# Two hundred lines > Short fiction. The same sentence, two hundred times, in a notebook at a kitchen table. Her hand goes at sixty; something else starts at a hundred and ten. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-lines/ - Section: Fiction and fantasies - Updated: November 2026 (2026-11-01) - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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. Nobody is hit in this story. It takes two hours and eleven minutes and it is the only thing that has ever actually worked on me. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version is on [lines and impositions](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/lines-and-impositions/). The sentence was: *I will say when something is wrong at the time it is wrong.* Thirteen words. I have written them one thousand four hundred times across seven occasions and I could write them now with my eyes shut, in the dark, on a wall. --- We chose it together, which is the part that makes it work and the part that makes it unbearable. My failing is not dramatic. I do not shout. I do not storm off. What I do is say that everything is fine when it is not fine, and then be quietly furious about it for six days, and then produce the grievance eventually in a form that is completely unrecognisable to the person receiving it. I have done this in every relationship I have had. Steve, who I had been living with for three years by then, had suggested a spanking. I said no, and I want to be clear about why, because it was not squeamishness. A spanking would have been over in fifteen minutes and I would have felt cleansed and I would have done it again in a fortnight. I know myself. That trade is too good. So I said: make me write it. And he said how many, and I said, ambitiously, two hundred, because I had no idea what two hundred meant. --- An A4 notebook, ruled, from the Co-op. A biro, not a nice pen, because the nice pen would have made it a project. The kitchen table, seven o'clock on a Sunday evening, no radio, no phone, and him in the front room with the door open. Lines one to twenty were nothing. Almost pleasant. Good handwriting, the letters neat, a little flourish on the ampersand until I remembered there is no ampersand. Somewhere around thirty the sentence stopped being a sentence. That is a real thing and it happens fast. It goes from a piece of meaning to a shape your hand makes. *I will say when something is wrong.* By line forty it was a fence. Verticals, loops, the word *wrong* with its long tail that I started to dread because it took a fraction longer than the others. --- Line sixty is where the hand goes. Nobody tells you about the hand. There is a muscle in the web between the thumb and the first finger and I did not know it existed until that Sunday. By seventy it was aching. By eighty it had a pulse. And my writing degraded, which was the thing I minded most, and I could not stop it. The letters got taller and looser. The line began to wander uphill. Around line eighty-five I wrote *somethign* and stopped dead, and looked at it for a long moment, and had a genuine internal argument about whether to cross it out or leave it. I left it. I want that on the record because I know exactly what it cost me. It is still in the notebook. Line eighty-five, on the second page, with the letters transposed and the whole line sloping. --- Ninety to a hundred and ten was the hating. I hated the sentence. I hated its stupid smug phrasing, the primness of *at the time it is wrong*, the fact that it is unarguable. I hated that I had written it. I hated that he was in the front room and had not looked in for forty minutes and that the television was not even on in there, which meant he was sitting in silence, which meant he was doing this too, which was somehow much worse than if he had been enjoying himself. Around a hundred I thought: I could write ninety more lines of anything. He is not going to count them. Nobody is going to sit and count two hundred lines. I did not do it. I sat at my own kitchen table at a quarter past eight with a biro and an aching hand and did not cheat a man who was in the next room and would never have known, and if you want to understand what any of this is for, it is that. --- And then, somewhere around a hundred and ten, the strangest part. It went quiet. Not the room. Me. The narrating, the arguing, the running commentary I have had all my adult life, the part that is always three steps ahead composing what it will say later. It ran out. There was nothing left to think about. There was a line, and then the next line, and the pen, and the small sound the biro makes, and the aching hand, and that was the entire content of the world. I have read about this. I did not believe it. It arrived at line one hundred and eleven or thereabouts and it stayed until the end and it was the most peaceful fifty minutes I have had in about four years. Somewhere in the hundred and fifties I started crying, steadily and without any distress at all, and kept writing, and the tears went on the page and made the ink bloom on two of the lines, and I did not stop to deal with it because stopping would have broken it. --- Line two hundred took me two hours and eleven minutes. I wrote it, and put the pen down, and sat with my hands flat on the table, and did not get up. He came in about a minute later, which means he had been listening for the pen to stop. He read them. All of them. He stood at the end of the table and turned every page and I sat there watching a man read the same sentence two hundred times, which took a good four or five minutes, and it was the single most exposing thing that happened all evening. He got to the page with the bloomed ink and did not say anything about it. He got to *somethign* and put his finger on it and said, "You left it in." I said yes. He said, "Good," and closed the book, and I put my face in my hands. --- What I would say about it now, four years on, is that the writing is not the punishment. The duration is the punishment. Two hours is long enough that you cannot perform, cannot get through it on adrenaline, cannot be brave at it. You just have to sit in it, and the sitting in it is the entire thing. And the sentence goes in. That is the practical bit and I did not expect it. Three weeks later I was in the car with him being told about something at work and I opened my mouth to say it was fine, and instead I heard my own hand writing, and I said the true thing instead. Out loud. At the time it was wrong. Thirteen words, one thousand four hundred times. It is the only thing anybody has ever done to me that changed how I behave when he is not in the room. The notebook is in the drawer under the toaster. There are four pages left in it. I keep meaning to buy a new one and I keep not doing it. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Lines and impositions](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/lines-and-impositions/) - [Running a lines scene](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/scenes/lines-and-impositions/) - [Headspace: what the quiet is](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/headspace/) - [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.