The smile on your mom’s face, as she fluttered through every room of your childhood household, appeared to you as more of a bare-naked fact of life than it did as something infectious or imitable. The world to you, with your mom’s smiling beauty within it, passed by you a generic grey. Metallic almost, unless the context would prove that hue too exciting, in which case it would be the grey of concrete.
Even still, when your mom smiled at you, you smiled back, making sure to do so before she passed you obliviously in the darkness of the hallway, doing everything you could to keep her mommy-sense from tingling. You were surprised she hadn’t noticed yet, everything about the world around you had become so viscerally cold and dry, its very winds whistling through the bleached bones of what was once purpose, that you felt as if your body or face should be transformed to match the hollow nothing within you.
When your mom saw you in that moment, or in any moment for the past few years, she failed to notice much of anything. Your face apparently wore none of your emotional scars, your cheeks unmarked by any of their craters, and your eyes still swam with that old milky placidity. You were apparently the same young man she had always known. Or maybe it was just that her mood, her joy for life, was so strong, regardless of circumstance, that she couldn’t help but read joy within you no matter the context.
“Look,” she said, pointing toward the television screen.
You looked to see green monstrosities with headbands, at least four of them, mocking you in martial dance, with glimmering weapons that seemed to tear at you, and you in particular.
“The Ninja Turtles,” she said. “They have a new one out. After all these years… Aunt Carol says its good. She saw it with Matthew.” She smiled at you, her eyes alight with nostalgia for your childhood, feeling it more than you ever remembered being able to. She turned back, smile still in her cheeks, as she ironed your clothing. She lifted your bright yellow-orange work shirt by its shoulders. “This is a nice one, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” you said. “It’s really nice.” The ‘really’ was deliberate. It was enough to throw her off your scent, but not enough to exhaust you with a third syllable. It was hard enough trying to affect your voice with the emotion necessary to sound human.
“The girls are going to love you in this.”
You stared at the shirt. It looked like nothing. Just fabric. You then let your eyes crawl from the shape of the shirt, over your mom’s face, her eyes, though they shined a striking electric blue, couldn’t pull a single sensation from you. You let your sights fall to her torso, and then you followed its bright blue down along the shape of her body, down to her feet in her sandals, one of which took a step backward when she put the shirt back down on the ironing board. Her calf tensed up when she continued ironing.
The blue of her dress, its fringes swaying, looked to you as if it were the color representing meaninglessness itself. Even its shape, which was borrowed from the shape of the body underneath, was as without distant reason to you as a nation-state when seen on the map. A bit of the dress dipped into the crevice between her giant butt-cheeks.
You remember once, when you were much younger, seeing the topmost inch of her butt-crack as it peeked through the waist of her shorts, which were lifted by the fabric of the couch when she shot up off it suddenly to answer the front door (you had received a package). Fifteen minutes later, she was tapping on the bathroom door, asking you why you were taking so long.
You stood there, shaking above the open toilet, as an electricity you never knew before (but would become much better acquainted with as time went on) crawled through you at a relaxed and deliberate pace. The tissue you had grabbed and pressed to the tip of your hard penis was now dripping with a strange white liquid gushing through its disintegrating barrier.
All the while, with your mom’s palm banging, and her voice calling, you thought about that little black inch on her, living within the notion of whatever it implied. Feeling yourself being emptied of every desire because of it, as if that desire ate up all others, extinguishing itself in the process.
You exited the bathroom with your face flush, and your mind frantic. Luckily, your mom didn’t notice anything strange then either. She just passed you on the way in, her body brushing past yours, and said “just use the one in the basement if you’re going to take this long, okay sweety?” She stepped into the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her own nudity. “That’s what it’s there for.”
From then on, you spent a lot of time in that basement bathroom.
You thought about those countless hours. Your mom’s ass, the subject of those lost and irretrievable units of time, its shape hinted within that blue dress, looked back at you, momentarily bobbing with her sudden energetic movements, her pushing forward with the iron, working your clothes until they’d be flatter than she could ever be. As she whistled, you imagined the sound came from that space between her cheeks, whistling up through that little inch of black as if it were a prisoner in a hole, dreaming of freedom.
Your penis moved. Then it stopped. It remained still.
You sat back on the couch and stared up at the roof. It stared down on you without value. Then when you could find the energy, you stood up and continued on toward your bedroom. It had been almost a year now since you spent an extended period of time within the basement bathroom. If it weren’t for the wet dreams, themselves grey with dull metal and chipped concrete, you would have probably exploded, ending up as nothing but a stain on your bedsheets, giant and white, without another worry to feel or a life full of burden and toil to lead. Because of this, you wished your wet dreams would stop, no matter how good they felt. For some reason, your mom’s body became alive in them, so much so that her mere presence in the dream, with an exposed upper arm, or a tilt of the chin, was enough to wake you up along the spewing ejaculations which were expelled against your bed sheets.
In one of the dreams, probably the most explosive of them all, you had been laying in a field, looking up at a cloudy sky, one which was grey but not black, with no indication of rain. The blades of grass swayed in the steel wind, and the wilderness was birdless, the world probably with it. You lay there, alone, unfeeling, uncaring, and secure in your solitary state. Then you heard the sound of something slapping through the grass with soft but consistent thuds. Suddenly, something beigepink fell from the immediate sky, and it pushed against your startled face with its soft and sinewy body.
“Sorry babe,” your mom said.
You leaned up to see your mom in her orange dress, its fringes bellowing through the wind, as she ran past you, not even looking back to give a facial expression to her apology. She was lost in her own world of activity and momentum. As she went, her body getting small in the distance, your sight fell from the fluttery orange fabric trailing behind her - its motion too chaotic to make out even her hips, never mind the giant wads of flesh she carried below them and behind her, which must have been jiggling with some violence – down to her exposed calves, then down to her heels. They ran bare through the grass, the soles of her feet and the bottoms of her toes visible in flashes with each unit of movement.
You felt their leftover pressure, having been pressed into your face, with the sensation of their soft texture still with you.
