Let the shimmer of my stockings under streetlights be
your lure. I hear and don’t hear your stealth-clad footsteps, trailing me.
Block after block, past sordid bars and shut-eyed houses. I want not to know the dark lust you harbour at the glimpse of suspenders through my skirt-slit. Swishing so close to my sex, where you want your cock to be.
(If you exist, back there in the shadows.)
Hand of A Stranger is a dark little flash fiction story I often perform live. (For the audio-link, head to the bottom of this article, and the big red writing will tell you how) I’ve been told this piece is quite filmic, and I like to invite the audience to close their eyes when I read it – so the images and story can unspool across the screen of their collective closed eyelids. If anyone was peeking, I guess they would see how much I enjoy reading this one, savouring the sound and consequences of each word, each building image.
You could say this story was inspired by two things – my love of film noire and my own relationship to what often is termed non-consensual (or non-con) sexual fantasies.
I have them. In fact, according to statistics, a lot of women do.
It may well have been the theme of some of my earliest and most recurring sexual fantasies when I was a much more sexually shy and inexperienced teenager.
I have written elsewhere that, “in engaging the reader, erotica seeks to arouse. But it may also confront. Provoke. And subvert. ” (Earthing Eros: The Making of Erotica)
And this:
Erotica writes into those areas of the human sexual psyche and behaviour that some other genres gloss over or shy away from. Erotica reveals the links between our inner psychological desires, motivations and our sexual actions. It can also bring into the light the contradictions between our inner sexual desires and our outward behaviour. What do we settle for? What do we secretly long for, and to attain that, what lengths would we go to?
The taboo in erotica is something I’ve addressed only obliquely so far, and it’s definitely a subject I will be focusing on in future blogs.
But – there’s other things going on here, aside from that.
This is a fantasy about a particular performance of femininity.
Stockings & suspenders. High heels & tight pencil skirts. Naivety. Vulnerability.
This is a fantasy about desirability, through the themes of pursuit and capture.
A deserted alleyway leers to the left.
You step close, bring your hand to my mouth, reel me into you, into the alleyway, deftly, like winding in a fish.
It’s an age-old, universal theme. Found in medieval sonnets, classic romances, Shakespeare plays, and graphic comics. It plays out the idea that a woman is so desirable, that a particular man will pursue her and, at all costs, possess her.
This is a fantasy about loss of control.
But not really. it’s a sleight-of-hand concept, a paradox. When a woman constructs a fantasy for herself about loss of control, it’s her fantasy. She only loses control in the ways she finds pleasurable, and the other players in the fantasy behave exactly as she wants them to behave. So, on another level, she’s entirely in control. But to enjoy this kind of fantasy, one employs a kind of double-think. One forgets that one has constructed something in order to succumb to the will and desire of another. And the sexual imagination is adept at this kind of double-think, I believe,
This piece does contain explicit sexual themes and ideas that some may find disturbing and confronting. So please, make your choices around listening or not listening with a view to your own self-care. Thankyou – you have been cautioned.
TO SAY “YES” TO ME WHISPERING THIS STORY IN YOUR EAR – HOVER & CLICK OVER THE IMAGE BELOW …
It will take you to a site called Audio-Boom, and then, like a You-Tube Video, you’ll need to activate “play” to listen. I hope you enjoy … and you know I love feedback. ❤
Finally, this is also a fantasy about trust.
“My unspoken fantasy. Hidden in the crevices of my unconscious. But somehow, you have found me out.
All quotes from Hand of A Stranger – Adrea Kore 2013
(published on forthegirls.com 2013)
My favourite of all your works Adrea.
How I love these rich, dark seas you show us: midnight words whispered between lovers: so many secrets: and a thousand versions of ourselves, and of desire.
Your recording is mesmerising: lush and sensual, raw and red, taunting and tantalizing. I could listen to your voice night and day.
Thank you so much for sharing this with us.
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Thankyou so much – I must admit the thespian in me is enjoying recording some of my writing – I do love to take the audience on a journey through imagery. 🙂
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Okay, third attempt. First time I couldn’t really get past ‘Wow!’ so made a glib comment instead, and second time I said I felt out of my depth intellectually and emotionally, but was happy to drown in this – and then someone said the same thing on telly and ruined it! So, take three: I am but a horny hack and wish I had the vocabularly and maturity to do this justice, but I can at least say how it makes me feel. It excites me and it frightens me. It takes me where I do not want to be but I do not want to leave. It makes me proud and ashamed and challenges my thoughts and my senses alike.
I often say my overriding criterion for greatness in literature is that it takes the reader/listener beyond the usual experience, and how this does that! Therefore, hashtag deployed: #eroticaisliterature
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I appreciate the complexity of your response. One of my aims with writing is, to immerse the reader in something sensorily, emotionally, so that they might lose (and therefore, find) sense of time. Non-con fantasy is a complex thing for me to unravel, let alone bring a reader along … I love your line as feedback ” It takes me where I do not want to be but I do not want to leave. ” If I have made you walk that edge with me … then I’ve achieved something worthwhile as both a writer and a sex writer.
Thanks for listening.
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