Punish Me, Please Me
Ashley Zacharias
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2010 Ashley Zacharias
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Contents
Forward
Betting on God
In Search of Master Exeter
Bless Me, Father, For I Have Sinned
The Middle Manager
Private Performance
Afterward
Forward
This is an anthology of short stories that I wrote in 2009 and 2010.
If these stories have a common thread, it is that all are about women who send themselves into a little, mundane hells-on-earth for a short time in order to improve their circumstance in some substantive way. One woman wishes to seize control of her father’s empire, another to relieve her oppressive boredom, another to protect her church, another to advance her career, and another to earn a university degree. These women may all be masochists to some degree, but their primary purpose is to gain something specific that they want.
While all of my stories may offend because of their kinky sexual content, each story may also offend because they depict various vocations in an unflattering light. An evangelistic minister is portrayed as a greedy man who fleeces his flock; a grade school teacher shown as being bored by an unchallenging profession; a Catholic priest as a potential pederast; a middle manager as ethically unprincipled; and an artist as naïve in expecting her audience to appreciate her work more.
If you want my apologies, I offer these. I’m sorry that I see my elderly parents sending money from their pensions to a wealthy television evangelist because he tells them that it will help them get into heaven. I’m sorry that my children had a few grade school teachers who were disinterested in doing their jobs properly. I’m sorry that the Catholic Church has spent so many years protecting a few evil priests, transferring them instead of defrocking them. I’m sorry that I spend so much of my career working for incompetent managers. I’m sorry that artists have canned their own shit and sold it as art.
But, like the characters in my stories, these are individual cases. I have known many sincere and ethical ministers; grade school teachers who were dedicated to their jobs; Catholic priests who devoted their lives to improving the world; managers who worked with their staff and resources to accomplish important goals; and artists who gave me profound experiences. I have not generalized from the individual characters in my stories to every minister, teacher, priest, manager, and artist. If you do so, then you do so of your own accord.
These stories are presented in the order in which they are written. I hope that my writing has improved enough during those two years that you, tolerant reader, can see a difference in the quality of the writing between the first and last story.
You may also notice another trend. As I wrote more, I became bolder. But what does “bolder” mean to a writer of kinky pornography who has always described bizarre sexual acts using the bluntest language possible? In my case, it means becoming self-assured enough to write less about the sex itself and more about the circumstances that lead up to it. In a nutshell, I became bold enough to try to give my readers more story than porn. You might even argue that the last story in this collection is hardly about sex at all.
I hope that you enjoy reading this collection of fantasies as much as I enjoyed writing them. And if even one wife gets so hot that she has to drop her ereader in the middle of a story and rush off to jump her husband’s bones, that would be wonderful.
Ashley Zacharias, 2011
Betting on God
The auditorium was filled to capacity; people who couldn’t find seats lined the walls at the back and side of the room. So many people had come to see the renowned atheist debate an even more renowned evangelist, yet the audience was coughing and shuffling their feet – a certain sign that the debate was failing to hold their interest.
Thomas Stone – “Dr. Stone” to his students, “Doubting Thomas” to the preacher standing behind the opposing podium – realized that he had to add spice to the debate right now. He stopped himself from droning on about the robust nature of scientific inquiry and executed a perfect verbal about face. “But all that aside, the bottom line is that it is better to believe that there is no God at all than to worship the evil being that is described in the Bible.”
Brother Jeremiah rose to the bait immediately. He pounded his podium with his fist and shouted, “Blasphemy will not win this debate. You present yourself as a man of logic, yet you are reduced to calling God names. I despair for your immortal soul.” The audience fell silent; the debate looked like it was going to be fun after all.
Dr. Stone shook his head. “I’m not simply calling God names; I’m referring to His actions as recorded in the Bible. You do believe the Bible, do you not?” This was a purely rhetorical question and Stone continued without waiting for an answer. “The Bible says that God ordered Abraham to kill his own son, Isaac. Abraham claimed that God stayed his hand at the last minute. Isn’t the truth obvious? When Abraham had his knife posed above the chest of his innocent son, he knew that he was about to commit an evil act. It was not God, but his own conscience that stayed his hand. It may have been the style in ancient times to call a man’s conscience ‘God’ but I think everyone in this room today would see it differently. If a good man thought that God had commanded him to commit an evil act, then he would have to conclude that God was evil. No evil being should be obeyed, whether He is called God or Satan. I say again, it is better to believe in your own conscience than in an evil God because, the final decision must always be a decision of conscience.”
Jeremiah shook his finger at Stone. “You are deliberately misinterpreting the story by omitting the lesson that God was teaching. He was testing Abraham’s faith. When Abraham showed that he trusted God even to the point of being willing to sacrifice his own son, God rewarded him by saving the boy. We are all tested by God. He made the story of Abraham exceptionally clear so that when we are tested in more subtle ways, we will recognize that He is doing the same to us. Every single day, I invite God to test my faith with equal severity.” He turned his eyes to heaven, and intoned, “Lord, please test my faith. Let me show you how I trust you completely. Lord, I dedicate my life and my daughter’s life to Your will.” He turned back to the audience, “I do not suffer the least fear that my Lord will abuse my trust. My daughter and I are safe in His hands.”
