Flash Fiction Friday - Fitting Room

[EDITOR'S NOTE] I feel I've been disingenuous because when I wrote the commentary I thought I'd made the cuts to which I refer. But it turns out Blogger ate them. So I've recut it the way I remember having cut it in the past, but it was a second cut, and thus everyone who read this might have scratched their heads a little trying to figure out what the fuck I was going on about since none of the cuts seemed to have been made and all three were still too long. Sorry about that.

The best thing about Sarah was that she never wore a bra. The refusal to wear panties either was a bonus, certainly, but only after you got to know her. Going braless was something even the uninitiated could enjoy.

Of course, as she backed me into a corner, her hands ripping at my belt, the lack of panties was more immediately noticeable. I noticed mostly because my cock had no impediment to sliding into her slick cunt. But after the initial formalities my hands sought out her bounteous breasts, sliding up to cup them, and her policy on bras came back to my mind like a shot.

A strangled cry escaped my lips and I grunted, “Today, of all days, you decide to wear one?”

She stopped her backward thrusting for a moment and giggled softly. “I have a job interview,” she gasped, unable to talk normally, as she began cumming, hard, on me. Can you blame me if, after that, I forgot about undergarments completely?

---

After hours and they were at it again. It had been weeks, yet they never seemed to tire of it, and I didn’t tire of it either. Security jobs have their perks.

I wondered as I watched, hand on cock, if they realized that there was a camera. Sometimes they fucked out of view, but lately she had been steering him into the corner opposite the camera, her gorgeous tits rocking as he railed her from behind. I sometimes wished there was sound, so I could hear the strangled cry, the grunt, the slapping of flesh.

I was all set to cum myself when she raised her head and, looking directly into the lens, winked and smiled, vacant but inviting. She knew I was there, or at least that someone was.

Other men might have taken the wink and treasured it alone. I stood, cock sticking from my pants, and rushed to the fitting room. And they welcomed me.

---

He leads me through crowds, into a smaller space, and then, with the creak of a door, a smaller one yet. The hum of people is around us, but distant. Private, yet public as well.

His hands slip my pants down, and his mouth presses against mine. Our movements echo in the buzz of a fluorescent light. I feel his fingers slip into me, stroking, teasing out wetness, and then he pulls me back against him. Orienting him by touch I raise my hips and sink down onto him.

Soon he picks up the pace, and I can’t hear anything but the rush in my ears, even the soft sounds of sex obscured. My strangled cry as he makes me cum sounds muffled, distant.

And then it grows lighter; my blindfold must have slipped off. And we’re in a fitting room, the door is open, and a startled clerk is staring at us in shock, and I don’t care.

---

I don't want to give the impression that I only enjoy pictures I submit, or that I know in advance that they'll be the ones picked; I give PB a (fairly large, actually) number of pictures for his perusal and possible use, and leave it at that. I enjoy erotic pictures and I come across more than a few which I think might spark creativity in storytelling, and it'd be a shame for me to keep them to myself. But I did like this picture. Maybe I'll be the only one, but to me it felt like it had immediacy, an unrehearsed, un-posed quality about it.

I don't know if they're actually in a fitting room (or dressing room, call it what you will) but that's the way it looked to me from first glance. Strangely enough, the first story really didn't have much of anything to do with fitting rooms, but it was about clothes, so I guess it fit the general theme. I started with the first line, then I noticed that the woman did indeed have a bra on, not easy to spot but I believe actually there. It's tough to tell, which is why at the beginning I didn't see it, but I think it's there now. So the story kind of unfolded in the same way. Basically, I just wanted an excuse to write the first paragraph, because that's pretty much the way I feel, in the Maslo's Heirarchy of Not-Wearing-Undergarment-ness.

Then number two began as a straight story about watching two sales associates fuck in the dressing room, but I decided that, if I were one of them, I'd know there was a camera, and if I were the security guard, I'd take it as an invitation rather than as an acknowledgment, and if both of those things happened, I wanted a happy ending, damn it.

Then number three began as straight sensation, but I deleted an early draft and mixed in a bit of plot because it seemed like the best thing to do. It's hard to write sentence fragments for so long; at least it is for me, but then I'm a grammar Nazi. I did make it present tense, something I don't often do, because that helped keep the feeling of the early draft without being the early draft.

