-art1.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1799" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWEgnDzaIiNvYnZzl2xr-pByzR3YDAvI0tKQDxx7GGYjBbISdha8OND1oSk9x9DtsbyxMieSmrihkzV9_UQ-3n3dfGRxOk2v45vLeYyfV_AvdXepWCEQ4WFuAsa5bbKaUyRmmLts0mjwV_/s320/m-art1.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<p>
I strode up behind him.
<br /><br />
"Unhand her at once, you h-<i>OOOUFF!!</i>"
<br /><br />
He cut me silent with a deft sidearm swing with his left forearm that bopped his fist against my pot belly. He never turned his head or took his eyes off hers. He simply flicked his shoulder, and jerked back his sharp shot where he knew my upper belly would be.
<br /><br />
And it ruined me. He socked my breath and my composure out of me all at once. My belly had only ever known soft and loving touches. I was stunned that this could happen to me: Debilitating agony, deliberate and intimate -- he thrust it into me. The belly-ache blossomed inside me, a beautiful, welling pain.
<br /><br />
<i>My belly! My bare belly!</i>
<br /><br />
Poor, pathetic fist-raped man. My whole midriff was stunned limp by his stomach-punch. But the rest of me tensed and writhed in the suffering of it. Lost in my own breathless, belly-ache world, I stagger and dance in place, gripping my upper belly, utterly winded, making comical bellyache faces, tongue lolling out my gaping mouth, all from his rude punch in my stomach.
<br /><br />
My sufferings are florid and fullsome. I act like I swallowed a mouthful of flaming pitch that's searing and scorching in the pit of my belly. I'm belly-branded on the inside.
<br /><br />
I know it's an embarassing over-reaction, but I can't help myself. I panic at the caved-in feeling, the awareness that my belly has been socked.
<br /><br />
He sized me up as I moaned. She stared, silent, fingers clutching her skirt. He put a hand under my chin, and raised me slowly upright. I panted breathlessly, seemingly under his spell.
<br /><br />
He gripped me by my tight shirt and roughed me up. "BELLY-WIMP!" he grunted as he lobbed another punch firmly in my deflated stomach.
<br /><br />
The shock of the uppercut lifts me to my toes. In a flash I feel the organ-tingle of his fistknuckles thrust bluntly up my belly.
<br /><br />
I moo out an OOF! that echoes round the room. My eyes must have been wide as saucers.
<br /><br />
And thus he re-sentenced me to long minutes of belly-cradling and making comical faces of agony and despair, winded, belly-raped, sounding out loud my belly-humiliation.
<br /><br />
He stood, arms folded, watching me evolve again through the pain-stages of a bellypunch bellyache. I felt her eyes on us. I heard her breaths heavy in the long seconds when I could draw no air myself, because his stomach-punch stole that from me.
<br /><br />
He reached up under me as I stood folded forward and pounded his weight up into me with another sock in the stomach. My wind was gone already, but the blow served to shove my body up straight in front of him.
<br /><br />
Which served me up bare-bellied for another stomach punch!
<br /><br />
He keeps punching, and he makes a fool out of me with his fists. He'll stick a punch in my belly then stand back to watch it make me suffer. Then he'll do it again. Right in my belly. I'm helpless and winded, but he keeps punching me in the belly.
<br /><br />
And every time he does, I get that crumpled feeling in my stomach, and I panic with the need to breathe when I'm fully winded, and all that just makes me thrust my belly out again!
<br /><br />
Where is my head, what am I thinking? The rival who put me in this state is standing there, eager to hit me again. Yet I stumble helpless, agonized, oblivious. Just a pot-bellied punching-bag.
<br /><br />
All through the beating, he hits me right before I realize what's about to happen. He hits me when the fear is in my eyes but before my muscles can tense and anticipate.
<br /><br />
Always in my belly. Always my belly.
<br /><br />
Quick, unmistakable, to the point: fists to my belly. A beatdown all in my belly. While I whine and suffer, he lets his knuckles do the talking. And with lots of trimming and flourish. The judo chop, the big bellypunch, the combination-punch. Calmly insulting and exposing me all through it, putting me in my place, assuredly, with both his fists and his words.
<br /><br />
I thought I would be her hero. What did I show her? Unmanly feebleness. A naked display of weakness and blatant suffering. He ramhorned his fist into my protruding belly. And I made a belly-fool of myself in taking it. Let myself go all to pieces, sobbing, suffering. A belly-beaten boy.
<br /><br />
It was the worst beating a boy can take in front of a girl. He was an expert puncher, and a cruel bully, and he was showing off.
<br /><br />
With that first mere thump of his fist on my belly, he had diminished me to a cliche: The wimp who tried to stand up to his bully and instead got thrashed by him. The dominant male simply slugs him in his unsuspecting belly and makes him suffer awfully in the eyes of the woman.
<br /><br />
I just stand there, wide open, and every time he jabs his fist into my belly I howl out an "OOF!" and double over with my hands on my stomach.
<br /><br />
Then he jerks a knee up into my stomach and bops me upright, and I stand potbellied and clueless, open target for him to plunk another fist into my belly, my wide-open belly.
<br /><br />
Like a musical instrument, part drum and part wind-horn. I sound my one note -- that bellypunch OOUFF! -- when he wallops me in the stomach.
<br /><br />
Yes, that plosive and deep-bellied OOUFF! sound that is my secret name, my shame name.