Your head fell back into the grass. You looked up into the clouds with your eyes wide as the wave after wave of absolute sensual gorgeousness came to you, and the grey sky was replaced with the grey stucco of your roof as you sweetly ejaculated into the softness of your bedsheets.
When you were done, you lay there, looking up at the stucco still. Then you turned your head and looked outside through the metal frame of your window. The clouds sat out there, dark but not dark enough for rain. You turned back. You shut your eyes. You went to sleep. You wished you could sleep forever.
You couldn’t tell whether you had been sleeping or had been awake when you heard the knock on your door. “A package for you,” your mom’s voice sang.
You tried to get up, but the blanket over top of you buried you in like snow. You struggled with it still, your limbs weak with a lethargic mind of their own.
“Hello?”
“Just drop it there,” you said, forcing it out of yourself, only having enough energy to do so because you didn’t have enough to get up.
“Bombs away!” she said. You heard the package being dropped against the lower part of your door. Then you heard your mom walking down the hall, her feet heavy on the floor due to the immense weight she carried from her kneecaps up to her lower back, a weight which was reflected nowhere else on her body.
When you finally got up, it was only with the modicum of energy provided to you by the knowledge of what was in that box, sitting there, waiting for you, just outside your bedroom door.
Your door opened, you pulled it in.
Your mom whistled as she prepared food outside. Mac and cheese, bright and yellow.
That had been a month back.
The box still sat in the corner of your room, opened but barely molested, as if you had only opened it to check if what you thought was there was indeed there. It was, but your will for it sat, inert and lopsided, within that box along with it.
You came into your room as your mom whistled, ironing your underwear.
You fell to your bed, and you felt its mattress rise around you, as if you were sinking into a pit. And then that sinking stopped almost as soon as it started, even it being disappointing.
You lay somewhere between sleep and being wide-awake, forgetting how to even differentiate the two, until you blinked for a second, and the grey wall of your room transformed into the edge of a giant, impromptu bird’s nest. The edges of your bed poked up into the air like teeth, becoming the edges of a cracked eggshell, one which you nested yourself, inert and lifeless like a chicken embryo, within the center of.
A crow flew over to the branch of a distant tree, snatching a squirrel screeching in its talons up into the air with it.
Another squirrel, larger and more feminine in the face, lunged forward on the branch and reached one of its black palms up into the air helplessly. The young squirrel screamed, and she whined with it, his suffering hers and vice versa.
That’s when you heard a bird chirping, near, almost next to your ear. You found the strength to turn over, and at first you saw a brilliant blue plumage. It protruded forth beyond the creature who owned it, the creature who sang. She moved in place.
You turned more, taking all of you to do it, and you saw her there, her eyes an electric blue. Her beak pursed into a song. She recalibrated her footing, looking down at you with her wings tucked in next to her blue body. “The worms are delicious this time of year, aren’t they?” She asked, looking down at you with big inquisitive eyes. “Sometimes I feel like I’m spoiled.”
You lay there for a moment, saying nothing, surprised that she didn’t notice you were having trouble conjuring something to say. Her eyes down on you, her neck bent forward, her six toes, three on each foot, splayed out, staring, eager for your input.
“They’re good mom.”
“Hey? Aren’t they?” Her smile wide.
“Yeah,” you said. “Really good.”
You heard a horrible screeching. You turned over to see the black wings of the crow flutter, disorientating its prey as it ripped into his chest with its beak.
“And it’s such a beautiful day,” your mom said, bending her head around on the pivot of her feathery body. “Isn’t it?”
You stared at the crow, the screeching stopped, blood dripping down its swallowing throat. “It is,” you lied. “It’s a really nice day.”
The mother squirrel lay prostrate on the branch, its chest and face pressed against it, being crushed under the weight of its own loss and horror.
“Just beautiful,” your mom continued. “Life is a gift.”
She turned around, and as she did, your reflexively shot your gaze toward her, catching something in your peripheral.
She stood there, fully-woman now, her red hair spilling down the back of her head and over her flowy blue dress. She sighed. She turned to look one way, then turn to look the other. And then, as if she thought herself alone, she criss-crossed her hands over her body, down toward the hem of her dress. She gripped its flowy fabric in her fingers.
She sighed again.
Your eyes went wide.
She began to pull up.
Just as the lowest part of her forbidden body, its shape seen and half-seen, like images often witnessed in dreams, became visible to you (in whatever shape it did, you could barely remember any of it soon after waking) you felt a sudden and violent rush, one which soothed you, yet dragged you along with vicious tugs.
The sky behind her turned uniform, like that of wall, and she faded within it.
The last thing you remember hearing, before that sudden crest of orgasm could fail to achieve its goal against you, was the pecking of a large, black beak into rodent bone. *thud thud thud*
*bap bap bap bap*
“Sweety, you sleeping? Matthew’s here.”
You took in a breath, your eyes opening themselves fully now. Your underwear dry. Your dick still hard and throbbing.
“You up?”
You turned, mustering all the energy you could, to look at the door.
“Come on, wakey wakey, eggs and baky.”
You stared at the brown surface of the door, its expression blank.
You then noticed something in your peripheral. You looked down.
It sat there on the floor. This was possibly the first time you had noticed it since the day you took it to your room and cut open its closing layer of tape.
It was the box. It sat there, its top burst open but left hanging, in the corner by the door.
Your mom banged on the door one more time. The box tipped over. Its forgotten contents rolled out.
As your mom sat with her sister, with her nephew sitting at the table with them (his mind set entirely on the thoughts of your mom’s naked thighs, calves, and feet beneath the table), she looked around her own kitchen as if it were somebody else’s. “Look at that cookie jar I got,” she said, pointing at the counter behind her. She looked into her sister’s eyes with her own electric blue. “Garage sale.”
“It’s…” Aunt Carol leaned forward, squinting her eyes. “… a cat.”
“Yeah,” your mom said, proudly. “And he’s smiling. Pretty cool, hey Matthew?”
