It was strange, your mom had never been in trouble before, and, now that she was, she wore a befitting confusion in her eyebrows as she walked down the sidewalk with her bookbag held to her uneasy stomach.
She could swear, since the beginning of this year, Mr. Charles had it out for her. To everyone else, he was the nicest of men. He held that reputation for years before your mom ever stepped foot in his class, so much so that when she saw her class list in late August, she smiled, eager to be taught by the nicest teacher in school.
Her older brother (your uncle) had especially gone out of his way to sing the man’s praises multiple times in previous years, and on hearing her tell him the good news over the phone (he was away at college), he only responded with “you’re in good hands.”
It was shocking to experience, as the first few hours, and then days, of class had made it clear to her that that would turn out to be true for everyone, everyone except for her. And as she sat in class, day after day, lacking theories to explain this phenomenon, she found herself sinking deeper into her seat with the realization that she was somehow unique, unique in the worst way possible.
She stood at the crosswalk, still in her school uniform (the school day had just ended), waiting for the digital orange hand across the street to transform itself into a white stickman. As she did, she held her open palm and bookbag over the front and back of her skirt, the wind today being surprisingly aggressive. In the driver seat of his convertible, Steve from school watched her from the perpendicular street, only to jump into the pull of his seatbelt at a honk behind him. He looked up, seeing that the light was green, and he slowly stepped on the pedal, moving forward slow enough to extract as much from your mom with his eyes as he could before passing her, and, even then, he kept her in the little shape of his side mirror as long as possible until her body became unbelievably basic with distance, sticklike like the man in the walking symbol, and then she was nothing but a dot. But even still, her full shape, or at least the memory of it, filled his mind with the echoing whisper of her curves.
“She doesn’t know,” he heard Harry saying. “Remember what she used to look like? Just a few years back. She has no idea she’s hot. Trust me. It’s happened to her too all-of-a-sudden.”
Your mom heard a honk. She twisted her head around to see nothing but a few passing cars, cars had been honking a lot in this town, at least since the summer. She had noticed this but had developed no idea as to why that was.
She rounded the corner, and she saw the house, two doors from the bend as reported to her. She gulped. Catchup-time at a teacher’s house to make up for her late assignment and other issues of an academic and behavioural nature. As far as she knew, and Sarah had vouched, there was no precedent for it, at least not in the minds and memories of any other student in school. Your mom assumed there must be, or that there was a shame attached to it that ran so deeply that no one spoke of it even when it did happen, the theoretical student in question clamming up for the exact purpose of not letting the news of their delinquency get out.
Your mom’s brows were still furrowed, a lump still in her throat, all from recollecting on the series of misunderstandings and happenstance which seemed to tarnish her in the eyes of her new teacher as a bad student, worthy of his sudden rises in volume and condescending monologues meant to be “constructive.”
As she crossed the street, after dutifully looking both ways, her bookbag held to her chest with both trembling arms, Timmy stood over on a neighboring lawn. Your mom hadn’t seen him. He stood there, his lawnmower handle rumbling in his palms, watching his crush since elementary school walking up his friendly neighbor and kind teacher’s front lawn.
He watched the back of her thighs, the back of her hand above holding her skirt flat against the round surface of her backside, and his mind burned feverishly with questions, some of which were hinting at answers he feared might make him sick upon discovery, seeing her smooth thighs and head of blonde hair ascend upward toward Mr. Charles’ door.
Within the house, Mr. Charles stood in his kitchen. Catching some foreign object receive the sunlight which shone on his stoup, he craned his neck to look out of the full-body window beside his front door. He then saw what that foreign object was.
Your mom’s face, her eyes squinting from the daylight, appeared within the window’s frame, and he watched the tensing of her bare, sun-illuminated thighs as she climbed his steps.
He smiled.
Then he looked back down at his blue lemonade pitcher. He kneeled quickly and gave it another lookover, looking for any visible evidence, however slight, of what had been dropped within. He stirred it a few times to make sure, hoping the pressure of the stir, its sucking vortex, would destroy what’s left, and, in destroying, absorb.
Then he heard his door being knocked by a timid fist.
He looked up at it to see the frosted glass at its center being filled with a shapely silhouette.
He looked down at his watch. “Five minutes early,” he said, feeling an excitement and angst rise within his stomach. “Good girl.”
She was the first one into class. Mr. Charles watched her frame move, itself accentuated by the steam which rose from his coffee mug. The mug read “Student’s Pet” and had been given to him by a young attractive student (who was now in school for dentistry) three years earlier. He leaned back in his chair, making his posture innocuous.
Your mom, on seeing him sitting there, earlier than usual, stopped a few feet in from the doorway. Then, not wanting to appear as anxious as she felt inside (fearing it would imply guilt of some sort), she continued to her desk and sat down.
He watched her outer thigh bend, and then squeeze outward horizontally, as her body met the pressurized plastic of her seat. He held his pencil in the thumb and index finger of both hands. He imagined himself snapping it as if he felt her pressure against that seat as a pressure against him, but he knew subtlety was key for this, the most important day of his life.
Instead, he just sat silently there, watching her place her books down against the table conscientiously. His expression and manner was inconspicuous, as if her presence there was a non-factor in his world. He instead stared off into the empty atmosphere of the classroom, something she was content with. She turned and looked at the classroom door awkwardly, as if in anticipation of a particular friend or classmate coming in. She turned back around, not catching his gaze pulling away from her body as she did. And she looked down at her book, unsure of what to do with herself now that she was here.
After a few hellish minutes, themselves of a deafening silence, another classmate came in. This girl – mousy, Asian, with a face behind thick-rimmed glasses – sat down silently at the back of class. Mr. Charles smiled at her warmly. She blushed and looked down.
Your mom looked at the girl, saw her reddening cheeks, and then turned back around to examine the warm expression on Mr. Charles’ face. He pulled his gaze from the blushing student and looked back at your mom, his expression becoming flat within the instant of meeting her eyes. She looked down at the table and said nothing. Below the desk, her each hand held the other, both attempting to keep the other from trembling.
He took her timid moment to scan over her body, her legs, one over the other, combining their pressures to multiply on each other’s appeal, their pink-beige flesh blushing a peach redness, a redness that he knew he brought to her. Her black shoe held tightly to her uplifted foot, its toe pointing toward the ground, and her socks were pulled tightly over her toes, heels, ankles, calves, and knees, her uniform too tight for her shape. This was because nobody foresaw her body changing this much, growing to be this thick, in such a short period of time (the lion’s share of it being over the summer), and rather than complain regarding the clothes that were ordered for her by the secretary, she stayed silent, not wanting to make a fuss. In keeping with her socks, her skirt hugged tightly to her shape, which ballooned out comically now, the fat of her upper thighs and backside being given against firmly by her seat.
She sat there without pretense, but as he stole quick glances at her, she appeared to him like a butterfly perched on a delicate branch, itself a product of a beautiful metamorphosis, one the butterfly itself could have no possible appreciation of.
He had had his doubts with his lifelong faith over the years, but as he sat in this Catholic school, its very name taken from Saint Christopher, he could only look at her and see, whether it was true or not, a structure created by a beautiful and brilliant mind, its craft beyond perfection.
His gaze ran over her body like a brush over a white canvas, tickling her – though she never noticed him staring, then or ever - in some subterranean anxiety, as the classroom filled up with less remarkable young bodies and faces until full.
The bell rang just as he, staring at her, mouthed it to himself: “Tonight…”
Everybody adjusted in their seats or looked up eagerly for his first word. Everybody except for her. She looked down nervously into the unblemished palm of her hand.
“Okay, okay!” he started, with bright enthusiasm. “Another day, another hour of education. How exciting!”
A few in the class laughed.
He clapped his hands together. “Laughing in agreement, I hope. First thing’s first: who has their essay assignments ready for me?”
Your mom thought nothing of the question at first, not until she felt a rising and unanimous movement all about her. She spun around in her seat and examined the rest of the class. Every single one of her classmates held a stack of papers, some stapled, some placed together as one hastily, up and toward Mr. Charles’ inquiring face. She sat there, holding nothing, and having nothing to give.
As Mr. Charles stepped, slowly, without any visible trace of malice, but with each step spelling doom to her, he began grabbing papers. “Good, good,” he said, starting on the opposite end of class, and then rounding it, with her being the last desk he’d stand at with his open hand extended.
