# Twenty minutes facing a wall > Short fiction. Nothing happens in this story. She is sent to stand in the corner of her own bedroom, and everything that occurs takes place inside her head. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/twenty-minutes-facing-a-wall/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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. The cheapest thing anyone can do to you, requiring no equipment and no skill, and the one that gets furthest in. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version is on [corner time](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/scenes/corner-time/). The wall is magnolia. Whoever lived here before us painted every room in this house magnolia and we have been meaning to do something about the bedroom since 2019. There is a hairline crack running down from the picture rail, about eleven inches long, that I had never once noticed in six years of sleeping four feet away from it. --- Minute one. Minute one is nothing. Minute one is a woman standing in a corner thinking: well, this is a bit silly. I could hear him go downstairs. Not far, just to the kitchen, and then the tap running, and then the fridge, and then nothing, and the nothing was somehow much louder than the fridge. Minute two I spent composing a private commentary. That is what I do. I stood there narrating myself in the third person like a nature documentary, because if you are narrating a thing you are not inside it, and I have been doing that for most of my adult life and it has got me through a great deal. --- By minute four I was bored, and being bored made me cross. Because this is stupid. This is genuinely stupid. There is a woman of thirty-eight standing in the corner of her own bedroom looking at magnolia paint while downstairs a grown man makes himself a cup of tea, and there are six emails I could be answering, and the bins go out tomorrow, and I said yes to this. I said yes to this. That was the bit that kept coming back round. Not the indignity. The fact that I had asked, in an email, in November, in about four hundred words that took me two evenings to write. --- Minute six or seven, and this is the part I would not have predicted: I became extremely aware of my own hands. Where do you put them? Behind your back is a whole statement. By your sides feels like standing to attention, which felt ridiculous, so I tried folding them, which felt sulky, so I put them back down again, and then spent about a minute and a half in a state of genuine anxiety about the placement of my own arms in an empty room where nobody could see me. Nobody could see me. That is the thing. There was no audience. He was downstairs. The entire performance was for a woman facing a wall. --- Minute nine, roughly, I got the giggles. Properly. The silent kind, where your shoulders go and you have to press your lips together, and the more you try to stop the worse it is, and the whole thing is made ten times worse by the knowledge that laughing is not what you are supposed to be doing. It came out of nowhere. I had a sudden clear image of the woman next door letting herself in with our spare key, coming up the stairs, and finding me. What would I say. What could anybody possibly say. Hello, sorry, I am being punished, would you like a cup of tea, he is in the kitchen. It took about ninety seconds to get through it. He did not come up. I have since wondered whether he could hear me and decided to leave me to it, and I have never asked, because the answer would spoil something. --- And then, some time after that, it stopped being funny. I could not tell you where the join was. There was no moment. There was just a point at which I noticed the giggling had gone and had not been replaced by anything, and I was standing in a corner with my hands at my sides looking at a crack in the plaster. I wanted to turn round. That was the strongest thing in the whole twenty minutes and it is the bit I have gone over most. Not wanting to leave. Wanting to turn round. Because he had not said what would happen if I did. There was no threat attached. Nothing was stopping me, physically, at all, and there is no version of that man in which he would have shouted. I could have turned round and walked out and put the kettle on and he would have said, "All right, no problem," and meant it, and we would have watched television. And I stood there. That is what I mean. Nobody was making me do anything and I stood there facing a magnolia wall because I had said I would, and there is something in that fact that I still cannot look at directly. --- Minute thirteen or fourteen was the resentment. Brief and quite hot. He is downstairs. He is downstairs and probably on his phone, and I am up here doing all the work, and does he even know, does he understand what this is actually like, has anybody ever put him in a corner for twenty minutes. It burned off fast. They do. That is the thing about standing still for a long time with nothing to look at: you get to watch your own moods arrive and leave like buses, and it is extremely hard to keep being angry when there is nothing in the room to be angry at. --- Somewhere after that everything went quiet. I do not have good language for it and I have been trying for two years. The narrator stopped. That is the closest. The woman in my head who describes everything I do while I do it, who has been running since my twenties, simply ran out of material, because there is nothing to say about a wall. And what was left was extremely plain and quite hard to write down without sounding either mad or holy, neither of which I am. I was standing in a warm room. My feet hurt slightly. There was a crack in the plaster. Somebody who loves me was downstairs and had asked me to do this and I was doing it, and the doing of it was the whole content of my life for about four minutes, and there was nothing else I was supposed to be achieving. I cannot remember the last time before that when I was not achieving anything. I started crying somewhere in there and it was not distress and I did not make any noise, and I was not entirely sure it was happening until I noticed my chin was wet. --- He came up at twenty minutes exactly. I know because I looked at the clock afterwards and it was eight fifty on the dot, which means he had set a timer, which means the man had gone downstairs and set a timer on his phone and then sat with it. He put his hand flat between my shoulder blades and said, "All right. That is that." And that was that. There were six with the hairbrush afterwards, which took about forty seconds and which I could barely tell you anything about, because by then the work had been done. The six were almost a formality. A full stop on a sentence that had already ended. Twenty minutes. No implements. No skill required. No equipment, no costume, nothing bought, nothing planned. The cheapest thing in this entire business and the only one I have ever had to sit down about afterwards. We have painted the bedroom since. I chose a pale green and I made sure the corner by the window got two coats, and I could still put my finger on that crack in the dark. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Corner time](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/scenes/corner-time/) - [Headspace: what the quiet is](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/headspace/) - [Standing against a wall](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/positions/standing-against-a-wall/) - [The need for humiliation](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/the-need-for-humiliation/) > ## 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.