He nodded at a beautiful young woman wearing a conservative skirt and blouse in the first row. She stood, raised her clasped hands above her head and shouted, “Amen, father. Praise the Lord!” Jeremiah’s daughter, Susanna, was always present at his public appearances. She was a critical aspect of his brand identity; her face had featured prominently on his television program since she was an infant. Since turning twenty-one last year, she had been taking an even more prominent role in Brother Jeremiah’s ministry. Clearly she was being groomed to serve as the second-in-command, a role left vacant five years ago when her mother, Sister Ruth, was killed in a tragic, highly publicized automobile accident.
The audience applauded the woman’s support for her father. Stone suspected that most of the women were applauding the heroic way that she had borne the tragedy of her mother’s death and continued to maintain her mother’s memory. Most of the men in the audience were applauding her long blond hair and finely featured face; not to mention the full figure that her conservative-appearing clothing had be
en tailored to emphasize in a subtle way.
The preacher was wily; Stone wanted to call that tussle a draw but he knew that he had press harder or it would be a point lost for the side of reason. “Your problem is that Abraham’s situation was not unique in the Bible. God commanded others to commit similar evil acts with a different outcome. Surely you are familiar with the story of the Levite priest and his concubine in the Book of Judges. A Levite priest and his concubine are invited to spend the night with an old man and his daughter. A mob gathers outside his door, demanding that the priest be sent out so that they can sodomize him. Instead, the old man and priest offer the man’s virgin daughter and the priest’s concubine to the mob so that they can satisfy their lust by raping the women rather than the man. What’s God’s message there? That raping women is all right as long as it doesn’t involve homosexuality? And what happened? The concubine was given over to the mob and gang raped all night – raped to death – and her body left on the doorstep in the morning. Guess God forgot to stay the mob’s hand that night. Maybe He doesn’t like women who’ve been sold into slavery by their fathers as was the concubine. These are not unique stories. The Bible is filled with rapes, murders, slavery, wars, all in the name of God. I’d rather believe in men of conscience than in an all-powerful God who could stop these crimes with a twitch of his nose, but prefers to let evil rage rampant throughout his Holy lands.”
“Again, you are deliberately misinterpreting the lessons being taught. Those are not God’s actions. Those are the actions of men. Your ‘men of conscience’ raped that poor woman to death, not God. God gives us the gift of free will and tests us to see what we do with that gift. We don’t always pass the test. And when we don’t pass the test, we are the ones doing evil, not God.” Jeremiah thundered in his familiar powerful voice, “Read your bible a little more carefully, sir. In every story you cite, it is the conscience of men that failed God’s tests.”
“And you don’t think that is evil? A God who lets men do His dirty work for Him when He could stop it at any time?”
“What alternative do you propose? That He turn men into automatons? Oh, yes, I almost forgot. That’s exactly what you think men are. Just machines made of flesh and bones that have been shaped by evolution to do only those things that give them pleasure and avoid pain. I prefer God’s way, thank you very much.” The preacher grinned with satisfaction.
At that point, Dr. Stone had little choice but to launch into an explanation of natural selection and evolutionary psychology. Brother Jeremiah let him drone on without interruption; he knew how to give a scientist enough rope to hang himself. Within five minutes, the auditorium was again filled with the sound of coughing and shuffling feet. Stone had lost them again. He had to go back on the offensive. He abruptly wrapped up his explanation and shifted gears. “We have concrete evidence for the scientific view, you have no evidence for God whatsoever. Worse, for centuries, every time religious leaders have pointed to anything, from lightning striking a tree to the sun rising in the east to the complex structure of the human hand, as evidence of God, science has given us a better explanation that doesn’t need divine intervention. Science has learned so much that you have to deny evidence that we can all see with our own eyes, like dinosaur bones or geological strata, just to give God a place in the world. Open your eyes to the truth and the world will be better for it. Scientific explanations tell us how to solve our problems. Religious dogma asks us to keep suffering in the dark.”
The preacher had to defend himself against that charge. “I see the same world that you see, but I see God’s hand at work throughout the whole world, the same way this podium is proof of the carpenter’s hand. This podium, this room, this building didn’t assemble itself by random pieces of wood falling together in a chance arrangement. The world itself proves the existence of the Creator. Your sin is denying the evidence that you see all around you. Science prides itself in seeing a leaf here and a branch there, but fails to see the forest.”
Jeremiah was trying to lure Stone into delivering another long, boring monologue about the details of evolution. Stone knew that he would lose the audience permanently if he got sucked into that trap a third time.