He saw the shock on your mom’s face in his peripheral as he went, and he tried to contain his grin. His hands filled with papers, each stacking on top of the other until they became, when accumulated, as thick as a book. He saw the back of her blonde head as he neared up on her, his hands still being filled, by every student he passed, without exception. And he savored the blush in her thigh as he neared her, one loud step at a time, from behind.
As he stepped forward once more, and now stood over her, she looked up, her face blank. He looked down at her, without clear disapproval, but with practiced hints of it in subtle places. “Not finished?” he asked.
She looked up at him, with a mouthful of words bubbling within her, dying to get out, about the e-mail he had sent last night, and its promise of a week of extension to anyone who wanted it. Instead, not wanting to draw attention to herself, not seeing herself worthy of it, or the time wasted in explanation, she just “No,” and she looked down, hoping the moment would pass quickly. “It’s not finished.”
He took in breath, as if exasperated. “It’s okay,” he said, continuing to his desk, his every footstep loud and definitive. “I did promise you all a week’s extension.” And he bit his tongue afterward, trying to forestall any sign of glee at his own cleverness, the way he had sent her that e-mail at noon yesterday, only to send it to the rest of the class at eleven o’clock the previous night, eleven hours later, after they all would have completed theirs.
Your mom heard him drop the heavy stack of papers on his desk, hers not among them, and then heard him fill his own seat, with its legs squeaking against the floor as he adjusted it beneath him.
He had sat down then, not because he wanted to initially, but because the look of shame in her face, and the way it knocked her off-balance (something he visualized in his mind with the sight of her body, and its shape, stumbling in response) had lead to his penis growing hard in his pants. His voice trembled as he began, starting with the day’s lesson, but, somehow, he found the focus to steady his nerves, even with the knowledge of what he was going to do next, what he had imagined in fantasy, planned for in delusion, prayed for in hope, until finally planning for in practice.
As Mr. Charles taught, eventually becoming flaccid enough to stand back up, the majority of the class listened. Those who didn’t only did not because of a stimuli of greater strength and excitement, the only one which had ever competed with him in his entire teaching career. Your mom sat there, her body succulent and smooth, and the various eyes of young men, depending on when they had last relieved themselves in a carnal way, all took looks over at her at various and varying intervals. Your mom had no idea that she recently had, through no will of her own, developed this magical ability to pull in attention like inanimate material to earth, and to raise male privates from their rest up into a standing position. Every boy in class wanted her, imagining her thick thighs around their bony waists, and her blushing face beneath them as they thrusted like rabbits into her body, savoring every secret it held. And they imagined giving her a piggy-back ride, with the same thick thighs around their hips, now from behind, with her face laughing above theirs while others watched. Likewise, they’d imagine her falling, or in a state of pressing danger, in desperate need of a savior, and themselves being there to save her, her gratitude rising at the coming realization she had been saved, from what, and by whom. And they imagined her lips, her eyes, and her sweet voice and laugh, existing in their lives to feel, see, and hear, always.
Mr. Charles was similarly distracted from his own lesson, even as he gave it fluently and professionally, to thoughts of a similar nature, though tempered against naivete by age, experience, and a fully developed mind.
He imagined, instead, spreading her soft butt-cheeks open with his rough hands and penetrating her waiting butthole with an ambitious thumb, doing so clean up to his knuckle. He imagined her pussy pressed against, and then swallowing, his fully grown and hard penis, until her body swallowed his down to his testicles which tingled at the sensation of her smooth and expansive butt-cheeks running against them.
He imagined the small of her back in one crook of his elbow, and the backs of her knee in another. He imagined her open mouth and the blackness within as he carried her, floorboards passing by beneath her as he moved. Her eyes shut, with the subtleties in her expression of one traversing through her own dreams. He imagined her, defenseless and hidden from the sight of anyone who could help her. He imagined her silence, her steady immobility, and her lack of will, and having it all with him, for one glorious and immortal moment, its either-end surrounded by an eternity before and after it.
He thought all of this while he lectured to his class, doing so flawlessly, about the nature of heritability, DNA, and what it meant for the family tree and existence of every single one of them there, many of whom now filling the seats their parents once filled. Those who could listen did, and took notes, including your mother, who did so fighting her own anxiety and shame, some part of her, quiet and meek, eager to make up for previous disappointment.
All the while, every mention of beauty, shape, color, or function passed down, father to son, mother to daughter, only brought every male mind back to the thought of your mom’s thighs, one on top of the other, sitting in the very same classroom they sat in. The pencil eraser held to her lips in between jotting hinted at a vague, archetypal sexuality, the roots of which reached past and below any notion of understood biological memory. Her buttcheeks, their prodigious size and soft shape deducible clearly from the way it pushed out over the edge of that seat, itself and enviable object, sitting inconspicuously afterhours, as if it weren’t her throne, made holy by the embrace of her butt-cheeks, during the daytime.
Nobody made so many enemies so quickly, and with so little sense, than the body of a young, attractive woman. And your mom, being exactly that, had to get to school each morning, find her seat, and look up at her arch nemesis each day, without the awareness to know she even had one (she naturally assumed he was just her teacher), her very notebook filled with copied scribbles based on his statements.
He stood up there, or walked from one end of the class, widthwise, to the other, seething with an enemy’s anger, the likes of which was only increased by the contempt which built every time he had successfully routed her from another post of dignity. The borders of her nation, in this metaphor, were Luxembourg now, though she seemed to wish they were Switzerland; or they had become the landmass of France, swiss-cheesed by effective blitzkrieg and aerial bombing, until it receded, jiggling all the while, stuffing itself up into a quiet corner, with her foot out, trying to keep what longed to push against her at bay.
She sat there, bursting with a necessary vitality, but with bones beneath which rattled sheepishly and rigid within the promise of that robust flesh, and eyes which scanned about mouse-like, insecure behind long, pretty eyelashes, and the occasional loose lock of blonde hair which would fall over it haphazardly on a windy day.
Mr. Charles’ noticed a moment of distraction, the classroom was full of them and always would be, but he had noticed it in his chosen target specifically, and had been prepared, circling over the target, for minutes now, waiting for exactly that.
He called out your mom’s name, swung his body over, pointing at her with one low hanging hand. “You look like you might have the answer.”
Your mom froze, her eyes doe-like, more than usual, as if caught in the blinding doom of pickup truck headlights.
“How much genetic information do you inherit from each parent?” His eyes were bright with expectation, giving off the specifically-articulated indication that he thought he was throwing a softball, and expected to witness it being plocked out over the stands as a result.
Your mom shifted in place. She looked up, thumbing through the rolodex in her mind, and then, panic setting in, realizing she didn’t know the answer.
In the darkness of Mr. Charles’ mind, his inner demon grinned, knowing he had yet to give that lesson, and, because of it, had set up his target for a failure clandestined.
Your mom felt the heat of her thighs now rise to her face, feeling the judging consciousnesses of her classroom furious in thought behind her, not knowing that they all knew as little as she did, feeling alone in her ignorance and in her failure.
And then, her worst fear came true, as that feeling internal, and its given expectations, had become externally visible on the face of her teacher, all within a splitting snap of a moment, his expression dropping into something flat and lifeless, as if the moment had obliterated the mechanism which birthed his joy and he existed within the void left by its promise. He looked down at the floor.
“Okay,” he said. “Well…” he looked out at the rest of the class, solidifying them as his allies. “… as we all discussed before….” He knew his stratagem had landed when he heard a few laughing voices among the fray “…you inherit roughly fifty percent of who you are, genetically I mean, from each parent.” He backed up as if going to check his notes, but continued with the thought. “…what you look like, how tall you are, your eye color, and… your intellige-“ he stopped mid-word, underlining it in doing so, and a sudden chord, a horrible and shrill one, was tugged within the cavity of your mom’s chest.
Her overlapping thighs were now beginning to glimmer under the classroom’s light as she began to sweat. She sat within the thick stew of her own humiliation, with the thought that everyone in her class knew she wasn’t that bright. She feared she had been the last to figure it out, because she only had, having no clear indication of it prior, figured it out in this very moment. Though of course, she would be slow to realizing it earlier if she was… slow… to begin with, wouldn’t she?