Now, there's a funny story attached to all of this, which is that I thought that the limit was 180. I actually had to cut a lot to get down to 180, and then suddenly I realized it was 160, and 20 more words had to go from each of them. It's amazing what you can chop from something and keep the basic intent, actually, and I think, because I'm all verbose today, that I'd like to give a few examples. This is not me telling you how to write. This is me giving you another peek at how I write.

For instance, the phrase in the third, "Soon he picks up the pace..." originally read, "At first he’s slow, but soon he picks up the pace..." Now, in a longer-form story, I might have left it (on the other hand, it might be excessive redundancy) because it emphasizes certain things. But picking up the pace implies that it wasn't picked up before, so the essential meaning is the same if I cut it, so I did.

On the other hand, the first one has a lot of extraneous words. I could have cut down on the first paragraph a lot, saying it differently, more succinctly. But I really wanted to keep that tone and those words, while superfluous to plot or setting, do give tone. Actually, the first one was the hardest to cut down; some extra description went rather than losing the tone. It's a choice, not a rule; I could have gone the other way and cut tone and left description, but honestly, the vignette didn't seem that interesting as a point of plot. I suppose I could have just told it like a joke, "So, there's the girl who never wears a bra, and then one day I'm fucking her and she's got a bra on, and she says it's because she had a job interview." But that's not really all that appealing. Telling the joke did teach me one thing though; it's funnier (and sexier) if she says she has a job interview rather than that she had one. At least it is to me.

In the third, the original read, "My strangled cry as he makes me cum sounds from a distance." Actually, it read that way after I tweaked it trying to get what had been more than 180 down to 180; if I'd had unlimited words, it would probably have read, "Even my strangled cry as he makes me cum sounds distant, as if through water rushing over me, filling my ears with the physical pulse of orgasm." Or something like that; that's still pretty crappy. But anyway, "sounds from a distance" is crap. And I would have let it stand had I not had to go back and cut. It's not always a bad thing to edit. I must keep telling myself this.

The second was mostly small cuts, a word here, a word there, no real phrase cuts. I have to discipline myself ahead of time because otherwise I'd start telling this character's back-story, how he wound up working the late shift at a crappy department store, how this store came to install cameras in the fitting rooms (which can't be common practice, otherwise there'd be lawsuits), etc. and so on. So I'd already minimalized it to the point that redundant words could go, but they were just single words or small phrases. I like "slap of flesh on flesh" as a phrase, but cutting the second "flesh" leaves the essential meaning unchanged.

There are warring impulses in my brain when it comes to things like this. On the one hand, I think that good writing isn't necessarily the use of as few words as possible, but on the other I tend to reject works that are flowery or excessively descriptive. I suppose it all depends on what one defines "possible" as. As a writer of fiction, I'm not writing technical specifications (which could all stand to be a lot less redundant in places); I'm writing something which is by nature perhaps more wordy than it needs to be just to drive along the story. I tend to ramble on the blog, but in a disciplined form I don't think I use way more words than necessary, at least. It's a tough line to draw. Having to "butcher" things to get them into a certain length is a good way to figure out priorities and "possible."

I said it previously, but I can't write Flash Fiction with no limit in mind and then just go back and cut it down to size. That's like taking a satellite photo of the earth and then cropping out everything but my face every time I want a self-portrait. I have to reign in my desires to write something longer, because while I'm okay with cutting verbiage when it gets too fruity, I'm less likely to want to cut major chunks, and that's the only way to get a 1000 words down to 100. You can't have ten paragraphs of 100 words each and just take 90 words out of each paragraph. You have to preserve some paragraphs and eliminate others completely. And that's more difficult that just sticking to the rules in the first place and writing something which might wind up being 200 when it needs to be 150. There's a big difference in style, tone, and plot between a 1000 word story and a 100 word one, at least in my process.

Okay, enough. I said I was feeling wordy, but I think I may have eaten a dictionary in my sleep. As the inimitable Groucho Marx once said, "You haven't stopped talking since I got in here; you must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle." Of course, he was saying it ironically, and... what? Oh, a phonograph needle is this... well, there used to be things called phonographs which played records, which recorded sounds via a... yes, like an iPod, only much larger and instead of mp3s, you'd put a record on the turntable and... right, like DJs use. Well, the needle is the... you know what, look it up. And while you're at it, look up Flash Fiction Friday, where there will be other contributions to the theme which don't involve anywhere near as much spouting off at the mouth. But fewer Groucho Marx quotes, so that's one thing I've got. Swordfish.