When he glanced down at the front row, Susanna caught his eye and smiled with the brilliance of an Easter dawn. Damn, she was a beautiful woman. And she was doing her best to distract him. He almost lost his train of thought and had to force himself to look away from the siren.
Concentrating his gaze on Jeremiah, he realized that logic wouldn’t win here, entertainment would. Instead of leaping to defense of evolution, he stayed on the offensive. “I don’t need a whole world to convince me of the existence of God. All I need is for him to pop up for a few seconds in person and say, ‘Here I am.’ I believe that you exist because you’re willing to stand right there in front of me. I believe that every person in this room exists because they all are right here.” He gestured at the audience and, reflexively, glanced down at Susanna again.
She winked at him with one of her big, deep blue eyes.
He almost lost it, but, with a heroic effort, looked away and kept talking, “If God exists and He’s all-powerful and He wants me to believe in Him, all He has to do is walk onto this stage as a concrete, physical presence, wave His hand, and say, ‘Hi, I’m here,’ and I’ll be an instant believer. In fact, I guarantee that every single person here will believe in God if he just shows up in person for a few seconds.” Stone looked around theatrically. “Well? Where is He? We’re all waiting.”
Jeremiah was not intimidated. He laughed deeply and sincerely. “God did appear in person and speak to us. Don’t you remember? That person was Jesus Christ. Jesus is all the proof that any man needs.”
“Not good enough,” Stone said. “Jesus was a great man, but he was born of a woman like any other man. He ate and slept like every other man. He bled when he was wounded and died like any other man.
“The world was filled with men claiming to be the Messiah. Jesus simply happened to be more persuasive than the others. Jesus was a great man but he is not evidence of God. He never said, himself that he was God. Or the Son of God. Read your Bible. He never made that claim. That was an invention of his followers decades after he was dead and buried.”
That got the preacher’s attention. He flushed with anger and shouted, “You deny that Jesus was God and you will burn in hell. The Bible tells us that he was the Son of God and he performed miracles to prove it.”
Stone answered fire with cool reason. “Probably not. You are aware that no one who wrote the New Testament saw him perform any miracles. None of them ever met Jesus in person. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote their gospels decades after Jesus died. They were merely relating stories that had been passed down to them through oral tradition. Actually, most of Jesus’ life and death was taken from much earlier pagan mythologies, including the virgin birth, rising from the tomb, the whole shebang. We have earlier writings of other people performing every miracle that the gospels say Jesus did. It’s a lot like saying that the latest Batman movie is the truth and that all the earlier movies, comics and television shows were not.”
Now he was really hitting hard; Brother Jeremiah was furious. “Comparing Jesus to a comic book character insults us all. You will burn in hell if you do not repent. I pray for your soul.”
“Don’t bother praying for my soul. Pray for God to step onto this stage and introduce himself. That’s all it would take to make me religious. Just ask him to come here as real as you and me, shake my hand and introduce himself, and I’ll believe that he exists just as surely as I believe that this podium exists.” Stone knocked on his podium to emphasize his point.
Jeremiah looked at Stone with a wily expression in his eye. “No you won’t. If God appears here in the form of a man, then you’ll dismiss Him the same as you dismissed Jesus a minute ago. If He appears here in his true form, the power of his appearance would strike you dead on the spot, along with everyone else in this audito
rium. If He appears as a burning bush or in some other symbolic form, then you’ll dismiss that as a parlor trick. You don’t have an open mind. You are so fixed in your disbelief that there’s no way that God can appear on this stage that would convince you.”
“Not true. I would be willing to accept any violation of known natural physical laws as evidence of a supernatural event as long as the phenomenon is clear and unambiguous and as long as safeguards are in place to rule out trickery or accident. There is a standing prize of a million dollars that will be awarded to anyone who can reliably demonstrate a supernatural event. Unambiguous evidence of God would certainly qualify.”
“What is money when a man’s soul is at risk? You can keep your money. All I ask is that you give your soul to God. I propose that if God reveals his presence through a sign tonight that you’ll submit to God’s will. You’ll come to my church, be baptized, and attend Christian service weekly. Will you allow Him to save your immortal soul?”
Stone was taken aback. He had not expected to have to risk his time and reputation on the outcome of some spurious test of God’s existence. He looked at the audience and saw a thousand eyes watching for his response. He was trapped. “As long as the test is clear and cannot be won by trickery, I’ll accept your challenge. But what if you fail? Are you willing to give up your faith and deny God’s existence?”
“It is against my religion to risk my immoral soul, but I’ll offer you what you value more – my daughter. I have seen you looking upon her with lust in your eye. As Abraham offered to sacrifice his son, as Lot offered his daughters to the Sodomites, as the old man you mentioned in Judges offered his daughter to the mob, so I’ll offer my virgin daughter for your base and vile use if God does not answer my prayers.” Jeremiah considered it a coup to get away with describing the atheist as ‘base’ and ‘vile.’ That was an association that would stick in the audience’s mind.
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