Mr. Charles all but danced at the front of his class, a vaudeville show unto itself, his kinesthetic flourishes the result of his joy and his pride in himself. He had planted a dark seed in the mind of a young woman, the most fertile mind there was, and he knew it would grow, an invasive species like it was, to choke out any and all other flower, tree, or foliage there, its branches aggressive, its fruits sensitive to being rustled and quick to drop, and the seeds from those fruits just as quick to embed themselves firmly in rich and soft soil as their mother seed proved to be. In her mind now, as he could tell by her reddening flesh and uncomfortable shifting in her seat every few seconds, was an entire forest, every tree within it the descendant of his planted ancestor, and still growing, too quick for the lazy lumberjacks of her self-esteem to contain, their tools only being as big and sharp as her estimation of herself was.
He continued, but as he did, he felt the tremble coming back, its intensity rising at the thought of just what was at stake now. She sat there in her seat, the reds of her cheek fading as she struggled to fight against her embarrassment, and all the while she had no idea of what hung in the balance, of how her recently-grown fruit were closer and closer, the farmer’s hand nearing, to being plucked, and basketed, its succulent textures and juices being enjoyed by one unscrupulous mouth, the tongue of which would glide over its fuzz and rounded shape.
“Shape,” he said, feeling his throat quiver. He stopped for a second, as if for effect, but actually out of a need to reel his rising emotions in. “Uh, shape. Shape. Where do you think shape comes from?”
The students looked around at each other. Your mom sat in her seat, looking ahead.
“Nobody? Okay, why are people’s heads shaped like circ- or more spheres. Why are people’s heads shaped like spheres? You know, instead of being shaped like…”
“Like circles!” a student blurted out.
The class laughed.
“Exactly! Why do we not have circles for heads?”
Your mom felt like she knew the answer. Instead, she sat there silently. A hand rose up behind her.
Her body stood a few inches from his at the front door. He looked down at her, the way a wolf would looking down at a lamb, as she leaned down to remove her shoe. Before she looked back up, he looked away, his expression innocuous.
“Come in, come in,” he said, trying to sound friendly, but with a hint of aggravation. He had practiced nailing exactly that on his car-ride home. He even looked out the window, as if preoccupied, as he said it, just like he imagined doing. He backed up, watching her come forward, deeper into his home, feeling himself tremble in various places as he did, not believing she was there before him in the flesh. He swallowed and turned around, feeling the need to ignore her body in order to keep his composure.
The blue lemonade sat there on his kitchen table, the glass pitcher containing it frosty with its chill, and he knew that whatever he would do next, it would behoove him to treat that frosty, blue pitcher with as much disinterest as he treated everything else there, including your mom’s nearing thighs and backside.
“Uh,” he stopped. Then he motioned to his dining room table. “Sit down,” he said. “You brought your books and everything?”
“Yeah, I came here right after my last class ended.”
“Good,” he said. “Sit down and…” he turned, heading toward the kitchen counter, stopping himself, and then turned back to her. “Uh, let’s go.” He began guiding her to the table, deciding they’d have to sit down for a bit before he even attempted offering her a drink. Though he knew this was the move, that he had done right, he felt a pit forming in his stomach as he brought her through his house, toward his dining-room table, at the mounting anticipation, and responsibility, which would now sit there, in his peripheral, a striking and unignorable shade of blue.
“Sit,” he said, his lips trembling and his throat dry. He pulled out a chair for her.
Your mom, clumsily, grabbed at its backrest, her fingers brushing his hand, and plopped herself, with a soft and pillowy push, against the flat and wooden surface of the chair. He watched from above as the familiar effect against her butt-cheeks and thighs, the one he had seen so many times now in class, happened just below him, in his very own dining room.
He backed up. “Right,” he said, and then cringed at how it came out, its frequency alternating as it went, as if he spoke in waves or signals. He pulled out his own chair next to her, hearing its legs rattle against the hardwood for a moment before he stabilized his arm mid-pull. He sat down, this time next to her, and then he looked down, past her bare thigh toward her bag on the ground. “You wanna…” he breathed subtly. “You want to pull out your things?”
She nodded and reached down.
Fearing the silence as she looked, he said “your, uh, notebook and the text… book.”
She came back up out of the darkness of her bag with exactly that, and she placed both on the table. It was only now that he realized her could smell her sweat for the very first time, just beneath the strong scent of her perfume.
Her arms rested on the cover of her textbook, over the praying mantis which stood there as the book’s cover image. It was just then that he could see it, it was her arm. It was trembling.
He looked at the side of her face, seeing its slightly-flushed hue, and her flat and innocuous expression, and, within a fraction of a second, he noticed a sudden flutter of her lower lip, one which, next to the trembling of her arm, gave him a clear glimpse of, and a predatory empathy for, the fear, and, possibly, confusion she held within her, close to her chest.
It was this realization – or rather this reminder of what he already knew – which, like a phoenix from humble ashes, lead to the slow rising of an authoritative flame, one which he could hear within the timbre of his own voice with the next line he spoke. “Now, let’s see how much of the essay you’ve finished then.”
She looked up at him, her eyes full of panic. And that’s when he knew: he had her.
“If we had circles for heads, we wouldn’t have room for a brain,” said Henry, his hand still up in the air.
The class laughed.
Mr. Charles’ smiled.
Your mom sat in that seat, feeling a terror well-up in her, one which she knew had to be illogical. The joke she conjured up in her mind, the one which had her as its target, and Mr. Charles as its speaker, was one regarding her and the shape of her head. The joke itself had no final form, but only swam with a general structure, a general shape in-of-itself, that she could sense the edges of. Unsurprisingly, as much as Mr. Charles seemed to have it out for her, he didn’t reach for this low hanging fruit, nor did he seem to show any signs of thinking about it.
“Exactly,” Mr. Charles said. “So, our head shape is there to accommodate our brains then?”
“Not my sister’s brain,” somebody said.
More laughter.
Mr. Charles ignored the sibling cruelty, though he knew the sister in question, and she was one of his better students in the year she attended his class. “Okay, so if the head accommodates the brain. Would it… um… make sense that the chest…” he pointed to his own. “…would accommodate the heart?”
His heart had slowed down in its palpitations as he settled into this groove.
“Yes,” two students said at once.
Your mom was suddenly aware of the beating rhythm in her own chest.
“Is that the only thing which determines the shape of our various body parts? Is it just so that we can fit things inside them?”
There was a sudden burst of laughter in his class, one which he normally would have thought nothing of, but at realizing what they were laughing at, the potential innuendo of his phrase, and on this of all days, a sudden panic, a ridiculous one, took over for what must have been a split moment. It was only the faces of his students, still looking ahead innocuously, or looking back at the joke-teller and laughing, which gave him the stoicism necessary to continue.
Your mom stared at him.
“How about these fingers?” he asked, holding up the back of his hand to the class, with his fingers bent inward like a claw. “They don’t have anything in them. Any organs at least. Why are they shaped like this?”
Your mom held her pen in her fingers, gliding it up and down the line as her script drifted right-word. Sitting to her right, looking down at her with his elbow resting on his table, her teacher loomed, his face holding a plain expression, with a constant undercurrent of irritation beneath it, and, deeper beneath that, there was a strange jubilee, its intensity strong, though only if perceived, and it waivered enough to not be perceived every time your mom dared to look back up at him.
“None of it!?” he had asked earlier, doing so in the same way that one would to their lawyer at hearing none of their late father’s fortune would be theirs to pocket. “You didn’t even start?”
Your mom had said nothing, only feeling a rising shame.
He could see, in his peripheral, her reddening thighs, and he had to hold from grinning too widely at the sight of them.
He sat now, next to her, watching her construct her 3,000-word essay from scratch, all the while feigning angry at the knowledge that scratch would be where they’d start from, secretly revelling in it, knowing that it would mean nothing but more time with her. And time was exactly what he needed. He stared down at the blonde strands of her hair, doing so in place of examining her lower-half, knowing he needed discipline now more than ever.
“That’s…” he blurted.
Her pen stopped.
He put on a sigh. “That’s not how you spell it…” he grabbed her pen from her soft and smooth fingers, realizing that this had been the first time he had ever touched her. “…like… this…” he said, spelling out the word. “That’s why I wrote it out on the board for you guys…”
She didn’t make a peep only waiting for him to finish, watching each word appear, spelling out her failure in plain English for her. When she took back her pen, she took it back sheepishly, without word and without expression. She collected herself, put its tip back down to page, and continued, this time on pins and needles, underneath the intense weight of his gaze and the heat of his judgement.