Matthew’s neck twitched rather than turned as he looked your mom in her eyes. Her electric eyes looked back at him, as if zapping toward the most central part of his loins within an instant, tickling him in the deepest nooks of his masculinity. “Yes,” he said, croaking out the words instead of speaking them, feeling viscerally as if his Aunt and Mother could read his thoughts and had caught him in his usual practice of imagining his own Auntie wearing nothing at all, her thick body skipping through a springtime meadow, with flowers and grass tickling at her bare heels and calves, the cheeks of her ass bouncing in the upflung dew and sun. “It reminds me of Meowth.”
“Mouse?” your mom asked. She turned to look at it again, then she turned back and dissected him innocently with her eyes. “In what way does it look like a mouse?”
Matthew gulped.
As this was happening, the door to your mom’s room hung slightly ajar. A shadow from within it appeared in the hallway. It expanded and then dissipated as you came through her door, stepping softly and slowly with your eyes on the kitchen doorway, using the conversation as a gauge for how safe you were to step out of your mom’s room without being spotted.
“A pokey man?” your mom asked as you stepped into the kitchen. She looked over at you. “Oh, sweety. Here you are! Straight off the redeye from Dreamland. Tell us about the trip.”
You looked at her, her electric blue eyes staring up at you. You looked to your aunt and cousin on the opposite side of the table. “Hello,” your aunt said, her sing-song similar to your own mother’s, except not quite, like some distant fading ghost. Her eyes being much the same way, their blue a metallic blue, faded and chalky.
“Hey,” your cousin said, nervously.
Your aunt looked at you strangely for a moment, her eyes narrowing. You looked back into those narrowed eyes, and when she realized you were looking at her for too long, she shook her head. “Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t meant to stare. You just…” she scanned your features. “You look tired, is all.”
Your mom looked at her sister, then up at you, her arm resting on the back of the chair. She squinted as she examined you. “Well, he was just sleeping…”
“No,” your aunt said. “I mean, yeah. But… it’s more than that.”
Your mom took a second longer. Then she looked away, shaking her head, the corners of her mouth downturned. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t see it.”
“How are you?” your auntie asked with a smile much more tempered than the kind usually given by your mother.
“Good,” you said.
“Good?”
“Yes,” you said. “Really good.”
She stared at you slightly longer than typical. And a quaint smile formed at the very edge of her mouth. “Good,” she said, submitting to it as true rather than recognizing it. “Good.”
As you went down the stairs to your basement, you suddenly noticed that the only footsteps you could hear were your own. You looked up at the landing and saw your cousin standing there, staring into the kitchen above, in the general direction of your mom, as she and your aunt continued talking.
You looked up at him for a moment longer.
“And it’s just the way he does these things. I don’t understand it myself. But I know…” Aunt Carol stopped. “Yes, Matt?”
He became flustered. “Uh…” he turned and began to move downstairs without looking you in your eyes. “Nothing.”
You saw his cheeks, their flush appearance becoming clear to you as they got closer. You turned and continued leading him into your basement.
As your mom and aunt chatted above, your aunt’s body beautiful but plain when compared to your mom’s, and eyes striking but dull by the same standard (even your mom’s skin had a supple moisture inherit in it which your aunt failed to inherit from the same mother) you sat with your cousin, the lightbulb hanging above your heads audible. So audible that you heard it rather than heard him while he spoke.
*zzzzzzzzzz*
“I think the first generation Pokemon were my favorite. Or second. I think after that, they started to run out of ideas.”
*zzzzzzzzzz*
“Like… even Sudowudo? What’s that? Like… wood?”
*zzzzzzzzzz*
You looked at him, his face passionate with the splashing color and pixel of Pokemon lore. You forced your mouth open, wanting to keep him talking, keep him passionate so that he wouldn’t notice your lack of strength to speak. “I think Sudowudo means pseudo – like fake – wood.”
He stared at you for a second. “Sudo means fake?” His expression was bewildered.
You looked at him, your every bone and muscle lethargic. “Yeah,” you said, forcing it out painfully. “Pseudo. Like pseudo-science. Uh… pseudo-…” You probed for examples. “Uh you know? Psuedo-intellectual?”
His expression was blank for a moment.
*zzzzzzzzzzzzzz*
“What does that have to do with wood?” His confusion sounded to you like it were an attack, though you knew it wasn’t.
“It’s… like fake… fake woo… uh.”
*zzzzzzzzzzzz*
He wasn’t staring into your eyes, but your mouth, as if waiting for words which made sense to come out and present itself to him in physical form.
“Uh,” you shook your head. “I- uh- … I honestly don’t know much about anything past second generation. What were the three starters from the third generation?”
“Oh, they suck!” he said, his eyes lighting up. He began to blather on, spitting as he spoke, his energy would be contagious were it not stilted with the awkwardness shared by most teenage boys, that inability to pick up on the lack of interest in all around them, their tendency to project their joy and enthusiasm on the mindstate of everyone they spoke too.
You looked past him, over his shoulder. The open door of the basement bathroom, its insides a stark black, staring back at you.
*zzzzzzzzzzzzzz*
“I swear. It’s like they’re looking around the house and using things they see as Pokemon. I could come up with better ones. I used to have a notebook full of them…. Still do, I guess. Heh. …uh, I have this one, he’s like a Chinese rat, but he carries ninja stars, and he walks around with a karate suit on. Me and my friend drew-“
“You mean like Splinter?” you asked.
He stopped dead.
*zzzzzzzzzz*
“Well… no,” he said. “This was before Ninja Turtles.”
“Ninja Turtles was before Pokemon,” you said. It came out of you suddenly. You had only spoke with the intention of phasing yourself into the rhythm of the conversation, hiding within it from any awareness or scrutiny. But the simple factual mistake just drew that objection from you, as if you were a teacher grown accustomed to correcting your students’ constant missteps.
He stared.
*zzzzzzzzzzz*
“I think if you listen, instead of interrupting what I have to say, you’ll see how my character is original.”
Your mouth was shut.
“He’s… like he… lives in the…. the Cyan sew-” he stopped, subtly humiliated. He then grunted in frustration. “How many Pokemon have you created?”
