#1 – Easter Spankings: An Eden’s Hollow Story
by Augusta Connor
“Free spankings?”
Hattie lifts an eyebrow at her friend, but Melody just shrugs her shoulders and smiles.
“An Easter tradition,” she answers, pausing next to the sandwich board sign that’s set out on the sidewalk in front of the small wooden church. “Slavic, I think. Supposed to be good luck.”
“Good luck? From church spankings?” Hattie’s voice is incredulous. Eden’s Hollow seems more odd every day, and just when she thinks she’s starting to get a handle on the local eccentricities, she comes across something like, well. Free spankings. In a church.
“I dunno.” Melody shrugs again. “I’m not Slavic. There’s like… special switches they use. Blessed ones, I think?”
The sign is attractively decorated with little painted flowers that swirl around the stylized letters. There are ribbons tied to the hinges, a rainbow of slim colors stirring in the spring breeze.
“Who does the spankings?” Hattie can’t believe she’s standing in front of a church asking this question, but she can’t get a handle on the prurient curiosity coursing through her. “Is it like, the priests? Or…?”
“You know, I have no idea.” Melody grins. “Shall we find out?”
Hattie opens her mouth, but before she can form an answer, Melody has the heavy wooden door pulled wide and is propelling Hattie through it.
“Easter spanking?” A middle-aged woman smiles cheerfully as she passes over a clipboard with what looks like a consent form. “Just fill this out, and then pick the line for the spanker of your preference.”
“Um, our preference?”
The woman nods. Her name tag reads Olivia Ruiz in a careful print. It’s a contrast to how Melody’s already filling out her form, tongue stuck between her teeth as she signs her name in an illegible scrawl.
“Yes, your preference. You can get spanked by Father Novak,” the woman gestures to a line in front of a man in a cassock and a jolly smile who looks a bare minimum of eighty years old. He holds a bundle of long, thin twigs in one hand, bedecked with the same colorful ribbons as the sign out front, and beams reassuringly at the plump, giggling, blue-haired lady at the front of his line. “Or,” the woman continues, “you can get spanked by Zorah.”
Hattie glances to Father Novak’s left, and nearly chokes. The woman on the chair next to him is half again as big as he is, her broad shoulders and sculpted arms on full display in the the dark purple muscle-tank she’s wearing as she brings the same sort of beribboned switch down on the squirming buttocks of a gleeful looking man.
“Yeah, that,” Melody says, and hands over her form. Olivia takes it with a grin, and gestures Melody over to Zorah’s line. “Jesus.”
“I imagine he’d have a similar reaction, yes,” Olivia agrees, and Hattie does a poor job of muffling her snort. “And how about you, miss…?”
“Hattie.” She hands over her form. “Yeah, two for whatever’s going on over there, please.”
“Excellent. May you be blessed!”
–
“Well.” Melody says as they emerge from the church a half hour later, the spring sunshine blinding. “Do you feel blessed?”
Hattie sucks her teeth. She feels hazy, the burning that’s currently at home across the backs of her thighs and stinging on her ass keeping her mind fuzzy and her body loose. Hattie pauses, remember the way Zorah had cradled Hattie’s shoulders across her forearm, effortlessly holding her in place as she brought the switch down with an expert hand.
“So blessed,” she agrees, and Melody just laughs.