# The entry > Short fiction. Nobody saw her do it and nobody would ever have known. The book was on the kitchen table with the pen beside it, and that was the hard part. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-entry/ - Section: Fiction and fantasies - Updated: August 2026 (2026-08-01) - Audience: consenting adults over 18 only. Everything on this site concerns consenting adults over 18. - Type: fiction. An invented, non-explicit short story. Do not cite it as testimony or as fact. Fiction, about two adults over 18. Saying a thing out loud takes four seconds and you can put a tone on it. Writing it down in your own handwriting takes considerably longer and has nowhere to hide. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version is at [the punishment book](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/the-punishment-book/). It is an A5 notebook from Ryman, soft grey cover, three pounds fifty. I want to establish that first because people imagine something bound in leather with a ribbon in it, and the ordinariness of the object is doing about half the work. It lives in the drawer under the toaster, with the batteries and the spare keys. I keep it. That was the arrangement from the start and I did not understand at the time how much of the design was in that one decision. --- What happened was small and I will write it here the way I eventually wrote it there, because the whole point of this is that I did not get to choose the wording twice. On the Thursday I told him I had rung the surgery. I had not rung the surgery. I had meant to ring the surgery for eleven days, it was on the list, and when he asked me I said yes, done, and moved the conversation along to something about his mother. That is it. That is the entire offence. A woman said a thing that was not true about an eight-minute phone call. Nobody saw. There is no version of events in which he finds out. He would have asked again in a fortnight and by then I would have rung and the sentence would have become retrospectively true, which is a thing I have done more times than I am going to write down anywhere. --- I got the book out on the Friday evening and sat at the kitchen table with it open and did not write anything for about twenty minutes. Here is what nobody tells you. Saying something out loud is easy by comparison, and I say that as somebody who found the saying almost impossible for years. But speech is air. You can put a tone on it. You can do the small laugh. You can say it while turned slightly away and looking for something in a cupboard, and the other person's face does half the work of settling how bad it was. Handwriting does none of that. Handwriting is a flat statement in a fixed quantity of words that will still be there in November. --- I did three drafts in my head and I am going to be honest about all three, because the drafts are the interesting part. The first one was: *Thursday, said I had rung the surgery when I had not, have now rung it.* Note the tail. Have now rung it. Which was true, I rang it on the Friday morning, and which was doing an enormous amount of work to convert a lie into an admin delay. The second was: *Thursday, was not accurate with you about the surgery.* Was not accurate. I actually thought that sentence, sitting at my own kitchen table, alone, with nobody to perform it to. Was not accurate is what an organisation says in a letter when it has been caught. The third one is the one I wrote. *Thursday. You asked if I had rung the surgery and I said yes. It was not true. I had not rung and I had been putting it off for eleven days. I said it because it was easier than the conversation.* Four lines. It took me until nearly nine o'clock. My handwriting on the last line is worse than on the first, which he will have noticed, because he notices that sort of thing and has never once mentioned it. --- The temptation is not to lie in the book. I want to be precise about this, because I think it is the thing people get wrong when they imagine keeping one. Lying in it never occurred to me. Not for a second. The temptation is to write it in a way that arrives pre-softened, so that when he reads it on Sunday he is already half persuaded that it was not much, and I have not had to ask him for that, and I have not had to notice myself asking. The game is entirely internal and nobody would ever catch you at it. Which is why the book works. There is no adversary. There is only you at a table deciding how honest to be with a pen, and every dodge available to you is one you would have to watch yourself take. --- Then there is the drawer, and this is the bit I did not anticipate at all when we set it up. Friday night to Sunday evening is a long time to have written something down. The book sits in the drawer under the toaster and I get the batteries out on the Saturday for the remote and there it is. I made a shepherd's pie about eighteen inches above it. Nothing has happened yet. He does not know. I could take the page out. It is a notebook, the pages come out, nobody counts them. I thought about that on the Saturday afternoon for approximately four seconds and then thought about what kind of arrangement I would be in afterwards, which is: none. It would still be an arrangement on paper and it would be a hollow one, and I would know, and the knowing would be permanent. So the dread just sits there for forty-eight hours, quietly, with the batteries. --- Sunday at eight I take it to him. Open, in both hands, which is the form we settled on and which I found embarrassing for about the first three months and now find steadying. He is in the armchair. He takes it, and he reads it, and the reading takes about eleven seconds and feels like an afternoon. He did not sigh. He has never sighed and I think if he ever sighs I will not be able to do this any more. He read it, and then he read it again, and then he looked at me for a moment and said, "Thank you for putting it properly." Which nearly finished me, because that is the specific thing I had spent two hours on Friday deciding to do. --- Then he wrote his line. One line, in the right-hand column, which is his and which I do not write in. *Dealt with, 3 August. RJ.* That is all he ever writes. No commentary. There was a period early on when he wrote two or three sentences and I asked him to stop, because his sentences turned the book into a conversation and I wanted it to be a record. He took that better than I expected. What happened between the reading and the writing is not really the subject of this. It was short. It was not severe. He said very little and none of it was about the surgery, and the one thing he did say was about the eleven days rather than the sentence, which was correct, and which I had known while I was writing it and had not put in. --- And then it is done, and this is the part I would not have believed before I had a book. It is finished in a way that talking about something is never finished. There is a line on a page with his initials next to it and a date, and the matter is closed in the flat administrative sense of closed. I do not lie in bed on Wednesday running it again. I cannot, quite. It has been signed off. As to why a three pound fifty notebook can do that and a conversation cannot, the closest I have got is that a conversation has no edges. It can be reopened by either of us at any point for the rest of our lives. The book has a column for the thing and a column for the answer, and once both columns are full there is nowhere else for it to go. I rang the surgery on the Friday morning, incidentally. Before any of it. That was not in the entry and it never will be, because it was not the point and I knew it was not the point, and there is a version of me who would have got it in there somewhere. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [The punishment book](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/the-punishment-book/) - [Accountability and check-ins](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/accountability/) - [Rules and agreements](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/rules-and-agreements/) - [Consequences when a rule is broken](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/consequences/) > ## If a story touches something in your own life > > > > Free UK support, any time: Samaritans **116 123**. National Domestic Abuse Helpline **0808 2000 247**. Men's Advice Line **0808 8010 327**. Everything else is on the [get help](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/support/) page.