He watched as her every letter began to vibrate on the paper, the very lines and curves themselves trembling as she lay them down.
And that’s when he noticed, the flesh of her fingers, chalky and dry.
I came here right after class ended.
He heard her saying it in his mind, and at playing with its implications, he imagined the dryness which was accumulating on her tongue, and – now that he was as cool as a cucumber – the dryness which he had decided to let get much, much worse.
He sat there, almost unable to hide his smile now, until, spotting it as it formed on the page, he shot out his hand toward her, grabbing her palm. “No-“ he clicked his tongue and inhaled, trying to appear as if he was catching his own frustration and tamping it down. He made as if collecting himself. “…that’s…. not how you spell that one…. either.”
She stared down, not daring to look at him.
Only watching as he took the pen from her palm.
Her hand then sat there, empty.
“The better to catch food with, my dear,” said a student, again to more laughter.
Mr. Charles held his hand out before him, his fingers still bent into a claw. Your mom watched him as he slowly let his hand fall to his side. “I honestly can’t tell if you’re joking or not,” he said. “Because, in a roundabout way, you’re completely correct. Hunting!” He turned around and headed back to his desk. “But humans – unlike other animals – don’t hunt using our ‘claws,’ do we? We hunt how?”
He looked out at his class expectantly.
“With guns,” somebody said.
“Yes, yes!” He replied. Or with spears or traps or… you know… whatever else. In other words we use…” his finger, its aspect still bent, as if still emerging from its previous claw-like state, pointed directly toward your mom’s shocked face.
She looked at the finger, seeing it pointing directly at her, and then lifted her gaze slightly to see Mr. Charles’ eyes above it, pointing in very much the same direction.
Her mouth was already opened, and that should have been half the battle, but instead all that came out was a tiny croak.
She saw his eyes, their joyous momentum suddenly falter, not as if slowing down, but painfully, as if hitting a brick wall. His hand fell to his side. “Tools,” he said, looking away from her, not showing any judgement, though she could feel it in his every fibre. “Tools.” His voice was dry now. “We have these here so that we can build and hold tools.”
There was a small moment of silence as he looked down at his book, expressionless. This moment felt like an eternity of painful and mounting humiliation to your mom, its every quiet second another that her classmates could use to reflect upon her with, their minds multiplying with her every flaw.
“Tools,” he repeated. “Tools do what? In a general sense, I mean. What do tools do?” He pointed at another student, one not only smart enough for an answer, but with the confidence and extraversion necessary to vocalize it in a roomful of his peers.
“Umm… they do…”
“I feel like you have it on the tip of your tongue,” he said, offering the young man more room and time to conjure something up.
“…what we can’t,” the student Timmy replied, his eyes lighting up.
“Correct!” Mr. Charles pointed at his student and neighbor, then he moved to the side, his body rarely ever still, even on days where he was filled with less tension. He was smiling. Then he gave a quick glance over, catching your mom in his sights for a split second, then looking away, his smile disappearing.
Your mom only sat there, motionless, almost frozen by the winds of a shame still building. After a moment of trying to fight intrusive thinking, she fidgeted.
She fidgeted in her seat. She looked around, taking note of the living room, being surprised that a teacher’s house would look no different than anyone else’s. Though she didn’t know what she expected in its place.
She ran the palms of her hands against her skirt, wiping away their sweat. Her ankles were crossed beneath the table. Her gaze was more adventurous than she was, and it seemed to walk up and down the house, brushing over everything her fingers could only wish they had the courage to touch. On his coffee table, in front of his television, Mr. Charles’ macbook sat. She wondered what he did with it. She looked at the television, and too, wondered what shows Mr. Charles watched, what movies or what reality television.
Underneath the television, in one of the cubic nooks within its stand, sat a record player, and in another nook sat a leaning xylophone of vinyl records. Your mom leaned on the side of the chair, trying to get a better look at the record which sat at their front, curious as to what music her teacher, the one who everyone seemed to think of as the “cool one,” actually listened to.
She leaned over further, almost sure she could get a glimpse.
She then heard a loud thud come from the washroom. She shot back into her usual posture, expecting him to come back out.
Mr. Charles stood in front of his bathroom mirror, beads of sweat pearling up near his forehead, his two hands gripping either side of his sink. “Just offer it,” he whispered to himself with neurotic force. “’Hey, you thirsty?’” he whispered to practice. He clicked the tip of his tongue, disgusted in himself, and adjusted his stance to his other leg.
His naked cock head thudded against the sink. He looked down at it. It throbbed there, anticipating as if it were its own lifeform, existing separate from his brain, though tied to its fate.
It throbbed again.
He felt a loyalty and a duty to it. At the same time, a tightening pressure, one both of fear of consequences, as well as a strange fear of success (like that which is felt by those who are aware they’re making history) seemed to be standing in his way.
He grabbed his cock, knowing where it wanted to go, knowing where he wanted it to be, and he thought about how close he had come. He began jerking himself off. Then he looked back up, seeing an expression of pure terror. “Just offer it,” he told himself, still stuttering from nerves. “The girl has to drink sometime.” He shook his head, his own skin crawling from his bones with nerves. “You’re only making sure she’s hydrated. She has to hydrate at some point. She’s only human. She’s like everyone else.” This last line, though it was obvious, hit him like a revelation. “Just… ‘would you like something…. something to drink?’” He put out his hand in a conciliatory way as if she were standing there.
He hadn’t even been thinking of what came after she drank it, those waiting moments with the glass sitting there, empty and lemonade-stained; or the very first sign of symptoms, occurring after an extended length of wondering, wondering and hoping. The image, that of which he had so thoroughly fantasized for months, now flashed in his mind, and did so for the first time in a long while. It was as if he had refused to let himself entertain the thought, doing so to keep the pressure light and his mind sharp. If that thought provided insupportable pressure in earlier moments, now it threatened to flatten him right then and there, when the moment was getting near.
He turned quickly, almost getting the spins. He felt something slap against his cock as he did. The bar of soap on the sink’s edge was knocked off by his cock head. It hit the wall with a thud and then fell to the ground.
Your mom turned around, looking in the direction of the hallway. She waited for an accompanying noise after the first thud, but none came. She stared for a moment longer, her heart beating quickly, her mind filled with a worry without shape. Mr. Charles had done that to her. The constant fear, the skating on eggshells because she honestly never knew, nor could ever hope to predict, what she was doing, and what she would continue to do, which would set him off. It always seemed to be a new thing every time. She had wondered if this is what it felt like for other “bad” students, an existence with all the minute surprise, and broad expectancy, of a perpetual game of Russian roulette. Was being bad just a disposition, one as natural as hair or eye color? Were bad students punished not for what they meant to do, but in a way that was incidental, like the way one would be punished or rewarded for things like attractiveness, tone of voice, or height?
Your mom had no answer, she only wondered these things, as she sat there looking at the darkness of that hallway, its bathroom somewhere within it, with her teacher somewhere inside. And inside that teacher, some gripe for her. And at the center of that gripe itself, what? She didn’t know. She wondered if even Mr. Charles himself knew.
She felt a lump in her throat, but before it could become anything more than that, she noticed something else peculiar happening inside of her. It was as if everything else she felt - the shame, the embarrassment, the fear, the angst, the confusion, the sense of running time – had masked another sensation, one she would normally feel quite viscerally, its sensation immediate on any other day. It was a sensation in her mouth. It was dryness. A dryness which, now that she was suddenly aware of it, was enough to remind her of the Pyramids of Giza, their sandy landscape, and the visibly waving air one would see them through when watching them from a distance.
Suddenly, something became apparent in her peripheral. A sight which universally sat at the opposite end of impressions conjured up by thirst or heat. That color, she confirmed as she twisted her body more in place to see, was the color blue. And it sat there, on Mr. Charles’ kitchen counter, untouched and sweating, its contents filled up to the pitcher’s top.
She stared at it with a real lust. Her tongue clicked up against the top of her mouth, a sound she was embarrassed by, and thankful she had made alone. She looked back at the dark hallway. She heard nothing. She looked back at the pitcher. It gleamed in the late-afternoon sun.
“Desires,” he said. “Desires. We’re getting mental now. Mental and emotional. But if we get what we look like…” he put his open palm beneath his face as if presenting his own as the avatar for all others “… from our parents, then where do we get everything that goes on up here?” He pointed to his temple.
