Bright Red

Your dad could barely conceal his smile as he pulled his tie up towards the throat of his shirt collar, feeling it go tight around his neck. He examined his face in the mirror to make sure that he didn’t miss a spot shaving. Then he looked a few inches to the left, to see your mom’s reflection, with the mirror version of her sitting in the mirror version of their bedroom, on the mirror version of their bed, in a mirror version of her tight red dress, putting mirror versions of her open-toed shoes on the mirror versions of her feet.

Your dad then looked back at the mirror version of his smile and thought they’re not going to believe it when they finally see her. Former shrimp, Quiet Joe sitting in the back of every class, 5 foot 5 until he was 18, coming back here to see us with a wife that looks like this. ‘What did he do to deserve her,’ they’ll ask themselves.

He looked back down at your mom as her shoe slid perfectly over her foot. She looked up to see his reflection looking down at her. She smiled back up at it.

“Do they fit?” he asked.

“Like a glove,” she said.

“Good,” he said, and grinned.

She looked down and blushed. She always felt embarrassed whenever he heaped her with praise, and she could feel it coming on soon. She held onto the edge of the bed for it, but when it never came, she could feel that leaded tinge of disappointment that comes with the minutias of companionship.

“Why so smiley?” She asked. “You excited to see your friends again?”

“Something like that,” he said, and readjusted his tie.

Your mom got up and wrapped her arms around his waist, resting the side of her head on his shoulder. She smelled sweet, her neck wet with perfume. “Something like that?”

“Yeah,” he said briskly with a grin.

She looked up at his face in the mirror, just as he looked down to adjust his watch. “Who else is there to be excited by other than friends?”

“I don’t know,” he said, coyly and looked back up at her reflection.

She looked down at the carpet. “Your teachers then?”

“Them too,” he said, and looked down at her feet, admiring the shine off her shoes.

She looked at the side of his face, preoccupied, but still beaming. She leaned in and kissed his cheek, and then pulled back and looked at him from the side, as he watched the side of her face through the mirror. “To be honest, as happy as I am for you, I feel a little jealous.”

That only made the smile on his face bigger. “Jealous?” he said with surprise.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’d have to buy a plane ticket to go to my reunion. Yours is literally down the street.”

“Almost,” he said. “Y’know, have I ever told you about how I used to take the bus through this neighborhood and just marvel at the houses here? And I told myself that one day I’d live in a house like this?” He pointed at the floor as he said it.

“A million times,” your mom said, and kissed his shoulder.

Her admired the top of her golden head in the mirror. The image of that family standing on their front lawn as he watched them through that cracked schoolbus window came back to him. The beauty and angelic delicacy of their suits and dresses, and that thick crown of golden blonde hair that hung down over the shoulder of that beautiful woman, her husband standing next to her. The two of them turning to look at each other as the photographer directed. And their immortal kiss. Still probably more real to him now than it was to them in the moment.

He looked at the golden crown of hair on his wife next to him, resting on his shoulder for support. Her dress beautiful on her, almost unreal, and him standing there in the mirror, in his favorite suit and jacket. He leaned in and kissed his wife on her blonde head. She looked at his reflection in the mirror and she smiled.

“You almost ready?” she asked.

“Almost,” he said.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll just be waiting outside.”

She got up and headed out the door. As she did, he watched her from behind, his sight on her golden head, then drifting down to her ass as it reacted to each high-heeled step like jello on a spring. Wait ‘til they get a load of her, he thought. She went through the door and turned the corner down the hallway, leaving only empty orange space.

As your mom past your bedroom door, you opened it and peeked out into the hallway. You watched her from behind until she rounded the corner, and you watched where she last stood even after that. You did this until you heard the front door open and close. Then you turned and looked over at your parents’ room, with its door slightly ajar. The light was still on. Not yet, you thought, and you ducked back into the dark of your room.

Your dad stood alone in his bedroom. The bed behind him with silk sheets blew as night air came in through the window. The indent from your mom’s bottom, in reverse through the mirror, still visible on the edge of the bed. As was the indentation from her heel on the shag carpet. He looked over at the door again, and the image of another door came to his mind.

A bell rang and after a few moments, students clad with backpacks rushed out of class through that door. A few moments later the teacher did to.

Your dad had knelt to the floor in his raggedy Black Sabbath t-shirt, blushing and trying to hold back tears. Why did he have to be such a dick? he thought to himself, as he picked up his notebook and pens. And why does Mr. Smith never do anything to stop him?

As your dad went to reach for his red pen, suddenly, a pair of feet in sandals stood there, knelt, and then a hand with two baby-blue bracelets on its wrist came down and grabbed the pen.

They both stood up.

“Here she said,” and handed it to him.

“Oh,” he said, nervously. “Thank you.”

