The Weight of the World, Part Two

In one of my earliest posts, I wrote about spanking being a transformative experience, allowing me to regress into a little girl for a while, letting go of all my worries, and then regaining my womanhood and "the weight of the world." Well, the weight of the world became a little too heavy for a while, hence the hiatus. I disconnected from my body; I was all mind, all worries, all the time.

In my quest to free myself from troubles, my thoughts became preoccupied with punishment and how it could release me. Sex didn't just take a backseat, it got out of the car. I was surprised every time a kiss led to love-making and not a lashing. So I decided to take a break from writing about spanking, from, honestly, obsessing about it. Then it became a break from everything: reading, sleeping, focusing...

Something changed this weekend. Some piece of me returned. I was gone from myself long enough, I suppose. In celebration of my return to myself, I even changed my hair color back to its natural shade. I've spent so long escaping myself that I had forgotten how good it feels to just come home.

Fortunately for all of us, a favorite part of my home is the spankings my husband gives me. But whether I'm using them to escape a bad day or my grown-up self, I realized that to him, I am always a woman. His woman. And the spankings are to say I love you, I love this thing we do, I love that you love it, too.

My favorite fetish is still the punishment of the schoolgirl by the headmaster. My fantasies will probably always return to that. But I'm going to try something new. The next time I'm bottom-up for one of my beloved beatings, I'm going to try to take it like a woman. A strong, tender, intelligent, bruising, brave, bright-red bottomed woman.

Just Push Play

I have a new obsession. Unlike my summer obsessions, which primarily consisted of spanking implements, spanking models, spanking blogs, and getting spanked myself, my new fall obsession is more introspective, more worldly, more.. alright, let's face it. Still about spanking.

But I tried really hard to make it about more than that! You see, my new obsession is the new Blogger Play. I first clicked on the link Friday night and found myself watching the random imagery of newly uploaded photos for half an hour. When my husband came home, I made him watch it too. We sat together in front of the computer for an hour, watching smiling babies, M&M ads, Grand Canyon family shots, pet pics, manga imagery, and a bizarre amount of photos of the Taiwanese boy-band Fahrenheit flash by. Every now and again we'd click on a photo to link to the blog where the photo was being posted--and yes, someone is really, really obsessessed with Fahrenheit somewhere in Indonesia. We kept saying, "I just know something really good is going to come along any second." When we were rewarded with this questionable Harry Potter film capture, we were finally able to leave the computer.

We talked about what made it so fascinating. "It makes me feel less alone," I explained. "These are all things that people care about, their worlds, their lives, the minutiae that make their lives meaningful. It's comforting." You see? Introspective. Worldly. The scroller has a filter that keeps the naughtier photos from popping up, though they do, of course, from time to time. Mostly, though, it's babies and landscapes and pets. So, last night, when this Australian schoolgirl popped up, I have to admit I was on her blog immediately.

She's just an ordinary schoolgirl, thankfully eighteen, doing ordinary schoolgirl things--acting in plays, taking photos of her friends and family, stopping to smell the flowers (there are pictures). Quite a few photos of her and her friends in school uniform, as well. The problem is--well, the problem is people like me who see this photo and their first thought is, "Ooh, she looks naughty!" It's why I'm not actually linking to her blog. The last thing a teenage girl needs is to be ogled by we perverted folks, even if we're miles and miles and miles away. So, back to introspective. Ah, the Internet. Pointing out uncomfortable things, indeed.

Then again, I also linked to a number of amazing blogs last night, most of which I cannot read. Why no one blogs in Latin, I just don't understand. This fantastic photo led me to the Portuguese-language Clarisset Anobanheiro. So, obsession adjective checklist. Introspective? Check. Worldly? Check. Dirty, naughty, and perverse as always? Check. Check. Check.

In Control of Not Being In Control

When a television show does something so unbelievable that viewers can no longer suspend their disbelief, it's called jumping the shark. As absurd things happen in television constantly, the term "jumping the shark" is reserved for when the absurdity is in conflict with the realm the show has created. In the same vein, a grown woman receiving a strapping for an imagined crime is commonplace in the realm we've created for ourselves. But what do we call it when something goes awry? What do we call it when a spanking scene jumps the shark?