“From our parents,” somebody said.
He pointed out with his index finger indistinctly. “’From our parents!’ That’s where. Just like everything else. What we are comes from our DNA, and our DNA comes from our parents. DNA is the language of God’s creation, at least when it comes to biological material. And your parents are the pen he writes with.”
“So it’s my parents fault I have the need for speed?”
The class laughed, Mr. Charles smiled along with them. Your mom looked over her shoulder and saw Steve sitting there, smiling. He looked back at her. She turned around.
“Yes, yes. Though you’re not a slave to your passions. So whatever consequences you face for this… ‘need…’ is without excuse. But needing to fight the good fight to master that in the first place is your parents’ fault. Yes. Don’t tell them I said that though.”
There were a few giggles. Your mom sat there, both hands on her desk, silently.
“So yes, our desires come from our parents. That’s very true. And that which we are disgusted by, repulsed, being the opposite of what we desire; naturally, that comes from them as well. What else? What else to we have up here…” he pointed at his temple again. “… that we can blame on our parents.”
The class was silent.
“How about our personalities?”
“Oh…” Steve said, apparently stumbling on a revelation. “So that’s why I never do my homework!” He snapped his fingers.
The class laughed.
“Well,” Mr. Charles said, still moving as he spoke. “You did do your homework, didn’t you? You usually do. At least for my class. Everybody in my classes always doe-“ He stopped himself, not facing your mom’s direction with his gaze, somehow translating subtle judgement through his side-profile. And though he couldn’t see her in full because of that, the glimpse of her which existed in his peripheral, however abstracted, seemed to flinch or fidget strangely. Mr. Charles could also see some of the students before him looking over at her after that aborted remark. He had to bite his inner-cheek to keep himself from smiling. “You’re all good students,” he continued, apparently excluding no one. “Where do you think you got that from?”
“Not my dad…”
Mr. Charles held his hands, palm upward, in a shrug. “If your parents aren’t good, and they don’t seem to know any better that that’s the case, you might want to question where you yourself are equally as uninclined in that way. Just saying…”
His audience seemed to like that one, loving the way he skirted cruelty without every crossing that line.
“I’m just kidding. That was just a defense of your parents. Not an attack on you guys. You’re all great.” He looked at your mom. When she seemed to respond to his look, and how it related to what he had just said, he tugged his gaze away from her nervously. She felt another sudden stab at some remote part of her soul. She had remembered her brother telling her about how much he and Mr. Charles got along, like he was just another student, and, even then, a particularly cool and down to earth one. She wondered how she and her brother, both sharing equal parts of their parents’ genetics, could seem to vary so drastically then in how they were viewed by this one man.
“Here,” Mr. Charles said. “Let’s go over a character trait. One that seems to be heritable.” He stopped to think about it for a second, and then shook his head with a chuckle. “Let’s keep it to a positive one. You guys are too quick to sense blood in the water. What’s a possible positive trait, you think, which one might get from their parents?”
“Humor,” somebody said.
His hands clapped together, the indexes of both pointing outward. “Yes!” he said. “That’s one that correlates, parent to child. What’s another?”
“Work ethic.”
“Again, yes. That’s a great one. We’ll get into environmental factors for that one too. The environment plays a huge part in all of this, but let’s just keep to what correlates genetically. Good, good.” He looked around the class, as if the students themselves were answers. His gaze never met your mom’s once. “What else?”
There was a silence for a moment. Then one hand shot up into the dead air.
“Yes?”
Timmy put his hand down. “Intelligence?”
Mr. Charles stood there for a second, his eyes receptive, but his features flat. “Yes,” he finally said, nodding slowly. “Yes. Intelligence. That’s another one which seems to – again, there are environmental factors – but it seems to correlate with who your parents are.”
Your mom’s face burned, her hands and her thighs along with it, and the thought that it would be visible to her classmates, and that she sat at the class’s front where she was the most exposed to them, something she only did to not appear suspicious to Mr. Charles when she came in early for class, caused her skin to burn red more. And her anxiety wasn’t misguided. Many in the class had noticed, with a higher volume of eyes, this time both male and female, being pivoted over to her. Mr. Charles didn’t look at her, he only looked down into his open book, a smile forming in the corner of his mouth as he ran his index finger over a line which meant nothing to him in the moment.
“One more,” he said. “Anybody have one more?”
“Courage,” Steve said.
Mr. Charles looked up.
Mr. Charles looked up.
He saw himself, sweating and pale, looking back. A distortion in the mirror made his forehead seem slightly too large. The effect was frightening, but not extreme enough to suggest to anyone that didn’t know better that the mirror was the culprit. He had enjoyed that effect whenever he brought guests over. He would smile as he waited for them to come back from his bathroom, seeing a weird mark left on their soul when they did. He had found a guilty thrill in this practice, one which was all the more thrilling because he never had to share the knowledge of it with anyone else. It was only today, for the first time, after being himself the butt of the joke, that he considered having that mirror replaced.
He looked down at his cock throbbing. “You have to,” he whispered to himself, as much of a command as could be made with a hushed tone. “Nothing’s stopping you. Only you are.”
His cock twitched, its tug against himself and gravity pleasurable.
He thought of being inside your mom, and the intensity of the excitement almost brought him to panic. “One glass would be enough to do it,” ejected from him so suddenly, he was terrified he had been heard. He looked at the bathroom door. Then he turned back. He imagined her thighs, sitting there, open and unguarded, ready for his hand, or anything else, all while her bottom lip hung open beneath her shut eyes. He imagined at that which her uniform’s skirt hid. He imagined it, in its wild newness, its shape beyond the faded plaid, its tone and its smoothness, its fine hairs, the length of its crack, and what they would appear like being pulled apart by his very own hands, his being the ones to do it, possibly first if her demeanor was anything to make predictions by.
He had been tugging himself, so reflexively he had forgot he was doing it, and at the last thought of giant soft butt cheeks being pulled open, he felt a sudden bliss and panic come over him all at once. Before he let it happen, he thought about the time he had seen his grandmother naked, finding a ledge to grasp to through that, as horrible as it was, saving himself from early orgasm, and the regret, lethargy, and cowardice (beyond the cowardice he felt now) which might come from it.
He looked down at his cock, itself still hard. “No,” he said. “Not yet.” He looked up at himself in the mirror, feeling a responsibility build in him, one which lacked an apparent narcissism for himself and whatever he wanted, as strange as that was to be the case.
“Courage,” he whispered to himself. He looked up into his eyes, their aspect lessening in dread, even if only slightly, giving way to a wild building drive, or at least a trace glimpse of it. “Just ask if she wants it?”
Your mom looked across the house, towards the kitchen counter, the top of which was becoming wet with the sweating frost of the pitcher. Its contents, blue and eye-catching, seemed to fill her mouth with its preceding ghost, she not only tasting its coolness, but its refreshing tang which she knew it would carry. Its sugary sweetness which she knew she’d have to be careful with, wanting it, and wanting it now, and knowing the possibility that she’d become so enraptured at her tongue’s first contact with it, that she might ruin her shirt, or sticky her thighs, with its spilling drops falling from the corners of her mouth. She had remembered one embarrassing moment over the summer, one where, at camp, she had sat down on the bench in the showers with a real arrogance (or at least she felt so afterwards), only to feel a sticky obstruction, about the size of a quarter, press against the inner curve of her right butt-cheek.
She stood up and spun to look at it in the mirror, only to see the little wad of discarded gum, resting on the inner cheek of her ass. When she began to pull it off, it left a long, gummy trail, from the height of her examining eyes all the way down to her inner cheek. She scowled. She knew the girl who had left it there on the bench too, the rebellious, dark-haired goth girl. Your mom never understood how someone could be that comfortable breaking the rules. She had always been too terrified to, even if she ever wanted to do such a thing, which she couldn’t, especially back then, imagine herself doing. That same dark-haired girl used to sneak out at nights, wading bravely through the pitch-black wilderness, over to where the boys’ camp was in order to “blow” one of the boys who was waiting behind his cabin for her. Your mom recollected on this, feeling a shudder run through her, as she pulled the gum, with multiple precise attempts, from between one of her most private places. She couldn’t imagine it, becoming somebody’s glorified sex toy, and what’s more, becoming one so young in life.