You looked into his disgusted face. You then looked up into the corner of your eye. The answer was at least 200, as you had a notebook with 200 pages you had filled once when you were really young. Your eyes used to shine with a glimmering light, like silver pieces lying beneath the surface of blue water, when you’d scan up and down those various pages, all of them birthed from your own imagination, with a joy and pride in yourself. Rather than say this though, you pursed your lips to lie to him and tell him you had created none. But as you tried, you found that your mouth would open but it wouldn’t produce sound. It wouldn’t do anything. It just sat there, in between speech and silence.
“That’s what I thought,” he said. “Do you think you’re too good for me? You act like you’re too good for me?”
*zzzzzzzzzzzz*
“At least for a year or two now. I try to talk with you. To shoot the-“ he stopped and looked toward the stairs. Then he turned back and leaned forward to whisper. “…the shit. I try to be friends with you, but you act like just because you’re older you don’t need to talk with me.”
*zzzzzzzzzzzz*
“And you’re always correcting everything I say. Like you’re talking to a 6-year old. But I’ve been in middle school for years now. I’m going to high school next year.”
*zzzzzzzzzzzz*
“And I have a lot of original ideas for Pokemon and lots of other stuff. But you never listen or take any of it seriously. Like… I have this one. It’s like a fox or a dog sort of thing. And he spins and… he wears this mask. Like a wooden one.”
*zzzzzzzzzz*
“And… another one. It’s like a big spirit thing. It lives in the forest and it can transform into a lot of other things. It’s like an optional one that you can catch or kill. Like Mewtwo, but it’s sort of like a deer, but with a really creepy human face. And team rocket tries to shoot it but you stop them first.”
*zzzzzzzzzz*
“What ideas have you come up with which are so good? The way you act, you must have invented the atom bomb. What have you done that makes you think you’re so much better than me? Huh?”
*zzzzzzzzzz*
“Huh?”
*zzzzzzzzz*
Before he could ask again, you felt something burst within you, something solid and metal once, which had been corroded by rust, but which still stood firm. So firm you had no inkling that you should question it. And now, in this very moment, the extent of the rot had become clear to you, because you felt it burst in your throat, and not long after, from your eyes, nose and mouth.
*zzzzzzzz* is all you heard as you brought your hands to your face.
You wiped your eyes and you saw Matthew there, staring into your face, his bottom lip hanging open.
*zzzzzzzz*
“Are you….” His eyes were wide. “Are you okay?”
You lifted your fingers to your face and felt moisture.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” you said, or at least tried to, but after the first syllable, you began to choke on your own tears. You said it again. “Nothing… I’m fine. I’m fine.” *snort* “Oh god!”
You began to weep into your hands.
*zzzzzz*
Directly a floor above you, where your mom and auntie sat, the ceiling creaking with their weight, you could hear the faint traces of conversation, and though you had no way of knowing, you could see your auntie look aside every few moments, as if considering something she couldn’t say to your mother. Something which she was fearful to trudge up or to make your mother aware of through a simple question. You imagined her imagining you, wondering at you, questioning herself and what she saw. And questioning why your mom wasn’t questioning. Questioning whether it was just her imagination or overthinking, or whether what she had spotted in you was genuinely there.
Your cousin only stared, not knowing what to do.
And you sat opposite him, feeling the same way.
The lightbulb buzzed above the two of you, its circumference decorated by a moth who glided across its surface at near-uniform distance, like a satellite floating along the circumference of the earth.
*zzzzzz*
You snorted again.
The mouth touched the bulb’s hot surface.
It dropped dead.
As you and your mother stood at the front door, waving off your cousin and aunt (your mom doing so more enthusiastically than you), your cousin, after tying his shoes, looked up at you. His expression less empathetic, but more acutely concerned, than his mother’s, who also stole glances at you between responses to your mom’s cheery statements and promises.
“This weekend then. Let’s do it.”
“Let’s!” your mom said, throwing her arms out at her side. “You’re not leaving without hugging me.”
The two sisters hugged, your mom gripping your aunt tightly, giggling playfully in place. Your aunt looked over your mom’s shoulder at you.
After they disengaged, your aunt leaned in to hug you. You felt her squeeze hard, then she rubbed your upper-arm with the flat of her hand. As she did, you cousin stood there, his eyes wide, as your mom’s breasts squeezed against his chest. His arms hung straight down. And then when he realized he was supposed to return the hug, he only lifted his hands, and kept them floating there, static in mid-air at about the level of her hips. When your mom let go of him, he couldn’t believe he felt relief, and all because he was terrified their lower-halves would meet and she’d feel how he felt for her in a very direct and physical way. She pulled back and looked into his shocked eyes with her eyes of glorious blue. “Wow, you’re getting big!”
He blushed.
She stepped back and waved her family goodbye. For every word they spoke, she said three, and then she kept speaking as if they could hear her, even when they were in their car. You only stood there, deeper into the house, looking at your mom’s body framed by the doorway, as she waved. Your gaze crawled down from her hand swaying in the air, down her arm, down her back, and down to her ass which sat swaying in that blue dress. The fabric jostled about over top of it. Some of it fell within the crevice of her ass and was subtly clenched there, dragging the fabric with her back and forth.
You only stared. Your arms felt heavy. Your hands felt heavy. Your throat heavy. Your dick placid, unmoving.
You turned around. By the time your mom had shut the door and turned around, you were gone.
Your penis rested, placid, sluglike, on your testicles. You looked down at it.
You heard your mom’s body moving through her bedroom, its weight real, its visual implied by it. Her body, though unseen by you now, produced sounds as it ran past fabrics and propelled her barefoot across her floor.
Your penis sprung up for a moment, still soft, still small. It seemed to throb for a second, then it fell backward, as if expecting to land on a bed of hay, landing uneventfully against your pubes. That was all the life it had in it.
Your mom’s bedroom door opened up. You listened as her feet, now making solid footfalls with the soles of her sandals beneath them, lead her toward your bedroom door.
She stopped.
*bap bap bap bap*
“Sweety?”
You look down at your penis. It sat as lethargically as your vocal chords did within you.
“Sweety?”
“Yes,” you called, dryly.
