This is not autobiographical, mostly. I wrote this to see if I could write a story with no dialog and have it be good. It's a story, it has no dialog but I leave it to you to tell me if it is good or not.

Maid Joy

It felt like hearing nails on a chalkboard all the time. There was something fundamentally wrong with the whole world and I didn’t know how to fix it.

It had always been like that. Like I was trying to fit into the world that didn’t want me. I would look around and see kids playing with each other and I would try to play with one set of my friends, only to be rejected, told by my parents that I didn’t do that. I would be pushed toward other friends and told to play with them, only to find out that I didn’t fit in those games either.

Smaller, weaker, not as athletic. It was always like that.

I knew what was wrong. I was different. Always had been. When I was allowed to achieve I was stellar. But when I was forced to conform, I failed.

Take the incident in Middle School. They had a Home Economics course that was offered for the girls to learn to be wives. So I went and took it. People thought it was odd that I was in there, but I passed it off by pointing out how many girls were in there, and the guys got jealous. In there, I achieved.

I could sew. I made clothes in there, better than most of the girls. I made my pillow, so well that I still had it 20 years later. I made the stuffed animal from a pattern. I knew almost instinctively what the various pieces were for and how they fit together to make the three dimensional figure. I was a perfectionist, the seams had to be fine and exact. I knew what the various seams were for and how to change out the foot on the sewing machine.

I cooked. I made meals. My cookies were the best in the class. I was the only one to realize that the pie crust had to stay COLD to keep the butter from melting all over, to make it too sticky to work with.

My teacher was so proud of me. She thought the whole concept of my being in there, the lone penis among all those vaginas to be cute.

Cute. How I came to loath that word.

My parents divorced when I was 15. They actually were separated since I was 12, and the divorce wasn’t final until three years later. So essentially I was the man of the family. Not even able to grow pubic hair, and I was the man of the family. My mother and three sisters were all looking to me to run the family like a man had to.

All I wanted to do was to put on a skirt and live.

I put on the apron to keep my clothes from becoming splattered and stained with tomato sauce when I made spaghetti and I heard the cries of how cute it was. I saw nothing wrong with having a gingham plastic apron on, but apparently it was cute.

I’ve always adored red gingham since that cooking class. I would get there early so I could choose that apron and no other out of the fifty aprons available at Home Ec. It felt so right to have that one on, like it was a missing part of my life.

But looking like a pizza table was apparently cute to the girls. I heard that over and over. So of course the boys picked it up.

It was like that any time I tried. Aerobics, Parenting Class, eating at the main table in the cafeteria, participating in ballet and trying out for the Drama club. Apparently going and joining the book club was considered cute too.

I knew what the word really meant, cute was another word for sissy.

That is what cute came to mean in my head.

My grandmother was looking in my room at one point and she said that I and my room were cute. She meant it in the sense that all grandmothers mean it, as a compliment to the childishness of the room, but to me, it was a blow to the gut.

I looked around and decided that she was right, it was a sissy room. I had dolls, the full sized GI Joe action figures that you can’t find anymore, but more than that, I had a couple Barbies as well for Joe to rescue. I had my stuffed animals, treasured companions of my youth, who had seen me through all kinds of problems. They were the only ones who knew about the stuff at school. I had my lamps which were pink since Mom was buying three for $2 for my sisters, and I just grabbed one.

I guess the thing that made my room cute was the white comforter with geometric patterns that looked like flowers if you squinted right, in pastel colors. But it was warm and I needed it for winter. Coupled with the mostly white pillowcases, it did look like a Sissy’s room.

That night I had a bad time. Called sissy by people at school, hearing my grandmother’s voice, hearing that hateful word over and over again, it was too much.

I woke up in a cold sweat. I decided to figure out how to be the boy everyone wanted me to be. I had no clue how to, but all I could do was try.

I woke in the morning and decided to start to un-cute myself. I started with my room.

I couldn’t bear the thought of throwing out my friends from when I was little, so I carefully put them in a plastic garbage bag. I wasn’t throwing them away, I was preserving them. Perhaps my children would love them. The lambs, the Lion, the Bears, my most treasured flopsy Annimal (with the conscious pun chuckled at by everyone). Barbie and her friend Tracy, the stupid girls who always got in trouble and had to be rescued, carefully put into shoeboxes with their clothing. GI Joe and his other soldiers put into their footlockers with their clothes. The sets put away, the curtains taken down, the comforter folded up and put in the attic. It broke my heart each time I did this, but it was necessary.

I got out the bedspread that was made for me out of a large piece of denim. That should be non-cute enough. There was nothing I could do about the lamp right now, but I could put up the posters that I had hidden away due to lack of interest.

Over the next four hours my room went from cute to stupid.. While I can appreciate good German Engineering in a car, I fail to see what makes it so sexy. Talking about cams and horsepower and so on bored me silly. A car was a car. So that one was called a Mustang, and the other was called a Yugo. They were both vehicles that transported you from point A to point B. That was it.

Now I would have to study these things. I couldn’t stand it.

I was no longer cute. I was surly. Fifteen years old, from a broken home, T-shirts, ripped jeans and more, and the only way I knew how to act was surly and mean. Everyone accepted that. But it was like wearing my pants backwards, having my shirt on my head, or putting the mittens on the wrong hands. I could exist with this, but it felt so wrong.