She sat there now, her body without stickiness, her tongue bloated with being parched rather than twisted with disgust. She looked back at the hallway. It sat there, dark and silent. He had been gone for minutes now, and she wondered at his absence. Not sure whether it implied he’d be gone for much longer, or that he was about to come back out any minute now.
She turned back, looking at the pitcher, gazing at it with a longing she had no idea was visible on her face. Its shape curved from the narrowness of its upper-neck, outward as it went down, creating a bulbous and round lower half. It sat in a shallow layer of water, which had pooled up around it, and she wondered at why it was sitting there, outside of the fridge when that was clearly where he had recently grabbed it from, its surface still frosty.
She thought then of going for the tap. She would have to grab a glass anyway, and once she did that, Mr. Charles’ tap would be as nearby the cupboard as the pitcher was. The thought of doing that instead carried significantly less anxiety for her, mainly because it seemed so much less presumptuous. And then she could quench her thirst guiltlessly, or as close to guiltlessly as possible. What’s more, if she managed to do all that before sitting back down, he probably wouldn’t be at all wise to what she had done. She could imagine that.
She turned in her chair, her bottom twisting along its seat, and she looked, one last time, at the dark hallway her teacher had disappeared in a considerable while earlier. She turned and looked back at the kitchen.
“That’s it,” she whispered to herself. “Just do it.”
She stood up, and, after taking her first step, doing so like a thief, silently, the next few came with less sheepishness, until, finally, she was walking at a normal pace, making as much noise as would come with that. It didn’t seem to be much anyways. She looked over the pitcher as she went, seeing the sink behind it on the other side of the kitchen’s floor. She then looked up at the cupboard, seeing two of them to choose from. She had no choice but to test each. Luckily, the first that she opened smiled at her with a row of glimmering glasses for teeth.
She looked back at the hallway, this time seeing deeper into it from where she stood. The bathroom door was shut. She could see the light peeking through from beneath it. She looked back up into the cupboard. She reached up and grabbed the biggest glass she could find.
She took it out, closing the cupboard slowly with her other hand, then held the glass before her, feeling a thrill rising in her. She didn’t even turn to look at the hallway this time, she only took a step forward toward the sink. As she now stood over it, looking down into it, she grabbed the cold-water tap, and then, after taking a breath, she turned it.
Cool, clean water poured out. She extended a finger off the glass to feel it. It was cool, but not cool enough. She knew it would be cooler. As she waited for it to get there, she imagined her glass if she had the courage to fill it with ice. She didn’t need to though, one glass of this water, no matter the way it was prepared, would be enough. Desire, if extreme enough, made all things sweeter.
As it began to get cold, it now being cold enough to numb her finger with any considerable time running against it, she imagined lifting the glass to her lips and feeling its cool mercy quenching her tongue, riding it down toward the direction of her throat, riding that down as well, down toward her every fibre, her body filling with its sweet, sweet trickle. It would be like the story in Exodus, the one with the stream from the stone. When she lowered her glass, ready to collect this stone’s bounty within its crystalline embrace, the thought of lifting the liquid to her lips occurred to her naturally, but with a strange detail, one unintentional, but now that it was felt, impossible to shake.
It was the liquid itself, in defiance of everything she knew about water, and tap water in particular, the liquid she imagined riding the dry length of her tongue and throat, did so with a refreshing sweetness, one which tasted to her like she imagined the wine of heaven would when hearing about it in bible study.
She pulled her glass back from the stream of falling water. She turned around. The glass pitcher, filled with gorgeous blue, sat there looking back at her, even while the water ran with an enticing whisper behind her. She turned to face that water, and she stared at it for a moment. Then she extended her glass, but with her finger pointed outward, enough so that she could use it to put pressure down on the tap. After she did so, the flow of the water slowed down, within an instant, into a small handful of solitary drops.
She turned back around, seeing the blue pitcher again, itself seeming to articulate with its very shape the blissful truth that it was no mirage she was staring at. The tap dripped audibly behind her, even as she approached the pitcher with her empty glass. And when she grabbed its handle in her drying hand, its cool exterior sent a welcome chill through her, her spine electric, especially at the place where her neck and skull met.
She tipped the pitcher and watched the glorious liquid fall in a majestic arc, toward the welcoming palm of her glass.
When her glass was filled, she put the pitcher, now lighter, back down. She paid no mind to the sound it made against the counter.
She looked at her prize, it held within her fingers now, ready to be enjoyed. Just as she lifted the glass to her lips, the bathroom door opened, though she heard nothing.
Mr. Charles moved down his hallway with his fist clenched, and his mind determined. I’m going to have a drink. Would you like one? was what he had settled on, and imagined himself, as clear as day, sitting next to his full glass as he looked away, trying not to celebrate right then and there as she emptied hers into her unsuspecting body.
He rounded the corner with the thrill of his own convictions, and the courage to make them actionable.
He froze.
She stood there, the glass’s bottom tilted up into the air, its contents falling downward, toward the direction of her open mouth, travelling down the throughway of her throat, toward the wide-reaching alleys and canals which made up the inner-workings of her voluptuous body. She looked at him as the glass emptied inside her, her eyes wide, panicked within their own composure, yet the glass remained uptilted. He looked back at her, his eyes much the same. They stared for a moment, until the glass was completely empty, and then, when it was, he subtly whimpered with his next breath, just as she put the glass back down on the counter and smacked her lips in attempt at innocuity. She looked away, over at the wall, and he at the dining room table.
There was a silence for a moment. The he spoke.
“Get any more done?” He felt a composure spill over him mid-sentence.
She looked at the table herself. “Not a lot,” she said, and began walking towards their unspoken point of rendezvous. “Just a few more words.”
“It’s better than nothing,” he said, pulling out his chair.
She passed behind him, grabbing her own chair, waiting for him to sit, and then swinging it outward, sitting next to him.
He didn’t even look at her now, he only looked down at the sheet. There was a silence for a moment. Then he said “okay….” He leaned back, eyeing at a particular line. “Huh,” he said.
She looked up at him, anticipating a barb.
“Yeah,” he continued. “That’s a really clever way of putting it. This line here.” He turned and looked her in her eyes. He smiled at her warmly. “Good job.”
“Okay then. Courage,” Mr. Charles said. He looked down at the ground as if it were a map to his own thoughts. He furrowed his brow. “So, what kind of things would one need courage for specifically?”
There was a silence.
“Shy all of a sudden. Guess courage is just something you guys lack. That’s just a joke, by the way.”
Tim put up his hand.
“Tim?” Mr. Charles asked.
“For adventure.”
A few students laughed.
Mr. Charles, his hands in his pockets, spoke as if no laughter were had at all. “Yes! Our ancestors didn’t have a mortgage, or a 9-to-5, or cable TV. They didn’t just sit around and every-once-in-a-while watch others go on adventures. They went on adventures. How primitive, hey? Having fun, living a life of meaning and excitement… Didn’t they know the joys of marking tests all day?”
“Or of doing tests,” someone suggested.
“Yes, yes. Of doing tests, especially mine,” Mr. Charles said with a smile. “But yes. Our ancestors were nomadic, Tim, you’re right. They would need to have courage to be able to go from one place to the next.” He looked back down at the ground to think. “But why?” he asked indistinctly. “Why did they have to go from place to place. What were they doing?”
“They were bored.”
Mr. Charles laughed. He then smiled in the corner of his mouth, tilting his head. “Sure. I doubt you’re wrong. But… hmm…. Let’s say, if you think about it on an evolutionary scale, why do we get bored when we sit still?”
“Because we have things to chase,” Steve said.
“Oh yeah?” Mr. Charles responded, with a grin. “Like what?”
He sat, looking down at the side of your mom’s face, its expression transforming before him as its every muscle and nerve seemed to be slowly letting go and relaxing. The blank lines of her page seemed to be rapidly pushing back as more and more of the looseleaf filled with her blue scribbles.
Her handwriting, immediately identifiable, was beautiful, he always thought so, and he relished being able to see her write like this the same way she would when alone in her own bedroom.
“I’m catching it in glimpses,” he said. “Just because I want to let you finish a bit more before I take it from you to read, but I’m noticing a few interesting lines. Unless it’s a fluke, I think it’s safe to say you’re understanding memetics very well.”