</p><p></p><p></p>bellypunchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15626322785267248362noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3692525029190577226.post-4293251756916932442022-03-04T16:28:00.000-05:002022-03-04T16:28:05.460-05:00<p> A young couple, pretty enough. They looked like they didn't get outside much, and they looked like they had money. They didn't belong here, that much was certain. Whatever their accent was, it wasn't local.</p>They were in the shop about five minutes. They picked up a few things, she made a small purchase, and they left. I immediately came out of the office and motioned to Butch and Wade to follow me as I headed for the back door to the alley.<br /><br />We have a way of showing our dislike of strangers. Maybe you've heard of us, if you ever knew anyone who passed this way. Lure you into a dim alley and gang-beat you, hold your arms back and slug you in the belly 20 times or so, and if your wife or girlfriend is with you, she gets to watch your stomach swallow every hot fist and your mouth sob out every bellyache. It doesn't do any lasting harm, it doesn't leave any blood, but it makes a point: Deep and unshakeable humiliation.<br /><br />What if they go to the authorities? I guess you haven't noticed; I'm the sheriff in this county. I am the authorities.<br /><br />Lorraine behind the counter is a good country girl, and she frowned at us. "It shouldn't take three of you to beat up that pot-bellied wimp. Are you afraid of the girl?"<br /><br />I replied, as we passed toward the door, "No, sweetheart, these thugs are going to hold poor Belly-Boy upright so I can get my fist-range on his stomach while I beat him up. A pot-bellied oaf like him will melt to a puddle the first time he feels my fist pin his belly-button to his spine. Close up the shop and come watch."<br /><br />She said nothing, but she locked the register and went with me. Lorraine's reliable. She loves to watch a good belly-beating. Plus she might be handy if there was trouble with Belly-Boy's girlfriend or wife. Whatever she was, I knew Lorraine could take all the breath out of that softbellied bitch, with a discrete judo-chop to her stomach.<br /><br />Why was this hapless wimp about to get his belly raped by my fist? I couldn't tell you exactly. I might blame it on this or that they said while in the store, the way Lorraine flirted with him, but it wasn't that. It was something about him, his total unawareness of his own unmasculinity.<br /><br />Guy with a belly like his ought to hide it in shame. But he seemed to think nothing of it. He had a belly that looked like it belonged on some sensual bellydancer, not on a man. And yet he acted like the world was not supposed to notice that he could be brought down in the dust so damned easily, through his utter vulnerability. He looked like the kind of boy that grows up never raising a fist, either in sport or self-defense, in his life.<br /><br />Well, his introduction to sadistic, personal violence was going to be one to remember. I kept flexing my left wrist, hungry with anticipation of my clenched fist poled into his belly, blasting through his belly-bulge like a cannonball through a cloud. A ram-punch up under his ribcage; his breath is mine to take. I hungered, too, for the satisfaction I'd feel when I watched his face melt into bellypunch ache-agony -- my gift to him -- and Belly Boy's eyes register the horrifying realization that a stranger just walked up to him and plunged knuckles into his belly and brashly stole his breath right out of his body.<br /><br />And I wanted to watch that girl as she watched her man fold and grovel and blubber and suffer in the dust at my feet.<br /><br />The shop rear door opened into the alley we always used for this. They wandered innocently down it, following the directions they got in the shop. When they saw it was a dead-end, they turned back, but we blocked the way, far from the street. No one but us could see or hear what went on.<br /><br />"You know this is private property," I said to put them off guard, as we approached them. They both started talking at once, explaining.<br /><br />I gave him no warning. A pot-belly oaf like him doesn't deserve warning. I tensed up and plowed my fist into his stomach. Hit him right in the sweet spot, too. Plunked my fist plumb into his belly, and I felt his gut part like the Red Sea.<br /><br />He heaved up an "OOF!" that echoed off the brick walls, and we all stood and watched him stagger backward maybe 10 steps, then collapse in the middle of the alley and suffer there, fine and clean, down on the filthy pavement. He was nothing but a twitching, oooooo-ing, writhing mess of bellyache.<br /><br />The thugs hauled him up roughly to his feet. Poor Belly-Boy's hands never left his gut until Wade and Butch gripped him firmly by the elbows and pulled his arms back. In manhandling him they had bunched up his shirt, so his once-punched stomach stuck out bare. Wade kept one big hand gripped in the hair at the back of Belly-Boy's head and held him forward so he had to look down at his own stomach served up for my fists. He was upright and belly-out; just the way I like my victims.<br /><br />I glanced at the girl. Lorraine hovered near, but the wife seemed stunned and rooted to the spot with her knees unsteady and her hands up to her mouth and her face frozen in a mask of shock. But she also seemed to be blushing.<br /><br />Potbelly Boy finally had enough breath in his soft stomach to croak out, "Please, no more." What a pussy.<div><br /></div><div>It came out his mouth as "no mo-<b><i>OOFF!</i> </b>I had changed his tune with a swift uppercut in his belly.</div>bellypunchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15626322785267248362noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3692525029190577226.post-25821815370707387662020-09-01T15:12:00.005-04:002022-10-04T21:13:39.616-04:00<p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGERZzxX7VFg7J0JK8IJU6nr4CDT9I8xRG_5uJQP4jz6eTWFRbTrJcxwQwB51JsnRupor08ZZXIccVeFS720pfVbz7jZ1b0g_Ttk_wGqOHn1Pe-PB5I4z0sUJv8UosQTAaN9jHHQUYbrL-6hcCa4eLUcjYdo0IFbEsp4LCrZWBtDFeQGJozmDciKdJZw/s879/art-essential.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="879" data-original-width="722" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGERZzxX7VFg7J0JK8IJU6nr4CDT9I8xRG_5uJQP4jz6eTWFRbTrJcxwQwB51JsnRupor08ZZXIccVeFS720pfVbz7jZ1b0g_Ttk_wGqOHn1Pe-PB5I4z0sUJv8UosQTAaN9jHHQUYbrL-6hcCa4eLUcjYdo0IFbEsp4LCrZWBtDFeQGJozmDciKdJZw/s320/art-essential.jpg" width="263" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><h4 style="clear: both; text-align: center;">The Art of</h4><h2 style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">BELLY PUNCH<br /></span></b><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">HUMILIATION</span></b></h2><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /></div><p style="text-align: left;"><b style="font-size: large;">The scene:</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">I get punched in the belly by another man while you watch and enjoy. The stomach-punch, and my suffering from it, are dramatic, over-the-top, like a movie stunt punch or a comic book fight scene or a pro-wrestling beat-up.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><b style="font-size: large;">The erotic energy for me:</b></p><p style="text-align: left;">Happens when I suffer loud and long from his punch, suffer like a weak wimp. And I know you see me like that. You see it all. You seeing me get it in the belly, then you see me moaning and winded from a jab in my stomach. I can't take it in the belly, and I can't hide it from you. He is humiliating me in front of you. I'm exposed to you as a soft-bellied sissy.</p><p><b style="font-size: large;">You:</b></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZlf-rM72hC8a1Iy3ZSVEZ2UM8-r26THu4_98L5Gm_DxpgE5SJNrXc6hkxzPDxTQZEI44iW2ccJlt1yi_NQ8UhJxeU820SJiRJF4DS98uZ6VICPP5hfQJA3uSbCW960nZtgbUVS8ZHjGO7muVwBNJw7EClbGFyqd0VGNs7A7W1_t4tAsSuPcJ6Aht5bQ/s4014/strip-2.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><br /></a></div>Like what you see and hear. You take passionate pleasure in seeing me socked in the gut and exposed as a pot-bellied wimp who can't take a punch in the stomach. Your pleasure might be an erotic, sadistic pleasure ("go on, give him another one, knock the wind out of him, right in the stomach!"). Or you can be mocking/teasing ("oh, no, he hit you right in the belly!"). Or we can take a mutual pleasure ("Will you challenge him to a belly-punch match? Just for me? I know you want to"). It can be a pleasure we both share.