“I’m just going to head to the park. I was wondering if you wanted to come.”
You stared at the flap of skin which lay across the pale crook between your thigh and hip.
“The weather is beautiful out,” she continued. “And we won’t get too many days like this before fall.”
You imagined her at the park, her body voluptuous and wide, the sunlight itself. Your cock lay there, motionless.
“No,” you said.
“You sure?” she asked in a sing-song.
“Yes,” you said, forcing it out of you, still staring at that lifeless piece of skin.
“You sure you’re sure?”
You took in a deep breath, looking down, your whole body inert. You exhaled. “Really sure,” you said.
“Okay,” she said, again almost singing it. “You snooze you lose.”
You said nothing, you only listened to her sandal-clad feet continue down the hall.
You heard her grab her purse from the coat rack. She zipped it open and rustled through it for a moment. Then she zipped it shut. The front door open and then it slammed close with such violence that the empty box in the corner of your room rustled. For a split second, you imagined your mom’s body as the door slammed, imagining its every modicum of phat shaking in whatever dress she was now wearing.
You look down at your penis.
Still flaccid. Still small.
But you could have sworn you seen it move.
You emerged from your bedroom and slowly stepped down the hall, your feet both walking over the path your mom’s took on her way to your door and the path she took on her way away from it and on her way to the park.
Her bedroom door hung slightly ajar. The house was silent but for the sounds of the late-summer suburbia spilling in through every open window. It only added to the sterility and lifelessness of the house, its essence your essence made manifest now that its brighter half had brought herself, like a Blake-painting, to shine effervescently in the park daylight.
You rounded the doorway and looked into your mom’s room.
There on the bed lay a blue dress.
It was amazing how little you felt, both in soul and body. The dress was discarded, empty. The shape which filled it wasn’t even implied by its husk, which sat flat on the bed. Your cock hung flaccid against your thigh. The cooling wind came in through her window, blowing the edges of her dress and the bare skin of your thighs and testicles all at once. It was the same wind which nipped at her exposed calves, heels, and arms at the park, just miles over, finding its way within the privacy of the room she once occupied.
You walked through her room, your bare feet overlapping the places her bare feet had propelled her over not long before. She had spent an extended period of time, you had heard her, propelling herself over that floor. With that very wind nipping at her every bare place the way it nipped at yours now.
You moved to the edge of her bed, your thighs pressed against it. You looked down at her dress. You then leaned in and grabbed it, balling it up in both palms, and you brought it to your face. Your cock hung lifeless below as you sniffed it, smelling your mother within the ball of fabric as if she were locked within it. You knew her buttocks and breasts had their own unique scent, but you knew not which part of the whole they played. It was all just her, all within one place, all within the palms of your hands, itself a blue rose.
Your cock made not a stir. If anything, it only shrivelled from the wind.
You dropped your mom’s dress there.
You then turned to her dresser.
Sitting on top of it, the only pair of eyes in there with you, stood a knowing cat. Its body a porcelain glass, its eyes yellow and all-knowing. You moved toward it for the second time that day.
The image of your hand was reflected back at you by those eyes as you placed your hand beneath its backside, between its two legs.
You felt it in your fingers.
Your cock moved. Then it lay there, lifeless.
You pulled out the object. Its image was reflected in those yellow cats-eyes.
You looked down at it.
It looked up at you.
It was an eye. A third one. It was a dark black. It had a little lens within the center of that blackness. And it reflected back at you nothing but your dry, expressionless face.
The cat’s eyes reflected back at you exactly the same image, except from an unwatching angle. It continued to reflect you, even as you turned around, and walked bare-assed out your mom’s bedroom, the device still in your fingers, and a little flap of skin on you - though it was only caught in the reflection for a moment – beginning to get stiff.
Matthew sat at his computer desk, his eager hand on his mouse, moving it back and forth as he stared intently at his monitor.
On the monitor’s screen, staring back at him with two white, lifeless eyes, a bomb stood on orange feet. “Bomber,” he mouthed to himself as he made minor brush strokes over it with his cursor. “Bomber used self-destruct.” He smiled, his mouse-hand busy. “It was super effective.”
A notification popped up in the bottom right of his screen.
He ignored it to give his pokemon its final touches, the smile in the corner of his mouth as he did reflecting his pride in himself and in his imagination made manifest.
When he was finished, he let his eyes crawl away, down toward the notification. When he saw your e-mail in its upper-third, he scoffed, his happiness regarding his most recent creation only stoking his rising contempt for you.
He looked up at Bomber. “Let’s see what this idiot wants.” Bomber looked back him, his eyes white and expressionless.
He clicked on the notification.
His e-mail opened up, and immediately something caught his eye. It was the ‘To’-line. It had a small handful of e-mail addresses listed, with a + next to it which read “expand to see all 857 recipients.”
Matthew stared for a moment, saying nothing, his expression as blank as that on his recent character design. He recognized one of the names on the e-mails exposed to his sight. It was his father’s.
He let his cursor wander to the + and he clicked on it. A sea of names popped into being, most of which appeared novel to him, with the occasional entry being somebody he recognized. All of the names were male. All of the ones he recognized at least.
He couldn’t put his finger on why, but something about this unnerved him. Your name attached to it was what drove it all toward that direction, though even he wasn’t aware that this was what was getting to him. It just didn’t make sense.
He let his cursor fall slowly downward, and at finding the bottom of his screen, he throttled his mouse wheel.
The body of the message came into view.
“If you haven’t opened up the attached media files yet, open those first before you read further.”
Matthew ignored this warning and kept reading.
“If you’re getting this, I just want to let you know that it isn’t a mistake. I’ve chosen every single one of you for one (or a few) of a handful of reasons. Either we are friends, family, associates, facebook friends, friends of my family or distant family, my mom’s coworkers or acquaintances, former teachers or classmates (of me or my mom), guys at the Jiffy-Lube by the mall, pyramid-scheme pushers, staff at most local places my mom frequents, that one therapist I tried to go to before I realized you couldn’t help me, etc., etc., etc.
“Yes, the woman in the video I’ve sent you is exactly who you think it is.”
