# The parcel > Short fiction. Her mother picked the parcel up off the mat and turned it over in her hands, and four minutes of the worst arithmetic of her life began. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-parcel/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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 adults over 18. Nothing is opened, nothing is discovered and nobody says anything. A woman of forty-four simply watches her mother hold a jiffy bag. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version of the problem is on [can I do this without anyone knowing](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/can-i-do-this-without-anyone-knowing/). The thing I want on the record is that I am forty-four years old. I own the house. I have a pension and a car with a dent in it and a job where eleven people call me if something goes wrong at two in the morning. And when my mother bent down and picked that parcel up off the mat, I made a noise like somebody who had been caught. --- She had come for four days, which is the correct length for my mother. Three is not enough for her and five is too many for me, and somewhere in the middle we have found a sort of treaty. I had done the sensible thing. I had ordered it on the Tuesday, timed for the Friday, because she was leaving on the Thursday morning. That was the whole plan and it was a good plan and it did not survive contact with a delivery company that decided, for the first time in its corporate life, to be early. Half past nine on the Wednesday. I was upstairs with the hairdryer going. I heard the letterbox, then the front door, then my mother saying, in the voice of a woman performing a small useful act, "It's all right, I've got it." --- By the time I got to the bottom of the stairs she was holding it in both hands at chest height, reading the label with her glasses pushed up on her head, which is how she reads anything. It was a padded envelope about eighteen inches long. Not a box. A long thin padded envelope, and my brain supplied, instantly and unhelpfully, the exact dimensions of the thing inside it, and then supplied the words on the invoice, and then supplied, with tremendous clarity, the possibility that the invoice was on the outside in one of those plastic document wallets. It was not. I could see it was not. I checked twice with my eyes while attempting to walk normally across my own hallway. --- Here is what went through my head in the next four minutes, in order, as best I can reconstruct it. One. She is going to ask what it is. Two. I have not prepared an answer, because I am an idiot who prepared a delivery date instead of a sentence. Three. Say curtain pole. It is the right shape for a curtain pole. Except she has been in every room of this house since Sunday and she has an eye for curtains and she will say which window, and then she will offer to help put it up. Four. Say it is a present for someone. She will ask who. She will remember. She will ask about it at Christmas, in front of people. Five, and this is the one that made my ears go hot: she is not going to ask at all, because she has no reason on earth to ask, because in her world a parcel is a parcel, and the only person in this hallway who thinks it is anything else is me. --- She turned it over once. She did the thing everybody does, which is squeeze it slightly to find out what it is, the way you would with a birthday present. I said, "Just leave it on the side." Not smoothly. There was about a semitone too much in it. She looked up, and I watched her decide that I was being short with her before breakfast, which she has been putting up with for twenty years, and she put it on the hall table and said, "Somebody's got out of the wrong side." And that was it. That was the entire event. --- I made tea with my hands not being quite my own. She talked about my aunt's knee. I said "mm" at intervals that I hope were correct. The parcel sat on the hall table until half past four, when she went for her walk, and I took it upstairs and put it at the back of the wardrobe still sealed, and stood there for a minute feeling like somebody who had got away with something, which was ridiculous, because there had been nothing to get away with. Nobody had done anything. A woman had picked up a parcel in my hallway and put it down again. --- The part that lasted was not the fear. The fear was stupid and I knew it was stupid at the time, which did not help in the slightest, in the same way that knowing a plane is safe does not help. It is what the fear was made of. Because it was not that she would think I was disgusting. My mother is seventy-eight and has surprised me before. It was that she would have to know something about me and then carry it, and that from that day every conversation we ever had would have a second thing going on underneath it. I would be watching her for it. She would be not saying it. And the ordinary, boring, perfectly good relationship we have, which is built on my aunt's knee and the garden and whether I am eating properly, would have a room in it that neither of us went into. That is what I was protecting. Not my dignity. The ordinariness. --- So I have made some changes, and they are boring, and they work. Everything goes to the office now, where a parcel is just a parcel and there is a man called Dariusz who signs for forty of them a day and would not look up if you had a bassoon delivered. I have a bag at the back of the wardrobe, and things live in the bag, not in drawers where they can be found by someone looking for a phone charger. I moved the whole lot the week after she left, on a Sunday, with the radio on, like admin. And I have written down, for the next time, what I will actually say. It is "something for the house". It is boring and slightly rude and it closes the conversation, and I have said it out loud in the car twice so that it comes out flat instead of high. --- The part I did not expect is that doing all that made me feel less furtive rather than more. I think because it stopped being luck. Before, the whole arrangement rested on nothing going wrong, which meant every doorbell was a small event. Now there is a system, and systems are dull, and dullness is exactly what I want around this part of my life. I would like it to have the emotional temperature of the recycling. She rang on the Thursday evening to say she had got home fine and had I remembered to book the boiler service. I had not. I booked it while she was still talking. She said, "You'd forget your head," and I said probably, and we talked about the garden for twenty minutes, and there was no second thing going on underneath it at all. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Can I do this without anyone knowing?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/can-i-do-this-without-anyone-knowing/) - [Setting and space](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/setting-and-space/) - [Implements and what each one does](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/implements/) - [Shame and arousal](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/shame-and-arousal/) > ## 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.