<p></p><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Situation:</b></span></p><p>Can be any setting. The other man who does the punching doesn't matter; he can be any man, or anonymous, or a group of them. What matters is that I know you see me as that belly-punched wimp.</p><p>I could be the shy young man who finally gets the nerve to ask you out. But just then my bully spots me and steps in to spoil my romantic hopes. He gives me an almost-comical belly-whomping in front of you to humiliate me.</p><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisLI2-FO0MKJ5NOLQZl4bZxwSKgYi7i9siX3ymlDFFoiv1H0f5QhfaLDlEH7a95ClRc21btSoeckgUW5jL7TTvhdYQWxVw3SeMFHyj0t-PpPKIWkqw-oltxeoCEwKwn6FtMMSUjpaXWi_5xkdTyemEspYW6LnESmNFT__JX9x8WYGcYp2lpM78D6L4OQ/s1448/art-motto.jpg" style="clear: left; display: inline; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1448" data-original-width="1140" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisLI2-FO0MKJ5NOLQZl4bZxwSKgYi7i9siX3ymlDFFoiv1H0f5QhfaLDlEH7a95ClRc21btSoeckgUW5jL7TTvhdYQWxVw3SeMFHyj0t-PpPKIWkqw-oltxeoCEwKwn6FtMMSUjpaXWi_5xkdTyemEspYW6LnESmNFT__JX9x8WYGcYp2lpM78D6L4OQ/w158-h200/art-motto.jpg" width="158" /></a>I can be the weak, soft fighter in a bare-fisted ring match. Everyone but me knows I deserve what I'm getting. I have no male toughness. I cradle my belly and cry out pitifully. I roll on the floor, gasping, with all the breath slugged out of me by his fist in my bare belly. All for their entertainment.</p>The violence doesn't have to be real: You can be the director of a stage play, and I'm the stunt-actor who gets beat up in it. Simply talking about it is a delight. I have many stories I love to share, true ones as well as fiction.<div><br /></div><div>The gist of it is, I want to get my belly beat up in front of you, and for you. I will be your belly-button worshipper, and your belly-punch entertainment.</div><div><p><b style="font-size: large;">Bonus:</b></p><p>I have a navel fetish, a belly-and-hips fetish, a lowrise-hiphugger-jeans-and-belly-tops fetish, all rolled into one intense lust. I can be lured to anything -- even a belly-punching contest! -- if you tease me with your belly-button, if you promise me a kiss or lick there.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgo4Y24IsD6UbFolUTc22MKhTMKtcrWNrBLYnIT5B_7-nLeuLDckWJo8rvvzeDf4TGljPZyvx54OUoOJcOrIT6OS7mPWHCSNQQW0d5GcZY9yi-k-3QZR3DTGLLTEln08upMUmiDpUZGBj2ovGROopFt0EvU2OWuYxAMzxf0TscH9LXfelS-B1xtZ85Qw/s1663/jP_uMSQQ.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1663" height="289" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgo4Y24IsD6UbFolUTc22MKhTMKtcrWNrBLYnIT5B_7-nLeuLDckWJo8rvvzeDf4TGljPZyvx54OUoOJcOrIT6OS7mPWHCSNQQW0d5GcZY9yi-k-3QZR3DTGLLTEln08upMUmiDpUZGBj2ovGROopFt0EvU2OWuYxAMzxf0TscH9LXfelS-B1xtZ85Qw/w400-h289/jP_uMSQQ.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p></div>bellypunchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15626322785267248362noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3692525029190577226.post-23155671341773386012020-08-17T22:02:00.001-04:002022-03-24T13:08:04.400-04:00LURED AND ALLURED<i>(artwork and modeling by the lovely and talented (and kinky) <a href="https://www.deviantart.com/squidlys3squishies">squidlys3squishies</a> whom I highly recommend for custom commissions)</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<br />
Look at me, Belly-button-slave. I have the most beautiful navel. Do I not?<br />
<br />
Of course I do. And I have the perfect belly. Don't you agree, Belly-button-slave?<br />
<br />
You long to kiss my pretty belly-button. You yearn to worship my navel. You're my Belly-button slave.<br />
<br />
And, look! I wrote a message on my bare belly. Just for you.<br />
<br />
Or, should I say, "just for your opponent."<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1W_HSYpfOmriaO6h3VCx-zBd5V81K1aKZXaVo23MYcHB7ZFFtEPvmhFQiAaM13ENIQoKbqFNfXpvYDUWZg3gHxg0xMWqARhsRs_6BhGJDbgzWGCwbRr90cIugx2jx19u1KLRzweHBF0gQ/s1600/SH-11716095_10153435965613839_1506650905_n_by_squishyhips-d8zz12w+%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="809" data-original-width="1000" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1W_HSYpfOmriaO6h3VCx-zBd5V81K1aKZXaVo23MYcHB7ZFFtEPvmhFQiAaM13ENIQoKbqFNfXpvYDUWZg3gHxg0xMWqARhsRs_6BhGJDbgzWGCwbRr90cIugx2jx19u1KLRzweHBF0gQ/s320/SH-11716095_10153435965613839_1506650905_n_by_squishyhips-d8zz12w+%25282%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
Yes. It's been too long since I saw you get punched in the belly. I've been thinking that think I need to arrange that -- soon.<br />
<br />
So I did. I found a hard-punching fistfighter to give it to you right in the stomach.<br />
<br />
I'll dress you up and make you show off your belly. Then I will watch you get a bare-bellied beatdown.<br />
<br />
You're going to get beat up in front of me, and we both know it. You get the exquisite pleasure of knowing you please me. By your suffering. That's how you please me. Every belly-punch OOF! every bellyache moan from you is music to me. Watching you stagger breathless or double over winded is sweet joy. I love watching you grovel and sob, and then I love watching while he steps on your belly in triumph.<br />
<br />
Oh, I love it.<br />
<br />
Your belly-punches turn me on. That's how you can please me: Get your belly beat up. Do it for me.<br />
<br />
The best belly-beating I ever saw you take was when I entered you in that bellypunching contest.<br />
<br />
Yes, you were so desperate to impress your bare-bellied girl. So desperate that when I told you to join a bellypunch contest you did it.<br />
<br />
I told your opponent, "See that pot belly? Punch him in the stomach. See if you can give him a belly-ache.”<br />
<br />
And he gave you a belly-ache you'll never forget. For my pleasure.<br />
<br />
You went out there, with your low jeans and your too-tight top and your bare belly. And you were asking for it. And oh, did he give it to you.<br />
<br />
And even while he was slamming his punches into your belly, I saw you gaze to me for a glimpse of my bare belly-button. You are such a Belly-button slave. You left your soft belly wide open just to stare at me.<br />
<br />
Could there ever have been a more inviting target? Your elegant, perfumed belly bowed out, bare and utterly vulnerable.<br />
<br />
Well, I flaunted my belly for you. I gave it all to you. Belly, hips, bellybutton. Just long enough for him to line up the shot and give you an unresisted punch right in your belly.<br />
<br />
But I need more. So you're going to fight again. And I'm going to watch you get belly-whomped.<br />
<br />
And I'll be sure to stand right in front of you, where I can see everything, and you can watch me watch you get your belly beat up.<br />
<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
bellypunchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15626322785267248362noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3692525029190577226.post-57199339613905411542018-04-26T22:05:00.000-04:002019-08-02T23:43:19.483-04:00BIG MISTAKE"Hey, wimp, get away from my sister. I thought I told you to stay the fuck away from her."<br />
<br />
Indeed, Bruce Goodwin, captain of the school baseball squad, had told me those exact words. I remembered them perfectly -- perhaps because he had shouted them in my face while simultaneously punching me in the belly.<br />
<br />
"Her" was Bruce's younger sister, Michelle, who was my age and who was my crush.<br />
<br />
She had been a geek girl along with us geek boys. Then she blossomed beautifully, and stayed her self inside. She was gorgeous, and a wimpy nerd like me could still talk to her, make her laugh. Which I became obsessed with doing. Especially when she wore those hiphugger jeans. There was no way I could resist that.<br />
<br />
Around the middle of August, the summer I turned 17, Michelle invited me over to take a walk with her. We used to do that a lot, but we hadn't done it much that summer. I was glad she still enjoyed it. I biked around the block to her parents' house, and down in the suburban basement who should be there but Bruce and his pals.<br />
<br />
I was nothing but a pot-bellied geek in the judgment, spoken or unspoken, of all the athletic guys. Bruce had a sick sort of possessiveness of his cute little sis. That weighed on top of his ego-preening, which would not tolerate the idea of his sister going out with a pot-bellied geek. He had the motive, and the power, to punish my belly humiliatingly.<br />
<br />
He had caught me, shamelessly defying him -- with his own sister. And I knew doom was coming my way fast.<br />
<br />
