Month: March 2008

He would come for her she knew.  He was a sweet boy, innocent in a naughty kind of way.  But she liked them like that, unspoiled, eager to know a girl in a carnal way for the first time.

Why can’t they wait to meet someone special?

They were born bastards, all of them. Better to use them and hurt them before they hurt you.

Still he was tender.

**

I’m afraid of me. I’m so bitter I’m afraid of what I’ll grow up to be, of how twisted and inhuman I’ll become. I have more than a handful of sins to my name, but nothing twists the knife like the hate I have for my mother.

She’s been working on a screenplay for about a year now, and she was watching TV and they had a commercial for a show debuting next season, which is basically the same plot as her screenplay. This is not the first time this has happened. In fact, this happens to her almost every time. I don’t know why the hell it happens. And a normal person would feel sorry for her. But I guess I’m so goddamned tired of her sadness that I don’t feel anything but hate towards her now. She complains about being overweight, and then opens up a new bag of Doritos. She complains that people are stealing her ideas for screenplays, but won’t listen when I remind her that everything is derivative. She can’t manage to see the beauty in anything she does. I feel like I’ve given up on her. But she’s given up on herself.

My mother remarried when I was fifteen.  It wasn’t until I was sixteen that her new husband started coming on to me.  At first it was the way he looked at me.  Always staring at me.  He never looked me in the eyes.  Always his eyes drifted down to my breasts and they would linger there longer than is decent for a father…even a step-father to be looking at his daughter, even a step-daughter…maybe his daughter’s friends but certainly not his own daughter.

What my mother could see in such a scrawny black bastard I’m not sure.  She seemed to have a thing for black men.  My mother really was a real slut.  My father found out that she was bopping a black guy and he left straight away.  As it turned out later, he was also seeing another woman, so my mom just made it easier for him to leave.  Because she got caught first, my father had the grounds he needed for a divorce.

Shortly after my father left, he moved in and my life began to change.

The first time he physically touched me, I was in my nightshirt standing at the kitchen counter pouring a bowl of cornflakes.  He came into the kitchen.  He was wearing his bathrobe open.  Underneath he had on boxer shorts.  I didn’t think much of it, but then on second glance, I saw his thing was hanging out of the little slit in the front.  He must have known especially when he saw my face go red.  He came up behind me and pressed against me under the pretence of getting a bowl from the cabinet.  I could feel his thing against my back.  I scooted underneath him and took my bowl of cornflakes to my bedroom.  I kept the incident to myself.

It got worse after that.  We started this goddamn bowling league and every time on the way home he would park somewhere dark and start saying things to me like how pretty I was and how he couldn’t help wanting to be near me because I was so pretty.  He would feel me up. I would beg him to stop and try to scrunch myself up into a tight ball.  He would paw me and kiss my neck until I started to cry.  Then he would say he was sorry and begged me not to say anything to anyone and that he wouldn’t ever do it again.  But every week he did.

He started coming into my room late at night.  The first few time he just stood and stared at me.  I pretended I was asleep, but I could see him standing there in his boxer shorts.

Then one night he climbed into my bed underneath my covers.  His kissed my neck and cheek and pressed himself against me…feeling me…rubbing me, touching parts of me that wasn’t proper.  I wanted him to stop; I begged him to stop.  In the end I would just lay there like a cold dead fish unmoving, no moaning, not even a protest.

**

“Jen told me you’d be here,” he said.  She caught his reflection in the mirror.

What a sweet boy.  I like him.  He’s a black kid.  I must be like my mom because I like these black boys, their dark skin.  There’s something primal…something exotic about it all…

She turned to face him.  He tried to look her in the eyes, but her lame eye looked eerie.

He had to avert his gaze.  She was too hard to stare at.  Instead, he let his eyes rest on her breasts.

Look me in the eyes you bastard.  They can’t even look me in the eyes.

If only my breasts had eyes, things might be different.

I doubt it though.  They’re all bastards, no matter how innocent they look.

Words are innocent.  They stand neutral until people get in the way hiding connotations between inflections, meaning between gestures.

“I’m going to ask you to do something for me,” she said, “but you can’t ask me to reciprocate.”

He stood beside the bed looking down on her.  The room was dark apart from the low glow of light escaping from the half-shut bathroom door.  It was enough light for him to see the smudged mascara around her eyes.  Had he done that?  She was still in her red dress, damp and clinging to her body.  Her perfume, soft and spicy, mingled with the smell of musky clothes made wet from the autumn storm they had walked through to get to here.

She didn’t belong here in this room with him.  But she had looked lost at the party like a wild animal that suddenly finds itself trapped inside a house, confronted by the screams of a frightened wife.  He had stepped in like a man full of courage and indifference to shoo the scared beast out the back door.

“Take off your shirt,” she said, “I know I have no right to ask you this, but you invited me here and I want to know how your mind works.”

Words can build bridges across chasms of incomprehension and chaos.  But as she shifted her position in the bed to make room for him, he could only comprehend the thought of her naked.  She was the real thing, sexy, hot, and ambitious.  She was also not his wife.  But then, the idea of marriage and a wife were only social constructs to legalize the transference of property. Marriage was nothing more than a legal transaction.

Morality.

Morality is for the meek, a concept that exists in the mind and free for interpretation. None of it is real.

Reality.

She was reality.

And he looked forward to getting to know reality in a way he had never known reality before.

“Where does your mind go when you are not here?” She asked.

“As far as I know, if your mind is not in the present, it goes in one of four places, either in the future, the past, subjective-me, or objective-you.”

He slipped her dress off.

She didn’t protest.

“Give me example,” she whispered, nibbling on his ear.

“A moment ago, when you walked into my room dripping wet from the rain, immediately my mind jumped to an imagined future of you naked and in my bed.  I trembled with excitement over something that was not real.  And all things considered, should never be real.”

“It is real now, no?”

“Oh yes, if we’re defining reality by what we can see, taste, touch, hear, and smell.”

He kissed her small breasts.

“Our minds can take a walk into an imagined future and fill us with excitement or dread depending on what we imagine the future to be like.  Or our minds can take a dip into the past and fill us with either nostalgia or regret depending oh how we choose to remember the past.”

“I only think about the here and now.  I care nothing about the past and even less about the future,” she said.

“That’s a good place to be if you can pull it off,” he said.

She kissed him hard. And in that moment of her hot kiss, he forgot about his past and his future.  He forgot about his obligations and responsibilities and the promises he made.

He forgot about…

The consequences…

Of a kiss…