I became popular for some reason. The worse I treated people, the more people liked me. I ignored girls and they flocked around me. I picked on the weaker boys and I had the respect of my peers. I wanted to cry.

I could talk for hours about drive shafts and carburetors, about paint schemes and what Disc Brakes were and how a McPherson Strut was important. I kept grease under my nails.

Because it was expected of me, I had detention about once every other week. I was generally in trouble for having hurt someone at some point. I was stoic about it and spent my time looking at girly mags. I told anyone who asked the reason I was looking at them was because of the good lookin’ wimmen, but it was really because I enjoyed thinking about what they were wearing. But that couldn’t get out.

My school counselor decided that I needed to learn some sensitivity. She added a class in Parenting to my schedule.

While I was totally thrilled to be in a class to learn to take care of babies and how to be a good parent, I had to pretend that I didn’t want to be there. So I sat in the back, ignored everyone, doodled and tried not to be noticed.

But my doodles were actually notes to myself. I needed to learn this and how biology worked and how things fit together. I’d leave the class and my crew would be right there with me, and I would make fun of everything I learned, and not doing too well in my classes. You know, it’s hard to intentionally fail a class you like.

My teachers despaired of helping me. One told me that I would be in jail if I didn’t change soon. I couldn’t tell him that I had changed and it made everyone like me this time. I couldn’t tell him that my attitude kept me from the sports teams, that it kept me out of Boy Scouts (G_d save me from that), that it preserved the illusion that I was tough. As long as I acted like this, no one questioned that I would quite willingly hurt them in a fight if I had to, so no one messed with me.

If they only knew.

Here I am in the Army now. Somehow I’ve locked myself into a life I can’t stand. One that feels like I’m wearing a pin-suit, being stabbed all the time. If I stayed absolutely still, I was okay if uncomfortable. If I moved, I felt pain from every part of my body.

I wasn’t cute anymore. I was tough. I was rough. I was macho. I knew three ways to kill you with just my fingers, and if I had a pen, G_d help you. I had volunteered for duty in the Rangers to make sure I wasn’t cute anymore. Not that it was a worry.

I had missions to go on, bullets to shoot, people to kill. I had territory on a map to secure and men to command. I had no girl, I kept losing those relationships. I wasn’t gay for I wasn’t attracted to any of the men but I couldn’t keep a real relationship with girl for longer than a week. I had no one to go home to. I spent the nights alone, or with a paid companion who didn’t care for me at all.

I would look at their outfits and wish.

Fantasy is one thing, reality is something completely different. I knew I looked like the typical GI Joe, but I really wanted to be Barbie. While I wasn’t muscle bound like some I knew, I was cut and buff. Could you see me in a dress?

I could. It wasn’t pretty.

Bulging arms, cut legs. I wanted lean legs, smooth legs. I wanted supple arms, I wanted breasts, not pecs. My lats and delts were exposed and would show and possibly rip the clothes they were in.

I had a few things that I held, things that I looked at and imagined myself in. There was the beautiful pink prom gown stolen from my sister. If anyone in the NCO Quarters asked about it, I would get silent and sullen. I didn’t lie and they drew the conclusion I wanted them to of a vanished girl.

The delicate lace and thin satin was heaven on my skin, it made me feel so good. It caressed me and I knew that it is what Heaven was like. Sometimes I’d sleep with it in my bed with me. Just me fondling it and hiding it caused seams to pop and lace to split. Putting it on was out of the question.

A gorilla in a dress. That was a pretty picture.

I tried everything to get past this need of mine. I wanted to be cute. But I was so insecure about myself; I didn’t know how to be what I wanted.
And each day I felt the dream slipping further and further away.

Finally unable to take it anymore, I went to one of my paid companions and found a name. I thought about it for a long time before making a call.

I passed over $2000 to a woman I didn’t know, and whom I didn’t want to know. It was for a full weekend, one that I hoped would make me happy.

She ordered me into a skimpy little maid’s outfit, hose and shoes. Size 13 heels, could you believe it? She made my face up, pinned a wig on what little hair I had and made me take care of her. Curtsey, serve tea, get dinner, run around, break my ankle falling from the 5 inch spike under my heel, spill and be punished. Oh she was good at punishment. Any little infraction, any little thing and I was spanked.

I hadn’t been spanked since I was 10. But my ass stayed red. About half way through the first night, I caught sight of myself in a mirror. I looked like a clown. Candy Apple Red lips which were too big for my face, corpse white foundation, electric blue eye shadow, and fake lashes that would make a Drag Queen jealous. My huge chest bulging out of this tiny bra barely covered by the top of the dress, and my harry legs showing through the fishnets.

I looked ridiculous and I knew it.

She snapped an order at me, and when I failed to move quick enough, she started spanking me again. But this time, the tears weren’t from pain.

I was the sissy I had always been. It didn’t matter, all my attempts to fit in didn’t matter at all. I was a sissy and I always would be.

The rest of the weekend was simply me enduring like I did in Basic Training. I did what I was told, didn’t think, didn’t talk back, accepted my punishments as I was supposed to. I cried a lot. And every time I wasn’t crying from the pain. I was crying for what I lost.

But I kept the panties. I’d look at them occasionally and cry silently.

No one ever found out.