A few nights ago, I came home from work to find myself suddenly pulled over my husband's knee, pants down to my ankles, receiving a hand-spanking for an unnamed infraction. If I had to guess, it was for pouting the night before when I didn't get punished for having forgotten to take out the trash. After the hand came the hairbrush, a Mason Pearson with a curved back and therefore a terrible sting, and then somehow found myself facedown and squirming on the bed, my favorite leather slapper being used in new and wicked ways against my backside. I was terribly wiggly for some reason, every blow stinging and making me squeal. By the time I was let up, thinking I was going to get dressed to go out but instead bent back over to take a strapping, I was completely disheveled and nervously agitated. I wasn't sure I could take any more.

Now, none of this is out of the ordinary. I was dripping wet, anxious for the ordeal to end but disappointed every time we paused and I thought it might be over. But as the strapping progressed, though it was nothing vicious except for it being with the heaviest of the straps, an antique barber strop we found on our honeymoon, I became increasingly panicked. At one point I asked if I still had skin on my bottom. When he told me I didn't, I laughed. We were having fun. But I started to freak out a bit, at one point actually turning around and sitting my sore bottom down on the edge of the bed to protect it. I also kept putting my hands in the way, which I'm usually a bit better about. When the strap caught the back of my left hand, it was my own fault. Unfortunately, an unbidden and vocal part of me didn't see it that way.

I yelled at him. It lasted a sentence or two, but it wasn't in my getting-a-spanking voice, or any voice I even recognized. I expected to be punished for acting out, but no more strokes came. I apologized, begging forgiveness for having yelled and cursed, but it did no good. The scene was over.

We sat. I cried. I didn't think of the phrase at the time, but I had jumped the shark. I had acted completely out of character, both my spanking self and my real self. I don't yell at my husband. We don't even fight. By breaking character to such an unexpected degree, I had made continuing the scene unbelievable for us both. I kept apologizing. "I didn't mean anything by it. I just freaked out," I repeated. We talked and he comforted me by telling me that we had the rest of our lives to get it right. I think we came out of the situation better for it having happened, because it gave us the opportunity to talk about it.

Still, I'm a little unsettled with myself. I try to be self-possessed during my spankings, aware and focused, in control of not being in control. This time, it was like I was possessed by my self instead. Even if a safeword was something we used, it wouldn't have helped. The reaction came unbidden and instantaneously. I trust him implicitly, but I trusted myself a little less after the incident.

Later that night, after we took each other shopping, we came home with plans to eat our takeout and play our new video game (Tetris for PS2!) in bed. I took off everything but my panties and a white oxford blouse. Next thing I knew, I was in our library, hands on my ankles, cane swishing in the air behind me. It was the thinnest and whippiest one, and I squealed and squirmed at every stroke. I don't remember his exact words, but after a dozen, he demanded I gain control of myself. I took the next twelve so well! I un-jumped the shark. Order had been returned to our universe. Our scene ended happily, I kicked his butt at Tetris, and I fell asleep smiling, in control of not being in control once again.

Take Me to the Chorus

Galavanting around town, indeed! My beautiful man, in his secret anonymous disguise, has finally commented on my blog. I suppose now I really must finish that story, though I wouldn't mind some "or else" right now! I really wasn't galavanting, though. Along with almost every other twenty-something girl in Portland, I was at the futuresex/loveshow. It sounds kinky if you don't listen to pop music. If you do, you'll know I went to see Justin Timberlake.
The show was surprisingly mature, as was the audience. Maybe local parents had heard there would be a burlesque segment and just too much sexiness. JT has shed the boy-band persona completely. The fashion was Jazz Age, the dancing was slick and sexy, and the musicians were as much as part of the show as Timberlake and the dancers. Spending much time on the piano as well as taking turns with a guitar and keyboard, Timberlake himself proved to be quite the showman. I expected to be entertained. I left the show not only entertained, but also respectful and impressed.
More importantly, however, is how Justin Timberlake fits into a blog about spanking. Let me set the scene for you. An arena packed full of girls, most of whom are of age, though there are of course quite a few teens as well. Everyone is dressed up, though some are not especially dressed. Fashion ran the full gamut from short-shorts and tiny tops to slinky satin dresses to tight jeans and cute tees. Everyone is singing and dancing along, wiggling their bottoms and shaking their hips. Justin himself slaps a few dancers' backsides during various numbers, the hottest of which was during "Sexy Ladies," which incorporated three girls in classic burlesque costumes (i.e. a little fringe and little else). The girls brought out stools for some Fosse-inspired chair-dancing. JT took a seat on one as a brunette went over his lap--no, not like that. Face up, unfortunately. But after she did her little lap dance, he smacked the back of her thigh, and it looked so natural, like he might not have even thought about it, like it was instinct. Makes a girl wonder about a boy.
So we've got our arena of girls, we have some flesh-smacking on stage, and we get to the last number of the show, the one we've all been waiting for, "SexyBack." Thousands of girls sing along. If you don't know the song, you don't know how hot this is. Thousands of girls sing along with the chorus and this line:

I'll let you whip me if I misbehave.
After seeing the show, I can't help but wonder if Timberlake planned ahead for the concert tour, knowing full well that at every show, he'd have a room full of girls singing that line to him. And now I better get back to work on that story, lest I be whipped for misbehaving. Hm. On second thought, maybe I should do something else.

A Writing Spasm

After coming home from vacation to find the longest, most ridiculous spam ever as a comment on my last post, I found myself wondering, "Now, why can't I sit down and write these days? Crazy people can do it. Why not me?"

I've always considered myself a writer. These past few years, however, I've begun to refer to myself in my internal dialogues as "the writer who does not write." After writing 70+ pages on fairy tales for my college thesis, I thought it would be easy to rewrite some of my favorite tales. After all, the thesis was on how the primary characters of the maiden, the prince, the mother, and the father have changed in retellings of five specific fairy tales over the centuries. How simple, I thought, to take the darker elements and create modern retellings that are true to those dark roots? I write a page, two pages, and then... nothing. It's not even writer's block. I just stop trying.

When I started blogging and the words were flowing faster than my fingers could type them, I decided I would try to add my favorite past-time to the stories. After all, who doesn't want to imagine vapid Snow White getting birched by the hunter when he takes her into the woods? Or find out just how wicked Cinderella's wicked stepmother was? I had a few great ideas. I started writing them, beginnings, bits and pieces. I got ten pages into one--ten pages! too long, but I haven't written that much in years--and had finally reached the spanking scene when, once again, I just stopped.

Am I afraid of writing a spanking scene? I never have. I've described my own in short form here, but I've never realy written a scene. I feel like I'd do it justice. I simply haven't tried. I can see the scene in my head, down to the eyelet details of the main character's cotton pantaloons. It's set in the West Indies. She's sweating, the fabric clinging to her bottom, the backs of her thighs. She's never been spanked before. The man she loves beckons her forward. "Madame Marie told me you deserve to be punished, little girl," he tells her, patting his lap, "but she didn't tell me why. We'll just have to start slow and keep going until you seem contrite." She shakes her head. This isn't what Marie asked her to do the night before. When he entered her room, she had thought she would finally be in his arms. Punished? By him? Her new legs tremble. "Come here," he demands more forcefully. She steps towards him. He smiles, his teeth gleaming like pearls from the blue of his beard. She steps again.

When she reaches him, he pulls her to his right side, pressing his hand against the small of her back to bend her forward over his lap. Her white camisole rides up. The small of her back glistens. She is so pale, so delicate. He wonders whether Marie was not being cruel in asking him to punish so fragile a girl, but once she is postitioned fully over his lap, her bottom surprisingly full and straining against her cotton pants, he silently thanks the madame for this unexpected gift. He cups one cheek, then the other, testing her bottom's resiliency. She wiggles. When he slaps her once, firmly, she freezes then looks back at him slowly, shaking her hair from her eyes. He sees shock there, and confusion, but at the core of her gaze is a hunger unlike any he's seen from any woman, nevermind a pale and silent girl. In the humid evening, he shivers. "Eyes on the floor, young lady," he demands, catching the tremble in his throat. "You know what you've done." Even if I don't, he thinks to himself before raising his hand over her. The spanking begins.

Hm. Well, that wasn't planned. There's more of a scene there, more description to come. Maybe I'm going to have to write the whole story on here, if it takes an audience to get me going. Maybe I'll even post the back-story (though perhaps not all ten pages of it). Even that little bit wore me out, though, and we still didn't get to the good part. To be continued, I suppose...

Which Leg Shall I Be Today?

If I had to guess, I would say that the message of the vintage photo to the left is that this woman is both the good girl and the bad girl, the wife in the kitchen and the whore in the bedroom. Or possibly, she is just demonstrating the wide selection of hosiery available at her favorite turn-of-the-century shop.