She looked at him through her giant spectacles. “You shouldn’t let him treat you like that,” she said. “You’re like the easiest boy to get along with. It’s not right that he does this stuff to you.”

“I know,” he said. “It’s no big deal,” and he shrugged his shoulders as if he believed it.

“It is a big deal,” she insisted. “Would you ever treat anyone like that?”

“No, of course not,” he said.

“Exactly,” she said. “That guy is a jerk.”

Your dad stared into her eyes, unsure of what to say.

“Anyways,” she said. “I gotta get going.”

She turned around to leave, and your dad, out of nowhere, even by his own estimation, said “wait!”

“Yes,” she said and turned around. She sounded slightly annoyed.

Your dad stood there for a few moments longer. And then he said “never mind.”

“Okay,” she said. “See you next class.” He could hear the sense of relief in her voice. She turned around and left.

He watched her as she went. If it weren’t for her long brown hair and her pink sneakers, she would have looked like a boy from behind. She went through the door, rounded the corner, and she was gone. Your dad stood there alone.

He stood in his bedroom, admiring himself in the mirror. How things have changed, he thought. Then he looked back at the indentation on the bed. Boy, how they’ve changed. He smiled to himself thinking about how that was going to be the shape of the impression he left in the hearts and minds of his old classmates. All the ones who showed anyways. He held onto the hope that they all would.

All of them.

Including Him.

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Your mom turned her head when she heard the handle click. “Took you long enough,” she said.

“Just being fashionably late,” he retorted, as he put his key into the ignition and started the car. Its engine roared aggressively. She watched him as he smiled. He always smiled when that car started. She thought it was the cutest thing. But she never let him know she noticed.

As they pulled out of the driveway, he said “you smell nice.”

“Thank you,” she said. “So do you.”

“You lie,” he said, and looked over at her.

She was watching the road with a poker face. “Maybe.”

It was the strangest thing. He had the jitters for the first time since his twenties. When was the last time he had felt this way? It couldn’t have been on prom night. He never went. He looked into the rear-view mirror at your mom. She looked up at him. They smiled at each other through the glass. The night dark around them, the air humid, and the pavement wet, their faces and the weight of their presence next to each other like an anchor.

“Do you remember what I asked you on our first date?”

Your mom smiled. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget.”

“I asked you if you were a famous actress.”

“I know,” she said. “I remember.”

Their eyes were big and loving as they looked at each other, looked away, then looked back at each other, all through the small strip of glass that hung above their heads.

“You just looked like somebody who should be famous,” he said.

“But you said I looked like somebody specifically. Have you ever figured out who you were thinking of?”

He looked back at the road. “I don’t think I have,” he said, and he looked back up at her eyes in the mirror.

She reached over and grabbed his right hand, wrapping her fingers with his.

It had started getting dark early at around this time of year. He didn’t like it. He craved the daylight. Something about the dark got under his skin. It was a chicken and the egg sort of thing. Did he learn to dislike the dark when he was in that locker, or did he plead to not be shoved in there because he hated the dark to begin with?

He didn’t remember. All he remembered were those dark eyes, and that horrible smirk, as he was shoved by the chest into that cramped little space.

When he heard the locker door click, he was terrified, but when he heard Ray’s footsteps as he left, the horror turned to mortification. He couldn’t tell whether it was just because sound was having trouble getting to him in there or not, but he felt like the halls were extra silent that day. He didn’t hear a single pair of footsteps walking past.

As he stood there, awkwardly, too tight to sit, too cramped to stand up correctly, he could feel his bladder filling up. As time passed, it occasionally stayed the same, and sometimes it got worse, but it never got better. And he stood there, his knees bent together in that little dark box alone.

When the break bell rang, he felt a sudden hope, which was soon trampled by the stampede of feet outside. I can’t let them see me in here, he thought. Everyone still calls me Mariah Carey over something that happened last year. Mariah Carey was a nickname your dad had earned when he discovered the dead frog from bio class that someone had placed within his pencil case.

If they see me here now, they’ll call me Locker Boy or something.

He listened to the happy and proud voices of his peers as they faded in and out around his locker. When the lockers on either side of him opened or closed, he felt it through the walls of his own. The slam was much louder from the inside than it was from outside. An obscure piece of trivia. Most students his age weren’t small enough to be able to sit in a locker to find out. So if none of them had the pleasure of that happening to them earlier in their school career, which none of them had, they would never know now.

As the voices and footsteps started to trickle down in frequency and volume, he started to breathe easy, feeling safe and obscure in his own moment now, the way he wanted it. The feeling of being able to breathe was so overwhelming that it took him a few moments to remember something important.

He had to take a piss.