A smile formed in the corner of her mouth, though she seemed to be trying to hide it. He smiled looking at her, seeing her eyes focused on the page. Then he looked at the table in front of her, and butterflies zipped around in his gut at the sight of her glass, its volume of bright blue liquid cut almost exactly in half now. “Here,” he said, after she had stopped for a moment. “Let me take a look.” She slid it over to him, still trying to hide her smirk. He took it with a grin, his own fingers sliding it over further. “I’m excited to see what you got.” Her smile was getting harder to hide. He looked out of the corner of his eye, even while making like he was reading, and watched as she brought the glass back in front of her. He looked back at the page, and in his peripheral, he saw her bring the glass up to her smiling mouth. His own smile got wider. He looked over the paper at her. She looked at him over her uptilted glass, its contents emptying inside her mouth. Her eyes were bright and hopeful for approval. He raised the sheet for a second to gesture, a grin on his face. “This is good stuff.”
“Like food,” Tim said. Mr. Charles nodded, strafing in front of the class. “Yes, we do chase food. You ever drop a bagel and watch it roll it away? I chase pretty fast when that happens.” The class laughed. “Prey,” Tim said. Mr. Charles nodded his head knowingly. “Yes, exactly. We move as a species – go on adventures – because we needed to do so for our food. And,” he tilted his head with a smile. “…we need courage to do exactly that, right? Not just to adventure to get the prey.” He looked at your mom for a split second. Your mom shifted in her seat, feeling strangely uncomfortable, even without being able to notice or register the quick glance. “But the courage to be able to risk our lives…” he stopped for a second. “…or our reputations - hunting it.” He began moving slowly in the opposite direction. “So, to bring our perspective out as broadly as possible, we need courage to be able to hunt for food, all because food is what we…” “Need,” Steve said. “Yes, we need it,” Mr. Charles said with his finger up. “Which means it’s something we…” He waited for an answer. “Evolution gave us what so that we can chase after what we need without knowing we need it?” More silence. “It starts with a D.” “Desire,” Timmy said, after a silent moment. “Bingo,” Mr. Charles said, snapping his fingers. “We need courage because we desire things…” he again quickly glanced at your mom, this time at her still-blushing thigh. “And we feel desire because we need things.” He stopped moving and stood in place, building for dramatic effect. “A perfect circle then, isn’t it?”
Your mom fell, face first, into her own essay. It had been held in his fingers as he read, somehow getting lost in it, even in the current circumstances, and her face itself split the paper in two. He looked down between both torn and hanging sides, seeing her there, her eyes shut, her mouth hanging open, laying in his lap. She was perfectly still, until her head bobbed an inch. It did so because his cock throbbed against it. He put his hands on her head, holding it as one would cradle a bull. He almost couldn’t believe that he could feel her there, the weight of her head against his cock. His mouth was so dry looking down at her, and his heart rate and adrenaline so overwhelming, that he almost reached for her glass to drink what was left inside. Instead, he pulled his crotch out from underneath her, and then slowly laid her blonde head on his seat. He stood up, looked at her for a moment, then went over to the tap. He didn’t even grab a glass. He just turned the tap on and leaned beneath the faucet, drinking from it like an animal. He then shut it off, stood up, wiped his mouth, and turned around, resting on his sink counter. He stared at her, laying down there as gentle as a lamb in his own dining room. She was silent and so was he, each for very different reasons though. He looked out the sliding glass door to his backyard. The late-afternoon/early-evening sun was the same it would be on almost any other day. He almost couldn’t understand how that could be possible. He looked back down, across his kitchen and dining room, at her lying there, her face against a seat. “And nothing ever changes,” he told her. “That same daylight is the daylight our ancestors lived under.” He stared at her longer, within a moment of complete silence. He broke the silence by snorting to himself, alone in the irony of it. Not sure he could translate it to her even if she were awake. He smiled for no one. Then he pushed off of the counter, moving toward what would come next.
“We desire what we need, even if it’s in a roundabout way,” he said. He looked out at his class with a grin. He brought his thumbnail to his cheek and began to scratch. “Come to think of it, you were all born because of your parents’ desire.” There was a silence for a moment, at least until the first student understood what he was referencing. “Ewww.” Your mom looked back at that person. He laughed. “It’s true. What do you want from me?” A few more voices broke out in disgust after a moment of confusion. “Ugh, gross!” somebody said. Your mom turned her head. “Oh, come on,” Mr. Charles said. “Don’t tell me you were all born invetro.” Your mom turned to face the front of the class, looking up at him. He looked down at her, his face still wearing a mischievous smile.
He stared, his expression a mix of anticipation, disbelief, lust, awe, and longing. A giant female ass, its skin perfect and smooth, stared back at him, silently and without expression. “Oh god,” he whimpered to himself. “Oh, fuck yes. Oh god.” He reached out and he grabbed her cheeks, feeling them, real, soft and heavy in his palms. He slowly spread them out, watching as her concealed butthole began to peek out at him, until it lay there, innocuously, in the early-evening sun. It was the most beautiful sight he had even seen. He suddenly, as if driven by a violent, automatic impulse, lunged forward with his tongue out.
“All I’m saying is: if your dads didn’t have courage, none of you guys would be born.” “You don’t have to say that!” Steve said. Mr. Charles shrugged. “I mean, it’s a biology class. I kind of do.” Your mom was no longer the only person in class blushing. Even still, she was still being glared at more than anyone else there, perhaps even more so, because of the direction the conversation took and the dirty places it brought all their minds to. Mr. Charles put out his hand, his fingertips spread and pointing toward the ground. “It’s not my fault your moms were so desirable that your dad’s felt motivated to….” He shrugged as the class laughed and protested. “You know…”
He sat on his couch, his cock throbbing hard and free. He reached over for your mom, her white panties hastily thrown over to the side, the rest of her still in school uniform, as if she were still his student in this too. He pulled your mom’s heavy youth toward his aged body. “I went to school with your mom,” he said with a trembling timbre. “We used to sit next to each other in Senior Chemistry.” He grabbed her ass-cheek and pulled it with his palm with a hardy and full tug. “All of this must have come from your dad’s side then.” He gave her cheek a spank. His nostrils filled with her scent; her perfume, her sweat, and the rich and enticing wafting from between her thighs and butt-cheeks. His cockhead made contact with the opening, and in second, he felt her fall over it, her body engulfing his, until her face fell into place before him, her head bobbing back in a sudden tug as she hit bottom, before she fell forward, her face landing on his shoulder. He panted to himself, trying to find composure, before lifting his index finger beneath her chin and tilting it up so he could see her shut eyes and hanging bottom lip again. He put her thumb within her mouth. “A teacher is not supposed to have favorites,” he said. She opened her eyes, looking at him groggily, indistinctly. “But the second I saw you walk into my classroom, you were mine.” He placed his palm against the back of her head and he thrust her face over his shoulder. He then reached out, grabbed each giant butt-cheek in his trembling palms, and then he began thrusting.
She sat there, her legs crossed, blushing amongst the hullabaloo. “Hey, all I’m doing is telling you that you have good genes,” he said in mock innocence. “I mean, your dads are all brave. Your moms are total beauties. And… you know… a few months later, you popped out.” He relished in the chaos of a class halfway between hilarity and horror. It was this fine line he walked with them, every year, which made his end-of-year assessments, by both students and parents, so successful. He was a star, an artist, and he played his pupils beautifully, leaving them with his every lesson in a way that they could never forget, the testing, itself standardized by the state, showing exactly that. Your mom looked up at him, watching the smiling man, the one everybody loved, and who seemed to love everybody, and she could only ponder wordlessly why he never seemed to feel the same way about her.
“Oh my fucking god,” he moaned as she rode him. “This fucking ass! I love you! I need you! I have you, oh god. Oh fuck!”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “You’re all ugly cowards. Is that what you want? You want me to lie and to tell you that? Suit yourselves.” Your mom had a smile in the corner of her mouth, her fear for this man, for his every disapproving statement and gesture, giving way to that occasional acknowledgement of his charm. It was in glimpses like these, however short-lived, that she could see what everyone else did, even beyond the tarnishing atmosphere that he left with her. “You don’t think it’s romantic?” he asked, the end of the question raised into a falsetto. “Your dad saw your mom and he went ‘she’s the one.’ And oh boy! Was she the one!” “Stop, please!” “No, no. Not ‘stop!’ You guys weren’t there. ‘Keep going,’ she said.” “Ughh!” “Get me out of here!”