But I did myself one worse: I gave him justification. Like a fool, I made myself deserve it. You see, I knew what was coming, and I was mortified at the thought of Michelle seeing me, watching me, feeling me -- as a pot-bellied wimp, as a humiliated bellypunch victim. Which is what I was about to become; I had to look tough.<br />
<br />
So I swung a weak fist at Bruce.<br />
<br />
Oh, I was so lame. In spite of my size. I don't even know what part of him I was aiming for, or what damage I expected to do with so feeble and slow a punch. All that mattered was the "ooooh!" reaction from his friends.<br />
<br />
My heart sank as I realized I'd done myself no good, and in the process committed an ungentlemanly foul. And now Bruce was not only stoked to beat up my belly, he was honor-bound to give my stomach a pummeling.<br />
<br />
Michelle watched the whole procedure with intense interest and wide eyed. Any hope I had that she might save me vanished. What a fool. She was the kind of girl a boy like me gets beat up over.<br />
<br />
My heart sank in my throat as soon as I saw him easily duck back from my wild swing. I whiffed, and I saw his eyes light up. I had handed him my dance card for a belly-punch tango.<br />
<br />
I braced for it, but he just smiled. I let my guard drop and tried to smile back. "I was hoping you'd do that ..." Was I off the hook? "... so I could do THIS!" and THIS was him giving me a master-class demonstration of belly-punching. The very first punch, the one that finished me off, and every punch in between went right to my belly.<br />
<br />
I'm not fat. I'm tall and, mostly, thin. My belly just naturally sticks out. I can't help it, it's my shape. And my other features make it seem prominent. I've always been really shy about my belly, to tell you the truth. I felt really vulnerable there.<br />
<br />
And now I'm serving it up to him like a slow round pitch over home plate.<br />
<br />
Without moving he flicked a fist toward my face. It never got within a foot of me, nor was it meant to, but my hands instinctively rose, and I deluded myself to thinking I had dodged it. He feinted his left fist again at my face. But this time when I raised my hands and shut my eyes, Bruce took a big step with his right leg and, with a "hah!" put all his weight into a solid punch in my belly.<br />
<br />
My breath blurted from me with a forceful UH! I stood in shock, then the sense of being penetrated and the pain of being bellypunched flooded my mind and overwhelmed whatever control I had. I let out a sound, wailing OOOOOOOO!! and put my hands over my stomach and folded far over.<br />
<br />
My eyes felt like they were bugging out, cartoon-style. My mouth felt sick and I opened it wide. My stomach felt like a crumpled beer can, and I can't keep my hands from clutching myself as I double up from that jackhammer punch in my belly.<br />
<br />
This is the humiliation I dread, and I helplessly act out right in front of her. I'm doubled over, making sick-baby noises, from a legitimate punch in the belly. Being mocked by the man who did it to me, and jeered by his friends.<br />
<br />
Being not the star, no longer a potential Romeo, but being a mere stunt-man in life. Like the hapless henchmen in the old movies and comics. So easily and comically dispatched.<br />
<br />
To be that in reality. That guy who tried to fight but couldn't take it in the belly. Forget him.<br />
<br />
"Leave him alone, you bully," Michelle called to Bruce -- it sounded more like a tease than a demand -- "Stop hitting his belly!"<br />
<br />
Bruce had almost a buzz cut, but I had affected long, hippie-boy hair. Let me tell you now, wiser by experience, long hair and a pot-belly are a bad combination to bring to a punch-fight.<br />
<br />
He grabbed my hair, and in one smooth swing he yanked me from doubled over to upright and arched back. My hands naturally flew to my hair. Other than clawing at his wrists I made no attempt to resist him or fight. And now I've got my back arched and my belly stuck out, and Bruce is holding me up to the room full of his friends.<br />
<br />
"Look at that belly!" one says.<br />
<br />
"Stop, you bullies!"<br />
<br />
The other boy tells Bruce, "You can see your fist-print on his belly!"<br />
<br />
Bruce looks, sees iy, and laughs. "You give him one!"<br />
<br />
The boy lines up his shot to my helpless belly, and swings hard, overhand, and whomps a punch down onto my bowed-out belly, near the solar plexus, and after that I don't remember anything for a bit.<br />
<br />
Michelle told me later what they did to me. The punch in the gut had scrambled my brains. I stood voiceless and defenseless while they punched my belly at leisure. They took turns: A left, a right, an uppercut, a big overarm jab. All straight into my belly. While she was demanding, "Stop punching his stomach. It's not fair!"<br />
<br />
At least that's what she told me.<br />
<br />
All I know is, the next thing I remember is rolling on the floor, cradling my belly and crying, while Michelle berated Bruce.<br />
<br />
"Look at him, he's crying," she said, as if to draw Bruce's sympathy to my suffering and humiliation. But of course they all only laughed at me.<br />
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I was lost in my own world at the moment. It was the slow, suffering world of a belly-punch bellyache. I was on my knees on the carpet. My body had folded over as far as my pot-belly would allow, and my arms cradled my bullied, beaten belly. I had no control over myself now, I was possessed by the bellypain that flooded me.<br />
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My suffering was a comical show. The old cliche: big guy who can't take it in the belly. I brought it to life. On my knees, bent forward, face flat to the floor, gripping my belly, in the agony of feeling winded. I became him. A one-punch fight-loser. A big bellywimp. Still down and sucking air long after the 10-count has ended.<br />
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He got tired of waiting. He started kicking at me, and instinctively I stood up, as best I could. But he just grabbed me at once by the collar and started punching me in the belly.<br />
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I do remember some moments from that belly-beating. Mostly I remember that horrible "splatted" feeling when the fist sank into my stomach. The terrible displacement sensation so deep inside me. That flatted feeling.<br />
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Sometimes my tormentor would give me enough time to fully pull myself together, dry my eyes, catch my breath. Then I was bound to make an effort to attack him, or else I must quit in utter disgrace. Taking my beating was better than quitting.<br />
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My efforts never amounted to anything but embarrassment for me. I was just too slow, too bulky. Even before I got the wind knocked out of me. I had learned fighting by reading about it in a book.<br />
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But Bruce encouraged me, told me to swing at him, taunted me, "swing at me!" And I would, though I knew he just wanted to show off his skill in dodging a feeble blow and counterpunching hard to the belly. He was exceptionally skilled at it, and he made me suffer for the sake of showing off.<br />
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My lunges at my rival also reminded the crowd that, no matter how cruelly he beat up my belly, I was the fool who had challenged him.<br />
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The bully would mock and berate me, while I stood breathless from his punch in my belly. The moment I found my breath again and was able to inhale, Bruce lashed out with another fist, or a flurry of jabs, and he knocked the wind out of me again with a sock in my stomach. I would groan and go back to silently gripping my belly.<br />
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It ended only when they were tired of beating my belly. It ended with a kick in the stomach that made me writhe on the floor, silent. Then Bruce told me in front of everyone, "Don't go starting a fist-fight if you can't take it in the BELLY!" and on the word "belly" he kicked his boot into mine. OOF!<br />
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They trooped out of the basement. I could tell Michelle wanted to stay, but he glared at her and beckoned for her to follow him, so, with many glances back down at me, she did.<br />