Either way, the other message our fine-stockinged friend bears is:

Abby is going out of town with her husband and her in-laws for a long weekend. She'll be back Tuesday night.

Sadly, despite having had a very difficult week (hence no new posts), this means that I will have to be a good girl all weekend, with no lovely markings to show for it. I have literally been shaking all day. Really, all I want is to be the bad girl and be taken out of my head for a while. Instead, it's out of town I go. It will be wonderful and fantastic and I really do have lovely in-laws. It will be a great trip--it just won't be the trip over the knee or a desk right now, like I need.

Still, ocean air and please please please, a forested turn-off somewhere along the way, here I come! Have wonderful weekends and I'll try to be more diligent about writing when I get back.

The Monster at the End of This Post

Yahoo's homepage today features this photo of students in uniform with the question, "Are school uniforms harmful or helpful?" The link leads to Yahoo Answers, one of the most terrifying sources of information on the Internet. If you need a question answered by a twelve year old with an attitude and poor spelling, this is the place to go. Needless to say, most of the responses were against uniforms. A few adults chimed in to point out that school is a place to learn, but nobody seemed terribly impressed.

Now, if I was one of the tween or teen students responding, I, too, would have been against being made to wear a uniform, though being a spelling bee champion, I could have made my case more convincingly. In fact, I was part of an anti-dresscode rebellion during my first year of highschool. A male friend was sent home for wearing a skirt. It was the early nineties, after all. We made posters and passed out petitions, telling students that if the boys couldn't wear skirts, soon the girls wouldn't be allowed to wear pants. We won, to a degree. Boys won the rights to wear kilts. Good enough.

This is all so humorous in retrospect, considering I spent a good portion of my weekend putting together a schoolgirl outfit that I could get away with wearing in public. Friday night found the perfect plaid skirt, knee-length, with a slight A-line. I'd have to be ten years younger or thirty years older to have gotten away with pleats. A simple black sweater vest was next. Throw it on over any button-down shirt--instant schoolgirl/librarian (perfect, as I worked in a library in highschool, and still miss it terribly). Oddly enough, the white blouse was more difficult to find. I gave up on the long-sleeved version, especially as I already have a few, and found a very fitted one with adorable puffed sleeves. It could double as a milkmaid blouse, which is fine. Milkmaids need spankings too. New black Mary Janes on Saturday completed the ensemble. Naturally, I already had the white knee socks at home.

This is where Yahoo's question becomes problematic. Whether a school uniform is harmful or helpful really depends on the goal, doesn't it? If my goal was to get a 24-stroke caning with no warm-up, then I'd say the uniform was quite helpful, indeed. However, from a hands-on-my-ankles, tear-drops-on-the-floor perspective, I'd say the outfit was fairly harmful to my poor plump bottom. So it's a toss-up. I had a wonderfully terrible, or terribly wonderful, time of it. So, to sum up: Plaid skirt on sale at Macy's, seventy dollars on debit Mastercard. White schoolgirl-milkmaid blouse, thirty dollars on debit Mastercard. Mary Janes at a terrific price, seventeen dollars on debit Mastercard. A perfectly striped caning from the man who loves me? Priceless.

Halfway through the caning, I was put in the corner while my husband went to find my camera. We've never taken photos of me during or after a punishment before, mostly due to my own self-consciousness. He left such perfect marks, though, that he couldn't resist, and I wasn't exactly about to say no. Halfway through a caning could easily have turned into a third or a fourth of the way through. After we admired the pictures, he encouraged me to post them here. I never planned to share my bountiful bottom on this page, but I do want to show of his handywork.

See how much I love my marks, Sir? Let's hope they like 'em too.

P.S. For those not current on their Sesame Street literature, "The Monster at the End of this Book" was a classic Grover tome, in which the monster at the end of the book turns out to be Grover himself.

We Are Not Alone

I see spanked people.

They're everywhere. So are the people who spank them. Seriously. We are everywhere.

Yesterday, over at My Bottom Smarts, Bonnie's Sunday Brunch topic was about a fictional spanking interview show for television. Everyone offered realistic and interesting suggestions, thus begging the question, at least in the UK, why isn't there such a thing?