“Keep going,” he said, his forehead dripping sweat. “Never stop. Never stop. Oh fuck, never stop. You belong to me. This ass belongs to me.” He could feel the weight of each cheek running past his thigh, its pressure, even in passing, immense with its weight. He grabbed at her cheeks as he fucked her, continually shocked by the momentum and force of them, so much so that he had almost wished he had majored in physics. Or maybe chemistry so he could know the exact active ingredient, the name of the miracle itself, he had snuck inside her. Or neurobiology specifically, so that he knew what it was doing to her brain now. He’d even settle for a degree in English Lit, so that he could write about these experiences with perfect proficiency and craft, immortalizing them in the next great American novel; or at least capture the effervescent beauty of her face and body with the most perfect poem every penned, one which elevated her perfect butt-cheeks to the primacy of nature’s most beautiful sights and textures.
“Did I go too far?” he asked. He looked around. He laughed. Your mom sat there, the smile in the corner of her mouth getting bigger. Suddenly, he looked down into her face. “Did I?” he asked her. She looked away.
“Are you going to remember this?” he asked, his voice trembling, in constant fluctuation from the motion of her body against his. “I wish you could,” he said. “I wish you could remember how good it felt. For both of us. I wish you could remember everything I’m saying now. I wish you could know how I feel, what your body is doing to me.” She was as silent as she always was in class. Though this time, the clapping of her cheeks was a sound which filled the room with its own histrionics, quite at odd with her usual mousy self. Every part of her exploded, filing the room, and decorating his memory forever more in the process. It was impossible for it not to. It just had to be nudged in the right direction. That’s all a teacher ever did with his or her students. Give them a nudge. A push to reach their full potential. He had definitely done that with her now. “Please tell me you haven’t done this with anyone in class. Please.” He sounded as if he were not only begging her, but himself and anybody or anything listening. “You can love whoever you want. Be with anyone you want. I want you to. But please. Nobody from class. I hope some part of you can hear me now and remember this.” He held the back of her blonde head as it bobbed against his shoulder, holding it as if it were a priceless heirloom, possessive. “Nobody.”
He stared at the top of her golden head. But not for long, knowing he needed discipline. He had showed so much up until now, he couldn’t lose from a sudden lapse of it as the tension mounted. And that’s why he joked harder. “Come to think of it, your dads would need courage to fight off male competitors as well.” The class erupted again, this time as if morally offended. “Oh, oh, stop it! I didn’t mean it like that. You know I wasn’t casting aspersions on your mothers. This is a Catholic school. You’re all good Christians.”
“Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ. Oh fuck. Oh my god, fuck!” He looked up at his ceiling, seeing through it. “Thank you, God, for delivering me my daily ass.” Any religious doubt he had, the little traces of fragmentary atheism, were being completely sucked out of him by her, and with such intensity and force that he would wonder for the rest of his life how he could have entertained doubt ever before then. Even on his deathbed, he went out with a smile, his family wondering at its soft sweetness, not knowing that it was a conviction, one on par with the saints, that in finding New Jerusalem, he would find her there, exactly as he had known her back then, waiting for him. Though what he saw in those final seconds, his eyes widening madly at its sight and sensation, was that he had experienced heaven from the inside once, that one day on his couch many decades ago, with heaven, and its beautiful soft and shapely body, riding him, its very cheeks in his grasping palms. He had always managed to make everyone smile with his own smile’s infectiousness. And this would remain true, even at his own funeral service.
“All I’m saying is, guys.” He smiled at the class. “Be courageous. Trust me, the girls will appreciate it.” The class was less riotous in their objections, but they seemed to blush, boy and girl, all being embarrassed as one. Your mom shifted in her seat. He looked down at her. And rather than look away, she kept her gaze for a moment. He kept his gaze on her. Then after a short moment, she looked down. He continued gazing at her, watching her from a distance, down at the top of her bashful head.
He looked up at her face, her chin inches from his forehead. Her pussy slipped up and down his cock with its accumulating wetness. He had never been with a girl so young, missing his chance when he was her age, only knowing women of a maturity twenty-five years of age or older, when their minds were fully molded into what their lives were and would be, and their spring freshness began to give way to a summer heat (or a mysterious and wise fall if he considered the gorgeous professor he had shared a bed with once). As a teacher, he never found it hard to fight temptation, seeing even the most beautiful of his students as beauties to be, nothing more. It wasn’t until he seen her wandering sheepish and uncomfortable into his classroom, her books held tightly to her quick-breathing torso as she did, that he finally understood the draw. That was when he began to understand a lot of things that he thought he never could, including the thrill of putting a younger person on edge, battering against their already-fragile self-esteem in hopes of making it more fragile. And when finding that strategy’s limits, realizing the obvious, that it accomplished only so much, and knowing, and not minding, that it would require something a little bit more direct, manipulative, and ambitious to be able to feel her body against his without barrier; physical, social, or spiritual. He had to go out of town to buy the drugs, just so he could make sure he wouldn’t be recognized. When he drove back into town, he did so with his steering wheel shining from sweat and his stereo off, no song being able to compete with the heavy thumping of his heartbeat.
He walked, moving so at the pace of his dying-down audience. He flipped to the next page of his lesson plan. “You only get one life,” he said, adding an addendum to it all. “And then that’s it. That’s why we pass on our genes. Because this life doesn’t last forever.” He looked up at all of them with a warmth in the direness of it all. Then he looked over at your mom with a subtle eye, and she back at him. “So make it count.”
She lay on top of him, her inside full with his need for her. Even still, more need existed within him, and he held her there, close to himself, looking up into her shut eyes, taking in her face, trying to merge it as one with soul. “You’ll never understand,” he said, brushing her bangs. And then he leaned forward and kissed her on her forehead, doing so, as much her guardian as her lover, wanting to shelter her from the world around her, even as he sent his other students out there, into the wilderness, gladly and without pause. He had her here, and for the next hour, he would just enjoy the sensation of her breathing lungs and beating heart against his.
After class was over, and everyone had cleared out, she stood there at the end of his desk with her books held tightly to her stomach. Her face was still flushed red. “So anytime after four is fine. Bring your books.” He wasn’t even looking up and into her eyes. “We’ll try to get it done as quickly as possible. I know you don’t want to be spending too much time on it.” He put his lesson plan into his bookbag. “Neither do I.” She nodded her head, then she turned around and headed for the door of the class, her limbs trembling at the thought of being at his house, terrified of it the way a child feared an unfinished basement, imagining the monster it held within its darkest shadows. He kept his sights down, meaning to do so until she had left the room. But instead, he looked back up, seeing her, in all her glory as she walked away. She rounded the dooryway, not even looking back, and just before she cleared it and disappeared, a smile came to him, one of considerable warmth. She was gone. And he still stood there, looking at nothing but an empty doorway. And still, he smiled.
Epilogue: You sat in your seat, nervous in your school uniform as names were being called. The grey-haired man, his face weathered with age and experience, called rollcall for the first time this school year, and everyone responded with a confident “here” or “present.” Your name was nearing up, yet you didn’t know how many shared the first letter of your family name. Then he called your name. You squirmed in your seat, the one at the front of the class (it was the only one left), impulsively, and then you put your hand up into the air. “Here,” you said, your voice cracking. He looked down at you, then back at his sheet. Suddenly, he froze. He looked back down at you. He raised one eyebrow, and your stomach seemed to raise within you as he did. He said your mom’s last name. You stopped breathing. “That’s her.” He repeated the name. “Your mom, right?” You sat there for a moment, then you slowly began to nod your head. He nodded his. He checked you off the list. “You look just like her,” he said. A worrying vibration began to rise in you, hearing all the horror stories your mom had to tell about his mean expressions and constant pouting. You had only hoped that what she told you about his grand treatment of everyone else was true, and that you were in that blessed category: “everyone else.” It seemed unlikely now, with his discovery of who you were, that that would be the case. You squirmed again in your seat. “Yeah,” the old man said, grinning. He looked down at the next name on the roll call, and before calling it out, he looked at you again. “She was my favorite student.” Your mouth fell open. He called the next name. They put up their hand and he checked the page. “Don’t worry one bit,” he said, not looking at you as he said it. He called the next name. And before they could answer, he turned to look you in your eyes. “You’re in good hands.”