Matthew’s face wore the same expression in total, though something in it twitched imperceptibly.
“And yes, that image is forever yours to keep now.”
Something shuddered through him. Whether it was good or bad, he didn’t know, feeling thrill and terror as one. Its duration didn’t last long, yet its residue floated as clumps through the stream of his turbulent emotion.
“On top of that, I’ve already posted these videos to all my favorite sites. I’m just letting you know that so you know that deleting what I’ve sent you will accomplish nothing except to deprive you of your own right to it. This video is out, and there’s nothing that can be done about that anymore.”
He scrolled down eagerly.
“If you delete it, or find any and every website where I posted it, and have it deleted there, it will still exist on a few hundred other e-mail logs and hard drives, by men who will refuse to deprive themselves of it. Men who lose nothing by keeping it, or by spreading it around themselves anonymously, which some of them, even if it’s only a few, will. And a few is all it takes.”
A few spreading what around? Matthew thought, knowing the answer while not knowing it all at once somehow. He swallowed saliva down his trembling throat, his eyes themselves feeling tight within their sockets, his body sweating, not as if he had just finished exercise, but as if he were in the most important moment of some physical contest, the make-or-break moment, with confidence that victory was his.
“Some of you – do-gooders, or those suffering from post-nut clarity – will be dying to ask me right now, why I’m doing this to my own mom?”
He felt the veins in his scalp pulse against his skull, the sensation itself a headache, yet welcomed as if he knew its intensity only foretold of something great.
“My first reply to that will be one of general wisdom: Don’t look a gift-horse in the mouth. But putting that platitude aside (and all jokes about looking a gift-horse in its ass),”
He leaned forward, as if wanting to dive into the screen. The videos were attached just below, yet he kept following the message along, as if addicted to the anticipation itself, an anticipation born of not following simple directions, his arrogance against you keeping him from it.
“…the only explanation I have for my behavior, the only one which makes sense to me (and I know it won’t make sense to many of you), is that I don’t see a point to anything else. What I mean by that is not that this stunt is the one thing which does make sense. To the contrary, this made as little sense to me as everything else. It was cruel. It was malicious. It was perverse. It was traitorous. It was humiliating (for both me and my mom). And by attaching my mom’s name to it, and mine with hers, it’s a humiliation she’ll never escape. A humiliation that will exist with my family for as long as digital information does. My mom will be as well-known by her naked ass and breasts as she will be by her face or name.”
Matthew sucked back air, both involuntarily and ridiculously. His preference for anticipation evaporated, and he scrolled down past the remaining paragraphs, clicking on the first video he could see.
The image which appeared before him, swallowing up your message, was the image of a messy room. He didn’t recognize the room at all, though the paint on the wall was familiar. He then spotted something sitting on the post of the bed. It looked like panties, and his heart-rate sped up, with his face getting red, as he leaned in to get a closer look.
He felt his ribcage lift in through his torso as he sucked back air, audibly, violently, his body apparently needing his lungs full exactly within this given second. His voice box, likewise, seemed to need to squeak, with or without him giving it permission to do so.
Your mom’s nudity exploded into his life, not just as a memory, but as a living, breathing piece of his own property. Her body, like his own mother’s, except almost unfair in its more extreme shape, her ass being even more than what it promised to be, her tits being all he ever wanted to kiss and manipulate with his fingers and tongue. Her unaware state in the moment, oblivious that she was becoming nude for others beyond herself, and to him specifically, added a sort of mean-spirited bitterness to the affair, giving dimension to its sweet and sour core rather than detracting from it. His status as the exposed woman’s nephew giving his placement within this whole erotic circus like that of being in the front row, or in the box seats reserved for royalty, watching stunned as the crowd roared in shock and glee, and him with extra glee that it was his aunt who was at the center of such jubilee.
As he looked over your mom’s body, your message continued without him taking heed of it:
“I feel nothing as I do this. Nothing as I copy the videos. I felt nothing as I uploaded them to various sites. I feel nothing writing this, nor anything attaching them to this message. And this occurrence isn’t unique to what I’m doing now. I’ve felt nothing for a long, long time. Longer than I can even remember. The word for this, from what I understand, is depression. But I don’t know if any word, no matter how multi-syllabic, clinical, or evocative can ever do this justice. All I feel, all I’ve felt for years, is a cloud running over, between, and through everything, a parasite living inside it all, one which has sucked the joy from every shape, color, hair follicle and limb.”
Matthew tugged himself viciously, watching his aunt preparing to cover her body in vain, her nudity existing in a perfectly captured eternity now, one which could be held within anyone’s hands, one which existed, ironically, within the private folders of others.
“You may be asking: ‘If life has no meaning for you anymore, no matter what, why do this of all things?’ It’s a good question, one which I don’t have a satisfying answer for. I think if anything (and I feel nothing exposing this about myself just like I feel nothing regarding everything else) my mom’s body used to be it for me. It with a capital I. That shining monument on the hill. The one I promised myself I would get to one day. I had thought about invading her personal space, blowing her privacy wide-open as a teenager. It was an obsession of mine, one which went well with my puberty. My mind was furious with thoughts of it, of hiding my phone in her bedroom, the logistics of it cartoonish in my brain, both dumb from it still in a state of development, and even dumber from the passion for the dream in which it tossed around like a cat’s paw tossed around prey. Touching, nearing-up-on, groping, fucking my mom, and imagining others touching, groping, and fucking her the same, filled me with such unbridled joy and excitement. Not only could I feel it all internally, but I could see it in myself every time I saw my face in my bedroom mirror. My big blue eyes, the ones I inherited from her, looked back at me with a wistful wonder, filled with not only lust for my mom’s body, but a lust for life which went along with it. Objectifying it, exploiting it, humiliating her through it. A young man, living in the age of booty, with a mom who had excessive amounts of exactly that. Nothing could be more thrilling.”