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It was, to put it bluntly, a humiliation beating.bellypunchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15626322785267248362noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3692525029190577226.post-89361647362994399502017-01-26T23:04:00.003-05:002022-03-24T13:08:54.292-04:00FIST-BRANDED<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Knocked off-balance, sucking wind, I stumble, potbellied, into his fist.</div>
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Bellyache hell. Still OOF-ing out the shock of his punch. No thought for defense at all. Nothing but a punched belly.<br />
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He saw me stunned and took full advantage. His fists found my belly again and again. Each slug in the stomach left me stunned from the suffering, and ripe and open for the next one.<br />
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I was battered and helpless. I had no wind in my body and no fight left in my bread-basket. My knees wobbled so much I had to lean on the wall.<br />
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I begged him not to do it. I offered no defense, but I pleaded. I offered my belly in a gesture of peace, stood with hands and gut relaxed. "Don't hit my belly!" Which is exactly what he did. With a drill-punch smack in my stomach.<br />
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Oh, my belly! I leaned against the wall, shamelessly bare-bellied, and sobbed.bellypunchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15626322785267248362noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3692525029190577226.post-1822955936471032802015-10-30T23:58:00.000-04:002022-03-24T13:09:14.890-04:00Can't Take It in the BellyHe gave me a classic four-punch bellyache. Sealed with a kick.<br />
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First a chop in the pit. No warning, just let fly a sidearm punch, and his hand's edge jutted into my bare belly. He chopped me high on my stomach. Totally winded me and froze me to the spot.<br />
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Bug-eyed and stunned, I watched in silent horror as his other fist served me up a belly-busting uppercut punch.<br />
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It was a real stomach-masher, a slug to drive the OOF! out of my gut and double me far over.<br />
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He pulled me upright again, rared back, and POW! - he let me have it. Right in the belly with his full-force fist. Drove me right back to the wall, and he caught me there as I arched myself away from the impact. Caught me good and hard with a bellyslammer. Pinned my belly-button to my spine and sent my breath on a long vacation. I was on my way to my knees before his fist left my gut.<br />
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My suffering and weakness drove me down to the ground, and I writhed there and grovelled on my belly.<br />
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I tried to rise and he caught me stretched out on my side, sucking for air, and gave me a contemptuous kick with his boot to my belly.<br />
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I scrolled in the sand helplessly, mouthing a winded, silent "O!"bellypunchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15626322785267248362noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3692525029190577226.post-47201625119792756062015-07-12T00:04:00.000-04:002017-02-10T00:38:08.571-05:00OOF! Right in the Belly!So I dashed up behind the barkeep and grabbed his elbow. I got it, but despite my advantage in height and weight, he shook me off easily. When I went for him again, he was ready. He backed into me as I lurched forward, and jammed his elbow right where he knew my belly would be.<br />
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I took the brunt of the blow in my upper stomach. Intense, overwhelming bellyache exploded in my core. And his punch kicked the wind out of me and left me too stunned to take another breath. My last word was UURFF!<br />
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The beefy little beast was warming to his task. His elbow-shot to my stomach had shocked me dumb and I stood like a martyr bound to a stake, wide open, helpless, and unfit for torture. Not the kind of man who hardens himself against pain and takes pride in his physical endurance. No, nothing but a softbelly.<br />
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He turned and rose from the crouch in which he delivered his elbow to my gut. The sound of my bellyaching told my tormentor he could take his time with his next move. This pot belly wasn't going anywhere.<br />
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My shirts always fit tight, and in my initial struggle with him it had bunched up around my chest. So I was as bare-bellied as Britney Spears when he started beating me up, and I stayed like that until the end. I must have looked like I was asking for it, like I was offering my belly-button for a bulls-eye. He looked at me, looked at my bare midriff, and punched me right in my belly.<br />
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I had just manage to suck a breath into my body in the aftermath of his stomach-buster elbow jab, but that breath came right back out of me as a lusty OOOUPHFF! when his fist hit my belly. It felt as big as a bowling ball in me and it seemed to explode me. I staggered back, arms flailing and hit my back against the wall. I instantly folded far forward, bent double, with both hands pressed up into the fold of my body, cradling the place my belly used to be before he socked it into the Twilight Zone.<br />
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"Stand up, you potbellied wimp!" he said as he grabbed me by my ponytail and jerked my body upright against the wall. My hands instinctively flew to my hair. I felt like my body was still deeply caved in the middle from his punch, but now I had my belly stuck out again.<br />
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He made something of the occasion. From close range he hit me with a one-two bellybuster combo: a straight jab followed by a wicked hook, both of them right on the belly.<br />
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OOOF! ... UUUH!<br />
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I crumpled like tinfoil and started rocking and foot-shuffling, doing the bellyache dance with both hands gripping my punched gut and moaning and sobbing as I stand and suffer.<br />
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He grabs my shirt, wheels me around and lets my own momentum throw me back against the wall.<br />
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I hit it with a smack and rebound into the hallway, my back arched in pain. And there's my bare belly again, like a hanging curve ball over home plate. He steps into the swing and plants a rocksolid fist in my exposed belly.<br />
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OOOOOOUPH!<br />
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I flop to my knees like a marionette with snapped strings. One slug in the belly took all the starch and strength out of me. Just one punch put me on my knees with a howling bellyache.<br />
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Hands glued to my belly-button I rock on my knees, moans and sobs my only words. But my body says it all. I can't take it in the belly. I'm nothing but a potbellied wimp. Humiliated, I raise my hands to him, speechlessly pleading for mercy. But he just laughs and drills his boot into my belly. Stomach-kicked, I tumble to the floor and writhe there, rolling and kicking and lost in my bellypunch suffering.<br />
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I'm in tears from getting my pathetic gut stomped by his fist. With all the breath kicked out of me, and a roaring bellyache crippling me, I can only crawl, not run, toward the door. But I need to get my body away from him, and those horrid fists. I've got myself on my feet, and I stagger into the barroom. Both hands grip my punched belly, and no power in me can budge them from tenderly cradling my stomach.<br />
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I had all the grace and dignity of a plucked chicken. He caught me by the hair at the end of the bar. "Leaving so soon, Potbelly? I don't think so. Get back here so I can give you the belly-beating you deserve!"<br />
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His fist felt like a sledgehammer as it hit me, with the driving weight of his full body leaned into it, right smack in the belly.<br />