Today, on The Cherry Red Report, Dave offered up movie posters and some fun suggestions for spanking-based feature films. Why did cinematic spankings die with the golden age of film? In a culture run amok with "torture porn" like Hostel, Turistas, and the upcoming Elisha Cuthbert faux-snuff vehicle Captivity, what is so wrong with seeing a girl's bottom turned over a knee and spanked to a nice glowing hue? Would we really rather see her fingers cut off? If audiences are craving a bit of titillating violence, there has to be a better way, especially when it appears that we're all doing it behind closed doors anyway.

When I typed "spanking" into the search field at Cafe Press, the make-your-own-merchandise website, it pulled up 2,290 designs. There was a bit of BDSM, a bit of joking, and apparently quite a few Irish people who need to be spanked, but most of it was along the lines of "Spank Me" or "I Spank." The adorable Punishment Book pictured to the left is at Hell's Harlot . The "I Want a Spanking" image up above is there, too--on a little white tank top.

Apparently, OTK is not just an anagram, it's also a logo to be worn on hats, t-shirts, coffee mugs, mouse pads, drink coasters, thongs, etc. Here are two I found, again on Cafe Press alone:

There was also this darling warning at The Lipstick Sub:

Not to be outdone, another t-shirt advertised, "Slippery when slippered," which I thought was a nice nod to a true understanding of the fetish.

After finding all these sites on Cafe Press alone, I turned to my husband and announced, "I think we're in the majority." There was even a spanking image, albeit not a sexy one, on a rerun of The Simpsons last night. The more I look around, the more spanking is everywhere I look. Could it be we're all either sitting with sore bottoms or typing with sore hands? I'm on the look-out now.

It's funny--I think most of us kept our fascinations with spanking quiet for at least some parts of our lives. Those of who knew since we were children certainly couldn't talk about it until we were grown-up. Those who discovered later on were, I'm presuming, possibly overwhelmed by the discovery. All of us have had to face telling someone we care about what it is we like. I know that not everyone is understanding, but I think there are more of us out there than we realize. We are not alone.

Looking Glass Bruise

Sometimes a bruise appears on my forearm or my calf and I off-handedly wonder, "What did I bump into this time?" I tend towards clumsiness; I rarely notice when I walk into a table, or a bookcase, or a doorframe. Knowing this, I never startle when I find another yellow-edged, half-dollar sized spot of plum flesh. They are just marks to indicate that I've made it through another day, bruised but not beaten.

Why, then, is it that when I am beaten, when I know that I spent the night before receiving five dozen each of the strap and the cane, I shyly approach the full-length bathroom mirror, turn around, and gasp to find not only sore red patches and welty stripes, but also two mirrored and navy blue bruises, one on each side of my tender sit spot?

My mind always goes blank when I first see a bruise. Then I wonder which implement did it. In this case, most definitely the cane--or one of them, at least. We played with four different canes last night. Touching this morning's bruises, I remembered running to my husband after I'd checked myself out in the mirror. "These red spots right here," I began, taking his hands and touching them to the spots that became the twin marks. "Is my skin," I paused, "hard?" He grinned, his accomplishment blatant beneath his fingers, as he confirmed my suspicion. I should have known then that they would be bruises in the morning. But for some reason, I never think that I will bruise.

I love a bright pink bottom radiating out from the edges of white panties. I love red stripes. I even find the sight of little scarlet pinpricks of blood fascinating and sexy, but bruising is a part of spanking that I have not yet embraced. I have never looked at my bruises and thought them beautiful. In fact, I have a hard time looking at them and not thinking they are ugly.

When I first started reading spanking stories, I avoided anything that made me squeamish. If a schoolgirl story took a turn for the worse, that is, the girl was suddenly about to be caned or paddled heavily, I found a new tale to read. When I started seeing pictures and clips of spankings, I couldn't take screaming, I still couldn't take caning, and I could not take the sight of a bruise. "How can she let that happen?" I would cringe. In my mind, spanking models became Eastern European slaves, captured and tied to desks, beaten to a pulp and then some. Now that I read their blogs, I know that's not the case. Ten years ago, though, new to everything and without the resources to know the difference, the things that made me squeamish were the things I just knew I would never let happen to me.

The cane is now my favorite implement. When I stop crying and catch my breath, I like to ask for more. Those "Eastern European slaves" are brave and brilliant women, literate and well-aware of what they're doing. They brandish their bruises with pride and I admire them for it. So why do I cringe when I look over my shoulder today?