Matthew watched his aunt’s body, her nudity as prized as gold, disappear within a new dress. He began laughing, even through all the labored breaths, seeing the same implied-but-teasing shape within a new cover. He knew her this way very well, for as long as he could remember, he did. And she would go out, interact with the world, not with that world as an object, but as something which lived and breathed along with her. Something she was a part of, existing within it naturally, clean and unviolated, just like everything else.
Yet now, all it would take was a click backward, and that same cover, that gorgeous adornment, that tease, would be all but obliterated. And it would stay that way – forever. You had made sure of that.
His laughing picked up in its intensity, as his strokes along his throbbing penis did the same. Her being clothed almost hotter to him now than her nudity.
“My mom knew none of my proclivities, of course. How could she? They were well-guarded. They were private. And they were intense. On top of that, they were relatively novel at the time, the internet having yet to blow these ideas up into something which had a larger life. Thoughts like this existed within the strange enclaves of solitary minds across the country and world. None of us knew that there were others. By the time I had found out, the tendrils of something dark (or rather, something grey) had already found me and had begun pulling me into their murky abyss.”
“My mom was oblivious to this. Even as I stood there, still new to it, and, because of that, still capable of panic at the sensation of its first grips; my mom saw nothing. The blue eyes I would see staring back at me in my bedroom mirror had all but disappeared. And I thought it was the coming depression which had precluded me from seeing them in myself. Yet I knew that wasn’t it. Because though I couldn’t see that shining Adriatic blue in my own eyes, I would see them, every day, wide and presentable, infinite in their depth, in the eyes of my very own mother. The corners of her mouth pushed the edges of her cheeks upward, as she smiled directly into my sinking hole at me, mocking me without knowing.”
Matthew’s eyes shined a subdued blue as they stared wide at your clothed mom. He laughed, leaning forward into his desk, pushing against it with his chest, in joyous mirth, his cock twitching in his palm below.
“I know she never meant anything by it. And, more than that, I know she doesn’t owe me anything more than what she has already given as my mother. She had no reason to be able to spot a state of mind she had never experienced before. This is something I want understood. I was never mad at my mother. That’s not why I did this. Even if I had anger to feel in place of this sadness and placid dread, none of it would be anger toward my mom. My urge to abuse her sexually like this, and in other ways I had imagined as a teenager, not only came from a place without malice toward her as a mother or human being, but likely only existed at the intensity they did exactly because I knew how honest, pure, and bright my mom was. In other words: I wanted her punished for being sinless. And though ‘want’ might not be the right word in a person who has been sucked of all will, that inertia due to the want from happier days is exactly what motivates me now.”
Your Aunt Carol sat in her living room, looking down at a crossword, her reading glasses on her face, doubling her metallic blue eyes in size.
She had heard a noise from her son’s room. She had heard it a few times. But this final time, its volume, its intensity, and the specific emotion she heard within it, ambiguous and troubling, caused her to look up from her magazine.
Matthew’s laugh rose in volume.
She pulled her glasses down to the tip of her nose and she looked down the empty and dark hallway, examining it with those faded blue eyes.
“This act, as crazy as it was, will either become more or less crazy in your mind when you realize that it was my last. Your worst interpretation of what that means is correct. As you read this, I am gone. My mom has either found me hanging in my closet, or I’m still there in the dark privacy of it, this very moment, and she is yet to be aware of it. If the latter is true, I imagine her out there, either still at the park or in the living room - or maybe in her own bedroom changing yet again, this time without my little black eye spying on everything she does – without any knowledge, and without any knowledge that such knowledge could be, in her little head. The world is shining at her in colors and hues I can barely remember, and every sound, every chirp of the birds, and every honk of a distant horn, is one piece of an orchestra she would be glad to participate in. That orchestra is called life. And it’s possible she still has no idea I have left it yet, leaving my instrument cold and unattended to next to my empty auditorium chair.”
“Oh god,” Matthew said, too loudly, feeling his cock throb in his hand, only seeing the video and not explanation for what motivated it.
“Whatever my mom’s innocence, however blameless she is, only the victim of her own joy and the obliviousness which came with joy, let the sharing and resharing of these videos I’ve left with you (and with countless others) be without larger moral implication or meaning. The exploitation of a beautiful woman is its own reward. Her son being its catalyst even more so. Jerking off as she cries, and doing so as she cries for more reasons than one, can only add to it all. And her confusion and the blindsiding pain of it all will only deepen the flavor of this plate further. Her attempts, or maybe futile hopes, that the videos will just go away, and the hopes that my story and the knowledge of what I’ve done will go away with it, will add a scrambling desperation which will compliment that ecstasy some of you feel. It doesn’t have to be all of you. Some is enough. And the fact that it will be the worst of you who enjoy these fruits the most is another factor contributing to the mouth-watering sweetness of it all.”
Matthew’s laugh rose in volume. It did so so quickly, and loudly that he couldn’t hear the sound of footsteps coming down his hallway, toward his bedroom door.
“I just wish I could share this joy with the worst of you. Even if it were only for my last moments. Even as I type this. Even as I know I’ve done it, and it’s out of my hands or ability to stop, I can’t help but realize I’m only looking up from what is a deep and ladderless pit. That’s how I know I need to do what I’m about to do after sending this. There is no escape from what I’m feeling now. If my greatest fantasy back from when I was a hopeful, naïve, and ambitious teenager isn’t enough, the width of its naughtiness and impossible essence as wide as any horizon ever promised to me through PSAs and Hollywood movies, than nothing ever will be. I want you all to know, whether it adds or detracts to your arousal or confusion, that whatever motivation that’s driving me, it is purely mechanical at this point, as if I’m doing it as a favor to my former self. The man I am now (I’ve only ever been this way as a man) finds no joy in it. But I will do it none-the-less. I already have.”
Matthew banged on his desk in glee, masking the footsteps, and the rise in their frequency and the growth of their sound as they approached.
“And as for my mom. If you’re wondering what my last words for her are, I want you to jack off to her with this in mind: there are none.”
Matthew felt his balls tighten against the underside of his thighs. He was ready to blow.
Just then, his bedroom door rocketed open.