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He forced sound out of me like a crude squeezebox. He stole my voice when he stuck his hand in my belly. And he made it say stupid, humiliating things I never would let myself say, like "OOF, UUH, OOMPH, OOOAAH, ... Oh, my belly! Right in my belly! No, please, not in the belly, please not in my bel–OOUFF!!"<br />
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I've got my back to the waitress in the hallway, watching, but she knows he just punched me in the stomach because she can see the look of victory on his face and she can see the flesh ripple on my loins and hips.<br />
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And, of course, she also can hear me blurt out my humiliating belly-grunt, my forced confession of inadequacy. The punch drives me back, and, off balance, I windmill my arms out and lean forward, which is right where he wants me. A real skilled fighter will do that to you. Not only does each punch torture your belly and ravish your pride, each one sets you up for the next shot, leaves you particularly exposed to it.<br />
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And now I was nothing but a human punching bag, a belly wide open for fists. He hooked them up into the curve of my upper stomach, and each one lifted my feet off the floor with the power of their thrust. The waitress told me later he gave me seven bellyslammers in that position – she remembered each distinctly – I would have guessed it was 70. Then he pulled me upright, with my back stretched back against the bar. Aware of the girl watching him, he paused, slowed, and swaggered.<br />
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"Are you ready for this, bellywimp?" He said, menacing my belly-button with his free fist. I had no breath to answer him. He didn't care. He was showing off for her, tormenting me to impress her with his dominancebellypunchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15626322785267248362noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3692525029190577226.post-70441513684913680962015-03-09T01:04:00.002-04:002022-08-24T13:18:57.492-04:00BELLY PUNCH HUMILIATION FORUM<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoRIkhpFRaCN3xf6e09EaT2838UAxW50xgGge4-KQzv-G9eVR1oHAT-WxYT7cIY6Fzz_g28hemCfJpacs-QODvbe04IKcwF3mXXByQLPpb3ROrhk5Tvy-82m2vNdl8IpSVFifKcse6n6aiEOeCH3jQZm8c_CazYh3YpQCxQ5BIgYRErvS6q_atzg7h6g/s1152/bpride2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="837" data-original-width="1152" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoRIkhpFRaCN3xf6e09EaT2838UAxW50xgGge4-KQzv-G9eVR1oHAT-WxYT7cIY6Fzz_g28hemCfJpacs-QODvbe04IKcwF3mXXByQLPpb3ROrhk5Tvy-82m2vNdl8IpSVFifKcse6n6aiEOeCH3jQZm8c_CazYh3YpQCxQ5BIgYRErvS6q_atzg7h6g/s320/bpride2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>It would be lovely if there could be a sustainable Belly Punching Forum as a virtual watering hole. It could work only if pictures and videos were forbidden. Copyright issues bring down every open one, and those that remain are limited to individual producers. Which leaves us without the Belly Punching forum. As for the special subset of "men who get off on suffering a punch in the belly in front of a woman" (and the women who love them), we are probably too few to have enough semi-public members at any one time to sustain a forum. So a belly-punching blog will have to do.<div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><br /><div>
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He had a belly that begged to be slugged, and he had a bad habit of showing it off. It's like he was asking for it. And he had a mouth that didn't know when to quit. And now 10 biker-gang toughs had him in the clear California sunlight outside their clubhouse, ready to deal him a bad belly-ache.<br />
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He's in black boots, tight jeans, and he's shirtless, with only a short black-leather vest open in front.<br />
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They're around him in a ragged ring, roughing him up. He staggers stupidly from a shove; one of them grabs his shoulder, spins him around. As he stands astonished the thug hauls off with his fist and whomps him in the belly.<br />
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"OOF!" Lips rounded out in a belly-button O announce his ache. Eyes go wide with the panic of feeling all the breath socked out of him and knuckles deep in his stomach. With first touch of a fist on his belly he's broken. Can't fake it. Can't hide it. Total humiliation. He's sobbing, staggering, gasping, cradling his poor punched belly. A punch in his gut stole his voice and everything else.<br />
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A different biker rips him upright, throws him back to the clubhouse wall, and holds him there by the neck. "You're the pussy who likes to belly-ache about us, eh? I'll give you something to BELLY-ache about!" and with that the thug slams a fist into his stomach.<br />
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He had no air left to lose. His whole body looked like it wanted to explode out of him -- bug-eyed, tongue pushed out, fingers flared. And the middle of him crumpled in, T-boned by a fist.<br />
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The bully swung him around to face the rest of them and held him there for all to enjoy the sight of him looking down, gasping, at his own exposed belly, the fist-mark pink on his stomach. His mouth is tragic, and he has that comical look in his eyes like he was being eaten from inside.<br />
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Then the bruiser shoves him and he drops to his knees in full windedness, with a fist-mark branded on his belly.<br />
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But their hands grip him and pull him. They're just beginning to have their fun. His face is wide-eyed, mouth twisted in the supreme effort to draw a breath into his stunned body.<br />
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The one who started it rudely hammers another punch to his belly. With a sour "UUH!" belly-boy instantly folds over, cradling his stomach, gasping at the ground and mooing out a low, loud bellyache.<br />
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They pluck him upright again. He stands stiff and winded, with agony in his face. They shove him around the circle, twice. He, unresisting, staggering. His mind is one punch behind reality. Flapping arms like a flightless bird, he blunders belly-first into every fist ready to greets him.<br />
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The moment he got punched in the stomach his whole body would go limp. The way he took it you'd think he got hit in the belly with a wrecking ball. And his face would burst into the most comical OOF-expression. His eyes would go crossed and bug out. His cheeks puffed, like he was stuck saying the letter O. You could really see the wind get knocked out of him.<br />
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Then he'd jack-knife forward and double up around the bellyache, with his hands pressed up under his belly and his mouth gasping at the floor. Or he'd stagger and stand breathless, feet shuffling in the bellypunch dance, while the shock of pain possesses him.<br />
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Either way he would be a man who had totally lost himself. Every punch in the stomach doubles him over or drops him to his knees gasping and cradling a bellyache.<br />
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"Hold him up," the beater demands.<br />
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Two of them grab him from behind by the arms and hair and vest and rudely pull him upright, arms away from his body, bread-basket arched out.<br />
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"Punching bag!" the beater declares, as he shoves a jab into his victim's stomach. The bare belly blurts out an "OOF!" His clenching reflex lifts his knee and bends his upper body forward, straining in their grip on his arms. His hands, pinned to his sides, claw at the air. He can't protect his midriff, and now the beater swings a full-armed uppercut into the pit of his belly. The upward force of it high in the belly rockets his body upright, wide-eyed in agony, and poses him as a perfect punching-bag target for the next fist. It's a knuckle-jab to the stomach that pins his belly-button to his spine.<br />
