The day after she had punished me in the backrooms of Bellefields Mall, I rode to Missy's house on my bike. It was a rusty old Schwinn step-through single-speed that I'd had since I was a long-legged and awkward girl of fourteen. When I got to the slope, I had to jump off and push it the last mile. These trees hide the shape of the land, which here in mountains is crumpled up like a sheet of paper, and the sparse, nameless neighborhood that held Missy's house was surprisingly high up on an upward fold of the earth, perhaps what Iowans or Mississippians would call a mountain, shrouded in the same tall old-growth pine as all the other hills and valleys around town. The sun was going down. She had told me to come around sunset.

Finally, I was at the door of the cabin. It had been a rental once, but the town had stopped being a tourist site five or more years ago.

I raised the brass knocker, gripped in the mouth of a cast lion, and brought it down with three clicks.

I heard footsteps, and then the door opened and, in the half-darkness within, I saw Missy for only the second time. She had a mane like the lion; it was flatly bottle-blond and curly, not terribly kempt but not tangled either. Her face had no makeup but flat red lipstick--every line and yes, a few small hairline scars, showed on her face frankly and without the pretense of concealment. Her lips were full and so were her breasts, in a black work-issue polo with what must have been a pushup bra in a size I didn't know they made. She had some weight at the middle, but it gave her a not-inelegant, classical shape with sides rounding into hips and hips rounding into strong, big legs. I could not guess her age, but she must have been past thirty and before fifty-five.

But there was something to that face, the face that had sternly demanded I bend over for an enema in a mall bathroom, the face that had asked me flatly, but with a secret tenderness, if I wanted baby powder as she was putting a diaper on me on her desk in the security office. If I could paint, I would paint her in shining armor as Joan d'Arc. I felt that she could tell me to do anything in that moment.

She extended her hand, not merely for a professional handshake, but with all the stiffness and subtle cues of a man extending his hand to a colleague. I took it and she shook it firmly.

"Call me Missy. Come in."

"Janie," I said, as she turned to show me into her house.

She showed me to a couch in a dimly-lit den where a fire was just going out in the fireplace. She indicated a place very simply, as if to say "you will sit here."

She came back with a tea set, which surprised me very much. She poured us each a cup and then sat down. I smelled it. It was something minty, and the kettle must have been on before I got there.

She inhaled, looked oddly like there was something pent-up in her chest. All at once, the words began to flow. "Janie, listen to me. You don't know me. Coming here was foolish, do you understand that? A girl your age going alone to a strangers house... it's bad business."

"I feel like I know you. I feel like..."

"Feel like what? Like you can trust me because I'm a security guard? Don't trust anyone just because they have power. Do you know what goes on behind closed doors with powerful people?"

"You punished me in a way that was oddly sexual."

"That I did, which proves my point," she said. She sighed. "Why did you come here?"

It was my turn to feel something build up in my chest, release it in a burst. "Because I want it again."

"You felt a kind of release, suffering a punishment you felt you deserved, reconciling with your punisher, being let go."

"Yes! Exactly! I felt so... clean afterwards."

"Janie, you come here asking to be treated like a criminal. I hope you understand why I can't. In this country, we take criminals and break them. Do you think people come out of prison having learned anything? Having learned how to succeed? Now, Janie, I hope you never deal drugs again. I hope to God you never go to prison. But I'm not going to treat you like a criminal. You are welcome here, and we can figure out your sexuality if that's what you want, but I can't treat a little girl like you as a prisoner, not more than once, and only to scare her straight."

My heart sunk. I had come here because I wanted to be punished. I grasped at straws. "Can you... can you boss me around and punish me for something small?"

"On one condition. I take you out to dinner tonight and we spend some time getting to know each other. I don't want to be someone you come running to for release, Janie. If we do this, we do this as friends."

* * *

Late that night we returned from the diner, feeling almost like we knew each other. We walked into her cabin and suddenly she said, very loudly, "you didn't close the door all the way behind you! Anyone could have been in here!"

"Missy, I just saw you unlock it."

"Be quiet. You're in trouble now, Janie! Help me make sure the house is secure and then take your clothes off. You're getting a punishment you'll remember."

After we searched all the rooms of the cabin, she dragged me into the bathroom by my ear. "Everything off. Now."

"Don't punish me too hard," I said, as I fumbled at the top button of my jeans.

"The time for that is passed. You're getting punished severely, Janie." She began to unbutton my jeans for me.

"Now take them off," she said as she started pulling my T-shirt off.

Finally I managed to get my pants off. Now I was standing only in my underwear.

"Arms up," she said, and as I raised my arms in confusion, she grabbed my bra strap right under the armpit on each side and pulled my bra up and off like I was a little girl who still couldn't undo it or slip out of it myself.

