Annie threw herself on board, as usual narrowly avoiding getting caught between the closing doors. She managed to get the bus card out of the pocket of her frilly, ankle-long cotton dress, with tiny pink flowers, and slammed it in the card-reader, despite wearing mittens and having her wrists cuffed together in front of her and fastened to her belt.
She sank onto the nearest seat, breathing a huge sigh of relief. She was going to make it in time after all!
Suddenly, the elderly lady who sat next to her said, in a squeaky voice:
“I don’t know how you are able to do all the things you do! I could never run and jump the way you just did, wearing my cuffs, I tell you! I would have gotten myself a seriously fractured leg or two!
We didn’t have the same range of products and designs you kids have today to choose from, but then again, it meant less of a competition about who had the fanciest cuffs. When I was your age, the cuffs, chains and gaggers for girls were pink and fluffy, and blue for the boys, and neither set were decorated. I can see you’re frowning, and I suppose it’s at the thought of having a fluffy gag in your mouth, and you would be correct; it was pretty nasty. The fluff ended up in your throat half the time! What’s your gag made of? It looks, and feels, like rubber.” Annie (who had been listening with half her attention somewhere else) nodded.
“Mine were always soft foam rubber. The combination soft foam rubber and a fluffy outer casing, is never to be recommended, not for anything, or under any circumstances! But then again, because it was soft, I was always able to close my mouth.
Are your cuffs as sturdy as they look?”
The woman grabbed a hold of one of Annie’s handcuffs and said:” If they are as heavy as they look, the not-too-distant future can look forward to having the women sporting some pretty well defined arm and leg muscles, because I suppose the ankle-cuffs are just as sturdy?” She lifted Annie’s skirt just enough to have a peek at her cuffs. “Yes they apparently are!
That belt around your waist; is that what they call a transport-belt?” Annie nodded.
“Oh, my goodness me,” the old lady babbled on, slapping her cheeks, “I never had one of those. Is it comfortable?” Annie shrugged. “I know they’re popular nowadays among the slightly older girls, especially among those who have a fiancé or at least a boyfriend. Have you got one?” Again, Annie nodded. “Oh, I bet he’s dashing! Is it true that all your cuffs will be replaced by metal ones, when you’re engaged? In my days they always were! Oh, how I mourned the day I no longer had to wear cuffs! That was a real day of sorrow, both for me and for my husband. But, we got used to that too, just like we’ve had to get used everything else that’s happened in our lives!” The old woman sighed deeply and Annie thought she could see a tear in her eyes.
On the way home from the bus stop, Annie thought about what the lady had told her. When she got home, and her mum had taken the gag out and had cuffed her to her desk, so she could do her homework, she started crying.
“Oh, my poor baby; what’s the matter?” her mum asked. “Why are you crying? Has anyone been mean to you at school?”
Between the sobs, she told her mum about the old lady she had met on the bus, and how she felt so sorry for her having her days in cuffs behind her and all.
Her mum gave her a hug and whispered:
“I know, honey; it’s sad when that day comes, but at least you will have fond memories.” She took her daughter’s head between her hands and looked her in the eyes.
“Do you remember when you got your first set of cuffs?” she asked. “You must have been five or six, and you were over the moon! You saw yourself as being a big girl, and we all had to admire you wearing them several times a day, whether we wanted or not! You looked so cute, and your father and I could for the first time get a glimpse of what a fine young lady you are on the verge of becoming.”
Despite her mood, Annie smiled. “Yes, I remember. I must have been quite a nuisance back then, mustn’t I? But you see; I was, and still am, proud of wearing my cuffs; and I don’t ever want to have to stop wearing them!”
Her mother stroked her gently over her hair.
“That’s my girl!” she whispered. “That’s my girl!”
Later on that night, when Annie and her mother were sitting cuffed to their arm-chairs, she had her ears properly plugged, so her parents could have a private conversation. Afterwards, her father said:
“Don’t go making any plans for Friday after school, because you are going to take a trip.”
“No dad, I won’t!”
Friday afternoon, when Annie came home from school, she saw a wooden crate standing on the other side of the front door. When she asked her parents about it, she was told it was part of a surprise they had arranged for her. She immediately got excited, because travelling in a crate was her favourite. If she was packed in one, she knew she was going to a faraway place; well, relatively faraway, anyway.
They told her to sit down in it, she had a ball-gag strapped in her mouth, and they switched her usual leg cuffs with a long chain to a pair with a short chain.
She was told she wasn’t supposed to walk at all the next couple of days. The lid was nailed onto the crate; there were enough holes to let the air in but they were far too small to let her see through them.
The crate was placed in the back of a van, which drove to a house on the outskirts of town. It was unloaded and carried inside a house.
Two strong arms lifted her out of it, and she was placed on a chair.
“Hello Annie, dear,” an old woman seated in an electrical wheel-chair said. “I don’t suppose you remember me. I’m your grandmother Augusta, but you can call me grandma Augie. My daughter called me and told me you were afraid of getting old and not having to wear cuffs when you go out. Is that right?” Annie nodded.
“I kind of thought so! When I was your age, I was too. Back then, this thing with girls being cuffed almost all the time had just got started. In fact, I was one of the first to fully embrace the new fashion when it started. I remember it was because of a web-site where people wrote in with stories of how they had been tied up as kids and teenagers. Heck, some people were in their early twenties, even!
The thing was; some of the stories were about girls getting themselves into such an amount of trouble, they simply had to be restrained by boys or girls. Oh, there were stories about boys getting tied too, by girls or boys, but they were far fewer.
Some boys I suppose read too much into those stories, and started cuffing their sisters and fiancés as a precaution before taking them out. When no one interfered, it soon spread like wildfire, both in this city and, later on, abroad. I suppose you could say that this is the biggest contribution to world history this small town will ever make!” Grandma Augie chuckled, then sighed and lost herself in memories for a while. She continued:”However, I know for a fact my ex-fiancé, Oscar his name was, thought I talked too much in public, and ordered a ball-gag for me, making me the first girl in town having to wear one. I’m still proud of that fact, you know!
Now back to not being restrained; well I suppose I should say: not being cuffed, because you can still be restrained as much as you like, whenever you like. See the armrests of the wheel-chair I’m sitting in?” Annie nodded. Then, she looked again; what had seemed to be quite normal armrests, at closer inspection turned out to be anything but normal. She saw at least four straps, two on each armrest holding her grandmother’s arms in place.
“I see you’ve noticed the straps on the armrests by now. What you can’t see is I’ve got straps holding my knees and feet to the frame as well, as they’re obviously hidden under the skirt, and the belt I’m wearing also pins my waist to the back of the chair. If you like to, I can get my assistant to strap you into a similar chair I borrowed from the local nursing-home.”
By now, Annie’s eyes were glowing like beacons, and she nodded enthusiastically. Her grandmother laughed and called for Orville, her assistant, to come and strap her granddaughter into the chair she had prepared.
Soon, Annie was strapped in as snugly as the armrests allowed. Obviously, being made for an adult, the chair was too big for her, but she got a feel for what it was like, and she loved it.
Then Augie showed her the bed in which straps were placed.
“I never fall out of the bed; they’re there because I like having them there. So, you see my dear, the world doesn’t come to an end just because you get too old to be cuffed! You just wait for a couple of years, and then you can get a chair just like mine, and you can be strapped to that instead. And you can get bed-straps just like mine, too. That, you can’t have now.”
In the crate on her way home, Annie smiled from ear to ear. Getting old wasn’t so bad after all, it seemed!