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They made him dance a belly-dance there. How? First they stood him up on a chair back against the back porch rail, tied his arms back to it, then kicked the chair away. The stress of being held up by his arms got to him at once and he began kicking the air and found his voice again. But they quickly silenced him with a round of punches to the belly. Watching the reaction on his face looked like he swallowed a fistful of cherry bombs and now they were blowing up in his belly one by one. Held up and helpless, he just dangled there OOF-ing while they pounded out a fist-beat on his stomach. They called that a "belly-dance."<br />
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<br />bellypunchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15626322785267248362noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3692525029190577226.post-67307187624572175872013-10-08T12:54:00.000-04:002017-01-30T10:48:04.196-05:00EYE-BRANDED<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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My fight opens with me making a series of ineffective lunges and haymaker swings toward my opponent. He easily dodges or blocks each one, and he responds to each one with a hard punch in my belly.<br />
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Each of these counterpunches makes me recoil and grab my belly. But he holds his fire and lets me recover myself and go at him again. And again he baffles me and whomps me in the stomach. These jabs to the belly take their toll on me, and soon I'm puffing and wheezing and weak.<br />
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She knows he is doing this to impress her. It angers her against him. But another part of her is turned on by it all.<br />
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That's when he gives me the big uppercut in the stomach. That does it. As someone calls out "bellyslammer!" and they all laugh and cheer, I grab my belly and "OOF" out loud and body-rock up and down convulsively while my wobbly knees try to move me away from him. I lose balance and dash to my knees, body upright, still gutpunched and lost in a bellyache.<br />
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He walks in front of me. Wide-eyed, I clench my hands and hold them up in a begging gesture. But he mercilessly kicks me in the belly. Black boot to white belly. My whole body jolts, freezes, wide-eyed, and then I pitch forward, face-down, belly-first. And quickly I flop over onto my back, writhing and shaking, stomach thrust up, arms and legs fish-flopping, in the helpless zombie-dance of the winded.<br />
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... wind knocked out of me ...<br />
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The necessary other-half of the humiliation belly-punch. I let myself get so vulnerable that she saw a man square his arm and ram his fist straight into my helpless belly. And it stripped all the self-control from me, and made me a physical fool in front of her.<br />
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That specific and humiliating way I responded to the shock and body-panic of a sharp punch in the stomach. The potbellied, kettle-drum impact thud, then the clownish OOF! sound I make.<br />
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Then the achingly long seconds of my breathless silence. The full throes of it, when my diaphragm just won't budge to let my lungs draw air. That frozen, dying feeling. The spear of pain that he lunged into my stomach transfixing me, crucifix and san sebastian in one pose, pinned bug. Every second it goes on adds a lead weight to my humiliation. Every second I lie there stunned and gape-mouthed, tear-streaming, unbreathing, the brand burns deeper into my belly.<br />
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The brand is her gaze, whether she wills it or not.<br />
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Finally I draw a breath, but a scant one, and quickly bleated back out. And so it goes, breaths coming more rapidly, but my bellyache still owns me, and I can only grunt and bray and make sour faces -- uuuh! ooooouu!<br />
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All that from one punch right in my belly. Even if it was a cheap shot, a boy's supposed to be able to take one or two stomach punches, or at least recover quickly from them. But there I am, still down and belly-punched, long past a count of ten, if there had been one. The panic possessing me, my body writhing in embarrassing tortured poses I would never allow her to see me assume. A head-to-toe picture of complete male failure.<br />
<br />
She's not a bad girl. Really. She tells herself. To like this, a little? She looks at me and knows, pityingly, that I'll always be shy of her because I am ashamed that she watched me get my belly beat up. That's what a nice girl would feel, right? A girl that's not a bully's slut.<br />
<br />
My belly is right there when he takes his victory stomp/pin.<br />
<br />
Before he's finished with me, he's given me a nickname -- oof-belly. And that's what he and his gang will be calling me, loudly and publicly, for a few days at least, until they tire of mocking my belly and move on to some other sport. I hope. Meanwhile the other girls who did not see the fight, will hear them taunt me and go ask her what it's all about. And she will retell it in detail many times. Some will want to hear it more than once.<br />
<br />bellypunchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15626322785267248362noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3692525029190577226.post-46789376600514913202013-09-09T22:57:00.001-04:002013-10-14T22:28:34.635-04:00Yes, It's Deliberate<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<br />
It's the stun of awareness that hits you when you get a punch in the belly in intimacy.<br />
<br />
This person, who makes you feel like he just rammed your stomach up your lungs with a casual shove of his fist, is loving this.<br />
<br />
Is getting off on it. On having given you that punch right plump in your gut.<br />
<br />
Your lover erased your person-hood for the duration of your suffering. And the sight of you proving it, writhing and belly-aching, is an erotic delight.<br />
<br />
The eyes that sparkle as they watch you get humiliated by a belly-punch -- those eyes deliver the second wallop, the invisible follow up punch, the one that takes all the voice out of you, the one that hits your soular plexus.<br />
<br />bellypunchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15626322785267248362noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3692525029190577226.post-82987251337057266862013-02-26T13:55:00.001-05:002015-03-07T01:09:21.753-05:00ALL in a DAY'S WORK<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
He's facing the crowd, posing and smiling. You seem to think he doesn't see you get up. You walk up behind him with your belly stuck out. And he just jerks his arm back and mashes his elbow into your stomach.<br />
<br />
OOF! Instant bellyache. You fold in at the shoulders and grab your stomach with both hands and spin around. You stagger away from him with all the breath socked out of you.<br />
<br />
Everyone in the arena is thinking the same thing. The announcer simply puts it into words. In long, low tones, "uuh! Right in the belly!" It hits you like the stamp of a brand -- right in the belly. Soft-bellied wimp. Can't take it in the belly.<br />
<br />
Still breathless, you stagger stupidly to the edge of the ring and drop to your knees there, hands still pressed to your stomach. Tragic-mouthed, bug-eyed, you finally get a feeble breath into your stung lungs, only to wail it right out again, "oh, my BELLY!"<br />
<br />
Yes, you waste your precious breath on announcing the obvious. Every eye on you can already tell that, yes, you got elbowed in the belly. Especially those giggling three in the front row, who are pointing at your belly as you lean against the ropes and sag your half-stripped body toward the crowd.<br />
<br />
Then you feel a big grip in your scalp, and you're rotated by your hair, while you hear his voice call out, over you, "get your belly back up here, so I can beat you properly," addressing you, but bawling it out for the crowd. And with that, he's thrown your arms back over the top rope, and pinned them there in the tangled ropes, so you're slumped belly-open, arms wide.<br />
<br />
He can beat you at his leisure, for the entertainment of the crowd. He grips you under the chin and pushes your head back, forcing you to arch your back and thrust up your stomach. Then he raises a fist, which you cannot see but which looms like a hammer over your helpless belly, and lets it hang there a second so everyone in the house -- except you -- can see what's coming.<br />