"Panties off."

I turned my back to her and worked my panties off.

"You're going to have a soapy enema this time, and some retention time with a good paddling."

I didn't say anything. I was scared of what I'd heard of soap enemas. Missy had spoken on the drive back after dinner about being a child and getting punished that way, or having it done for constipation. She'd said it was a full body experience, like getting all the bad things violently scoured out of you. Compared to a soapy enema, she said, a water enema like I'd gotten was relaxing.

She spread a towel on the ground. "On your back, legs in the air."

The enema she had at home wasn't improvised like the one at her office in the mall. It was a red rubber bag with a clear plastic hose and a small valve. There was no nozzle on it, and as I watched she looked at an assortment of nozzles and picked a long, skinny one and attached it. She filled a big mixing bowl and cut up some soap into small cubes with a knife, which she dropped in and stirred with a spoon until suds were visible. She poured it into the rubber bag through a funnel and reattached the hose.

"If you expell before I can get the retention balloon inside you, I'm going to put even more water in you. You have to learn your lesson." Saying that, she abruptly bent down and put the nozzle in my butt. She hung it on a nearby towel rack and opened the valve.

And there was a spreading warmth. It didn't feel worse than my first enema, not for a minute at least. Then there was an uncomfortable feeling of fullness, like I'd been needing to go for an hour and had to hold it. And then came the cramping.

My stomach was distended, my bowels felt like they were going to explode, and the water kept coming.

"Now, tell me, Janie. Are you going to leave the door unlocked again?"

"No."

She grabbed my leg, pushed it back and whacked my ass with a hairbrush, hard.

I guessed why she had spanked me. "No, ma'am, I won't."

"Say 'thank you.'"

"Thank you, ma'am."

She whacked me again. There was an uncomfortable jostling sensation in my bowels. and I almost expelled.

I hesitated. "Thank you, ma'am."

At this point the feeling of having to go was almost irresitable.

She gave me three more whacks, then forcibly spread my legs so quickly it startled me. Suddenly she was pinching my clit so hard I almost screamed. The pain was overwhelming. She was up close to my ear and saying "listen. If you ever do it again, I'll make you wish you'd never been born. Am I understood, little girl?"

"Yes, ma'am. Thank you, ma'am."

Her fingers slipped into my pussy for a moment. She pulled

She spanked me, in all, about a dozen more times. I don't know how I didn't spray enema water and feces all over the bathroom. Finally, she told me to stand.

Standing made it worse. I felt like I was about to shit my organs out. But I knew it would only make things worse.

She pulled out a quarter and pressed it to the wall. "Nose here. If it falls I'll hear it."

I felt like such a child, standing with my nose holding a quarter to the wall. She went and sat in the next room. Time passed, and the urge to go got worse with every second.

Finally, after what might have been two minutes or a thousand years, she came back in and told me to sit down on the toilet. Before I could do anything, she suddenly straddled me and put her weight on my lap where I was sitting on the toilet. Her breasts were up against my face. She put her hand to my chin and made me look up into her face.

"I want you to say 'I was bad, mommy, I'm sorry."

I barely hesitated. But there was some part of me, my individual will, perhaps, that felt like it was shrinking down, and her will, her intentions for me, were getting bigger to replace it. "I was bad, mommy," I said. "I'm sorry."

I got lost in her eyes.

"Did you learn your lesson?" she said at last. Her weight was crushing my thighs.

"Yes, mommy. Thank you."

She got up. "You may expell your enema. When you're done, join me in the bedroom and I'll diaper you up for the night."

It took ages to get all the soapy water, now brown and reeking, out of my body, and when I had, I just sat there for a few minutes, pushing and pushing. I suppose I almost prolapsed. Finally I cleaned myself up and walked into the bedroom, where Missy was standing in her pajamas. She had a towel down on the bed. I knew what to do.

With my legs in the air, I felt vulnerable. She could spank me again or whack me in a sensitive place at any moment. But instead, she took out the talcum powder and gently tapped it out onto the whole area, spreading my buttcheeks a little with two fingers to get a little extra in there. When she grabbed my legs and lifted my butt into the air so she could slip the diaper under me, I think I slipped away that last little bit, and I was hers to do with as she pleased.

She closed the diaper and stuck the tabs, then helped me up. We hugged, and I rested my head on her shoulder.

That night, she let me sleep in her bed, and held hands with me until she fell asleep. The diaper was a definite presence in the bed, but she didn't say anything about it, and in the morning, we woke up and nothing more was said about it, even though I wore it to the breakfast table with nothing else on. It made me feel safe.

The next day, after work, I came back to her house. "Can you do that thing where you put your whole hand into me again?"