Part of it is simply knowing that if we want to play again this weekend, it's going to hurt more than it would if we were starting fresh. Part of it is instinctual--it's my body's reaction to witnessing its own weakness. I don't think a body likes to know that its human drive to defend itself has failed. The reason that resonates with me most, though, is that the bruise scares me because it is a harbinger. If I let a bruise like that happen, next time it might be larger and darker, and even more vivid and vicious the time after that. What makes me squeamish anymore? What are those things that I won't let happen to me?

This is my world now. I want to know every dark crevice. I want to be taken beyond my limits, to allow my husband to reach beyond his and mine. These two little bruises taunt me. "This is only the beginning," they tell me. The woman writing this is excited to know what comes next. The more I think about it, the more I want darker bruises and longer-lasting welts, and I want to be punished for wanting those things. What makes this so exhilarating, though, is the little girl inside me who is absolutely terrified. She's the one looking at the bruises, touching them daintily and declaring "Ouch" to her own reflection. Her lower lip trembles. "I must have been a very bad girl," she thinks.

The third party in the mix, my husband, who loves me as both woman and child and calls me "young lady" to keep me balanced somewhere in between, will surely read this and I know what he's going to think. "Are you questioning the bruises I gave you, young lady?" I picture him asking. As this little schoolgirl shakes her head "No" and this brazen woman grins and nods her head "Yes," I know that neither answer matters. He's teaching me to love my bruises. Until I do, I'll be a very bad girl, indeed.

Earning My Stripes: A Dream Allegory

Some days I feel like this little piggy in the picture, adopted by tigers, trying to earn my quite literal stripes, all the while thinking that at some point soon, I am going to be devoured. I meant to write last night, but ran out of time. That post, which is still to come, would have been about the fiction I am now writing. I've given up trying to write straight fiction and have realized that if the subject of spanking has me writing again, then perhaps I should run with it in my fiction as well. Of course, I'm struggling a bit, and so I was hoping to sort it out in text.

Since I didn't get to write about spanking, I dreamed about the spanking world instead. But this wasn't a playful dream in which my bottom was bared. No, I dreamed about all of us and our blogs, in which we existed like exhibits at a zoo. Some of the exhibits were large and lush--those belonged to the more established personalities and writers. My exhibit was small and new, but clean, with a little plaque with the name "Abby" on it.

At this spanking zoo, one particular girl had a beautiful, tropical exhibit near mine. She had tiger stripes. She was planning a costume party (a strange activity for a tiger, but this is dream logic) and I was the Cinderella of the tale, wanting terribly to go to the ball. Then, to my absolute bliss, she invited me!

Mysterious dream things occurred; time passed. Briefly, there was an octopus. Then it was the day of the ball. All of the girls wore amazing satin dresses with detailed backsides--intricate beading, lace, and, of course, little ties that could fix the hem of the dress to the waist, since this was, after all, a costume ball for the animal people of the spanking zoo. I, however, had no dress. The tiger girl, in a sumptous cream confection, offered to help me. We found a costume closet at the back of the ballroom, filled with the strange outfits you might find in the costume closet of a college theater arts department. I could have dressed as Puck, or Dogberry, or an Elizabethan nurse. I could have worn the uniform of a Confederate Civil War soldier. But the only dress we could find that was appropriate was sage green, made from wallpaper fabric. The sleeves wouldn't stay up over my shoulders and the zipper wouldn't go up over my bottom. It didn't have any of the features that all the other girls' dresses had. So I attended the ball, but my dress kept falling off. Everyone kept saying I ought to be punished for wearing such a silly dress, but because my dress wasn't as fun as everyone else's, no one wanted to do the actual punishing.

I don't think anyone is really looking at me that way. I've felt nothing but accepted here. Maybe it's just that it's been eight days since my last spanking, or that I got writer's block this weekend as I came close to the scene that up until that point I had been so excited to write. Maybe it's just that I'm not getting as much time to write as I'd like. Or maybe it's that little girl inside me who never felt like she fit in, and she's just so scared that now that she's fitting in, it's going to be taken away somehow.

Or maybe I was just overtired and the forward I'd been sent about a mama tiger who adopted orphaned piglets became this distorted brain debris. And what was up with the octopus? I think this little piggy just needs her little pinkish-white bottom to be covered in tiger stripes so she can go on to think about other things. Other things on the same subject, of course.