“Matty? What’s with all the-“
Matthew spun around, seeing his mom standing at the doorway. Her faded blue eyes looked at him, themselves wide. That’s when he realized. Those eyes weren’t pointed at him at all. They were pointed past him. Pointed toward what was on the screen. At the video which had started again from its earliest moments.
He spun back around.
Behind him, he heard his mom sucking back air in a horrible gasp.
Your room looked strange when framed by your closet’s edges. Because of that, you leaned forward slightly, sliding its doors closed so that you could only see the bedroom you grew up in through tiny slats of light. As you did, you felt the stool give way a bit beneath you, and you panicked, feeling the rope tighten against your neck. After stabilizing yourself, and feeling relief at doing so, you almost found a dry, understood but unexperienced humor at the thought that that sudden terror, and the relief at its cessation, was the terror behind the possibility of something you had planned to do anyway.
It wasn’t a bad way to go out. On an irony like that.
You took one last breath, not sure why, and you kicked the stool out from beneath you.
Just as you did, through a legion of tiny slats, you saw the brown of your bedroom door be replaced by bright, burning orange, the likes of which seemed to float about in fluttering waves as if it were liquid. You thought for a fraction of a second, however impossibly brief, that an angel had come for you.
It called out your name. And that’s when you realized it wasn’t an angel. Because when it called to you, it called to you with horror.
The ground thudded with familiar steps, this time intense and all at once, as if tumbling, and then, just as the world began to fade, your closet door slid open.
Your mom looked up at you from the light, her eyes wide with shock and horror, their pupils shining with it, an electric blue.
Her arms shot out frantically, desperately, and possibly meaninglessly, from within her frock of burning orange, and it would have been the last thing you had ever seen.
Then you opened your eyes, and you found yourself laying on your bed, feeling a weight against your chest.
You looked down to see the crown of your mom’s head as she wept against you. “Why?” she said, asking both you and God. “Why’d you do it? Why baby?”
You looked down at her. She lifted her gaze from your chest and looked up at you with those pleading eyes. “Why?”
And even with all her shock and all her horror, you saw something joyful within her. It was relief. Relief that she had found you in time.
That’s when you saw her phone, its face still alive, in her other hand.
You heard a voice coming from it, tinny but firm: “Stay on the line, ma’am.” And off on some distant block out there, but getting closer, you heard the wailing of an ambulance siren clearing traffic, and doing so… just to get to you.
Your hand was gripped tightly. You looked at her. She looked back at you, her eyes glowing, her gaze loving. She said nothing. She only admired you. Admired your existence. Admired your breathing. Admired your life.
You stared back at her, your expression blank.
Wind blew in through the hospital window, fluttering her bangs.
The emergency room door shot open, slamming against the wall. You could hear it, but you couldn’t see it, it being obscured by your mom’s head and angelic face. The bright orange of her dress seemed to burn within the rays of the sun, looking like folds from the sun itself.
Your mom’s name was called, though she didn’t seem to notice. She opened her mouth as if she wanted to say something to you. Her name was called again. She leaned up and looked behind her. Standing there, now unobscured, was your auntie. She looked down at the both of you, her eyes wide.
Your mom stood up quickly, and you could see by the side of her face that she was smiling. She approached her sister, who seemed to be trying to back up, to get as far away from you as possible. Your mom followed her, out into the open-wide room, as doctors and nurses passed by and between them on their way to other curtains and the beds behind those curtains.
Your auntie looked into your mom’s eyes, which were facing away from you. Your aunt’s eyes her faded blue, their expression of intense worry. An intense worry not only of the situation as it was, but worry at the realization that your mom still had yet to know the second half of it all. She only had time to tell her about your suicide attempt over the phone. She didn’t have time to tell her the rest, and she was hoping somebody else, maybe even you, would have broken that news instead.
You could barely hear them, only picking up the edges of their feminine speech, and their contrasting moments within it, the way one could hear the squeaking of sneakers along a gymnasium floor.
Your aunt’s mouth, furiously in motion at first seemed to clam up at some point, as if there were just some words she couldn’t speak. Instead, she reached for her phone, doing so with apprehension.
She then lifted it to your mom’s face. Your mom’s big, electric, blue eyes were now visible, looking down at the screen with playful anticipation, an anticipation which was not replicated at all in her sister or in your aunt.
You imagined what they were looking at, mapping it to the changed shape of your mom’s eyes, and the aspect of the swimming blue within them.
Your mom’s mouth began to fall open, its bottom lip, even from a distance, seeming to quiver slightly. Her eyes were glued to the screen, not believing what she was seeing, and then when believing, not understanding.
The look which came next, possibly when understanding set in, was one that was utterly foreign to her face as you and everyone else knew it. The best word you could conjure for that look, as you lay there in your bed staring at her, was despondency. And the rest of her body seemed to shake with it.
Your aunt was crying as she stood next to her sister, showing her a horror beyond imagining. Her lips were moving, but you couldn’t hear what she was saying over the sound of a distant patient in pain.
Your mom’s gaze, blank but fractured, her world a painful and desperate buzz in her head, one you knew the frequency of only all too well, rose to meet yours. She stared in your eyes with her own, their look of shock, terror, and disbelief shining at you an electric blue.
That’s when her lower lip began to quiver, and a question within her was posed visibly, not just to you but to the universe itself, which you knew now appeared to her as grey and sucked dry of all purpose or deity.
That’s when you felt it. The air blowing in, rustling your bangs.
You looked away from your mom’s face, over to your left to see the open window, the wind coming in through it rustling the delicate pedals of a solitary orange flower.
The birds chirped outside, and you could see the bright green leaves of the tree without, its trunk so ancient it brought the bursting foliage to the height of the third floor. The leaves danced with the wind. A bird appearing from within shook its branch as it flew off into the deep blue sky, its endless, magic hour blue adorned with cotton-soft clouds.
The solitary flower on the radiator leaned in its rich pot of soil, its hue being an orange brighter than any you had remembered seeing, at least not for a long, long while.
You looked out at this world, carelessly, without thought, and you took it all in, with eyes bright and wide, and shining with an electric shade of blue. Perhaps the most striking shade of blue that anyone had ever seen.