<br />
Your upside-down view of the crowd shows their faces lit with expectation, some shocked, some cringing, some laughing. Then he drops the hammer on your stomach.<br />
<br />
Your body jolts in shock and you blare the effect of the punch from head to toe. Head jerks, mouth opens to OOF out the impact, body falls back into the ropes but can't drop. Legs kick helplessly, fingers clench in suffering. You can't escape till he pulls you out of it. You're hung up there like a belly punching bag. And he's in a mood to show off.<br />
<br />
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<br />bellypunchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15626322785267248362noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3692525029190577226.post-67101116910984403412013-02-07T22:42:00.001-05:002017-01-26T23:22:51.846-05:00SYMPHONY in OOF<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
"Come in," she said. I opened the door, and caught my breath, though I managed not to gasp. She stood across the room, just turning as I entered, casually setting a glass on the table, a moment framed so perfectly she must have been a long time setting it up.<br />
<br />
She wore her belly-dance gear. The one I like best, the dull gray-blue one, the one that almost vanishes into the background when she wears it, so that her dance becomes a whirl all of bare hips and belly, fingertips and smiles, navel-kisses fluttered with every step.<br />
<br />
And the gold sandals, and her hair set just so, and as she turned to face me she let her hips tip toward me, back-arching, belly-flaunting, and she looked me in the eye and arched one brow and smiled.<br />
<br />
Invitation is too weak a word. She knew what she did to me. She knew all my erotic buttons, and what happened when you punched a fistful of them all at once. I began to walk toward her.<br />
<br />
And I walked right into a bellypunch. He must have been right behind the door, because I didn't get one step past it when I saw a big brawny arm swing around from my side and plunge a brass-balled fist plump into my stomach. It was a perfectly placed punch in the gut and it took the wind right out of my belly with an OOUFF!!! I doubled right up, with a big, bad belly-ache. <br />
<br />
There were two of them, it turned out. I saw the other after he hauled me back upright. I was still folded in half mouth toward the floor, my stunned belly still frozen breathless. I felt my hands pulled behind my back and someone tied my wrists there. Then they un-jacked me with one hand, and forced me upright, and they both presented me open-bellied to her.<br />
<br />
Her twin muscle-thugs held my arms tightly on either side. As if I was going to try anything with my wrists already tied behind me. Or maybe they just did it to make me look vulnerable to her.<br />
<br />
They held me up in front of her and let her casually look me up and down, and back again. She stepped casually past me, her hand lingering down the front of me as I shivered shirtless.<br />
<br />
"Take him down to the dungeon," she purred to the twin towers behind me, "and beat up his belly."<br />
<br />
They hustled me down the steps and threw me down on my bare belly on the cold concrete floor. I was perspiring in fear and my belly hit the icy floor with a soft splat. I heard her chuckle, then the stiletto click of her heels on the floor. Then I saw her in front of me -- or, exactly, I saw her sumptuous pumps and perfect painted toes. Because one of the goons had his knee pressed to my back to hold me down. The other apparently was tying my ankles together, and lifting them up enough to hook them to something.<br />
<br />
"Something" turned out to be a boat-engine lift, and with a touch of her slender hand on a switch (and the big thugs roughing me along), she had me hoisted up, hanging upside down, ankle-bound and hands tied behind my back. She let it lift until she was about eye-level with my navel, then she locked it there.<br />
<br />
She strode slowly up to me. She set a fingertip in my navel, then dragged it down to the center of my belly, midway to my sternum. She paused, bent down, and planted a lipstick kiss on me there. Then she turned and walked away.<br />
<br />
"Now," she told them. "Give it to him in the belly. I want to see which one of you can make him 'OOF!' loudest. I marked it so you won't miss. Punch him on the kiss."<br />
<br />
The chain or cord that held me was anchored to a free-rotating wheel, so they could turn me to face any direction in my helpless pose. The brawlers took up position on opposite sides, and began a game with my helpless belly.<br />
<br />
One would grab me by the hair, which I have plenty of, and turn my body to face him, navel-out. Then he'd line up his shot and deliver some sort of show-off-y chop or punch into my stomach.<br />
<br />
Disoriented, flipped, spun, dazed, I had no hope of anticipating their blows to my bread-basket and no hope of resisting them. The height she had me, they could swing straight jabs and overhand shots right into the "sweet spot" of my gut, and get the breath of me every time. The kind of sharp, shocking blows that in a typical fight only go to the head. In this beating I took them in the belly.<br />
<br />
First one would jerk his fist into my soft stomach or jab an elbow into the pit of my belly. And stand back and let her watch me suffer. Then she'd signal the other one to take his turn.<br />
<br />
I swung like a pot-belly pinata while they took their whacks on my bread-basket. She cooed and purred them on the whole time, teasing and suggesting what the winner might enjoy.bellypunchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15626322785267248362noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3692525029190577226.post-77214908155717793352013-01-29T10:18:00.000-05:002015-03-07T01:18:24.981-05:00HenchmanAll my life I've secretly been a henchman at heart, not a hero.<br />
<br />
You know, a henchman: The gang of helpers and lackeys who gather about the Bad Guy in the story or the movie. The ones whose only function is to get beaten up in the big fist-fight brawl scene -- beaten like fools, dispatched quickly, vigorously, and visibly by the hero. Often all it took was a series of chops to the belly. One of the fine arts of henchmanship was knowing how to charge out into a fistfight with your belly stuck out like it was searching for a fist to "OOF" against.<br />
<br />
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<br />bellypunchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15626322785267248362noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3692525029190577226.post-8068787144698406702012-09-15T00:51:00.005-04:002013-10-14T22:32:09.573-04:00The BELLYPUNCHER (contd.)<br />
Now I had him. Now he was helpless. I was in full control. I grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him upright. But his hands wouldn't release their grip on his poor punched belly. So I shook him roughly by the collar and slapped him back against the side of the tree to loosen his clutch. Eventually he reached for my arms, and I whipped my left fist back and socked him a haymaker uppercut in the stomach, then I swung my right back and gave him the same thing again.<br />
<br />
I saw his eyes cross briefly and he roared out an anguished belly-grunt -- uuh! The girls had a full view of it (I made sure to stand just right), and they both blurted out "oh, right in the belly!" then they looked at each other and laughed.<br />
<br />
The pot-bellied oaf was leaning back on the tree, fully winded, with his shirt bunched up to his chest. I rared a fist back, aimed at his face, and his hands flew up to try to block it, pure reflex, while his eyes got big.<br />
<br />
Instead I dropped the punch overhand into the upper curve of his stomach, right in the gut! His eyes got even bigger then. I let them see me hold it in him, pure mass of muscle in my punch and pure vulnerability in his soft belly.<br />
<br />
His worthless, girly belly paid the price while I put on a show for the girls. They were chanting, "belly-punch! belly-puch!" and calling out, "beat his belly! What's wrong, can't take it in the belly?"<br />
<br />
I stepped aside to let him stagger. I love it when they stagger. When they're torqued up by the suffering in their belly, and they can't keep their wobbly knees straight. When I got tired of hearing their giggles at that, I whipped him back upright by the collar, jerked him around toward me, ducked down and packed a sledgehammer punch right into his belly.bellypunchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15626322785267248362noreply@blogger.com12