He clutched onto the top shelf of the locker over his head as if he were doing bicep pullups, his fingers through the gap between it and the door, and he clenched his teeth. Even if he could hold off from it getting any worse, he couldn’t hang on to any hope of it feeling any better. Why me? he thought. Why does it always have to be me? Why does it only have to be me? What have I ever done to anyone?

The answer to that question, nothing, had no effect on the feeling of warmth and uncomfortable wetness that came as an uninvited guest to his crotch area. At the same time, a warmth and wetness came to the cheeks on his face, and after a while, just like his now-empty bladder, he couldn’t hold it any longer. He began to cry.

He was crying so hard, he could almost be expected to be oblivious to any and everything happening around him, but when the sound of footsteps and voices came, he managed to choke it back to achieve silence. The two guys who passed were talking about girls and laughing with each other, until their voices disappeared with their footsteps from the echoey cave of your dad’s locker.

He stood there again in the silence. His warm, wet pants and underpants now becoming lukewarm and soggy. When he heard single sets of footprint passing from time to time, but he didn’t bother making a noise. Not like this. He had his chance during break. It didn’t matter how many people heard him banging on that locker during break, and waited patiently, even taking a late in class, to see who it was who had been clowned in that way, eventually seeing him come out of the open door like a kid rescued from a well. Whatever nickname he’d get then would be better than the one he’d get now.

He didn’t care what happened. And instead, he just stood there. And then the bell rang again, and he heard a mindless commotion all around him. Sneakers and books and locker doors slamming. Laughing and calls across and down the hall, and the stern voices of teachers telling students to have a good weekend and to be careful going home.

And then that faded, and he stood there still, his neck and back in pain, and his shoes and socks now as wet as his crotch. The entire box, the place where he put his own books and supplies, now smelling like his own urine.

He heard a few more sets of feet going back and forth and stood silent. And then after some time, silence was all he got in return. And it wasn’t until then, until he was completely alone, that it hit him.

What are my parents going to think?

He began to panic again. He knew how worried his mother could get. And he knew how angry his dad could be. He pushed on the locker door, but it barely budged. His breathing became heavy and he felt like he could see images now, vivid as daylight, in the darkness of his box.

He would be trapped there all night. Trapped there, in his awkward stance, now painful, and his wet bottom, legs, and crotch. The police would show up to school, and when nobody had any idea where he was, they’d ask to see his locker for clues, drawing a crowd as they moved conspicuously, with stern faces, the same way they would with any other incident, through the halls of that school. When he’d first be blinded by that light, he’d be praising it like it came from heaven itself, and everyone would look on, horrified by the site of this grinning shrimp in his heavy metal t-shirt, dripping urine from his pants, as two cops shook their heads at him, unable to hide their disgust.

His breathing became rapid and shallow. It was as if the pain in his neck and back now were from the weight of the burden that he was unfairly stuck with. He wanted to die. He’d take it. He’d take anything over what was coming.

Then suddenly, like cavalry from the woods, he heard it in the distance. Footsteps. He had to stop, and stay as still as possible, only allowing for the occasional drip, to listen and make sure it wasn’t a hallucination on his part. But as they came closer, he knew they weren’t.

And just as the steps were outside of his locker, just on the other side of the door, he began slamming on it. There was a shriek from without.

“You have to help me out!” he yelled. “Please!”

“What?” said the voice, startled. “Why are… you’re in the locker?”

As soon as he heard her voice, he realized he had made a mistake. There was no going back now. “Yeah, I’m in here. Go get somebody. Please.”

“Okay,” she yelled. “I’ll be back.” He could see her skinny, boyish body in the darkness, as if it were right in front of him. He closed his eyes and pressed his head onto the door.

Moments later, he could hear two sets of footsteps, a lot of busy talking, and a ring of keys being handled.

Suddenly, the door came open, and into your dad’s eyes came a bright light, blinding him like transfiguration. As his eyes started to settle, two silhouettes stood there, one tall, one short. As his eyes began to focus, so did the row of lockers behind them. And finally he knew he could see when he saw their bespectacled faces. They were both looking down at his crotch. Their eyes wide. Their mouths open.

And that’s when he knew it was all over.

He spent most of the weekend crying in bed. He knew that out of all the people who could have found him, she was the least likely to tell anyone. He hung onto that hope for dear life. Just trying to tread water for two days, until he could come back to school and see that he was proven right.

When Monday came, he walked into the back doors. He walked past a few faces, most of them in their own world. Then he saw one pair of his eyes on him as he floated past. Then another among a crowd of four. And then two girls looking over at him in between whispering in each other’s ears.

And then heard someone say, from some unknown direction, “shoved inside.” Then he heard from another direction “she found him after school.” And then “Jan and the janitor.” And then “piss.” And then “piss.” And then “piss.”

And then “Pisspants.”

And then he walked past a tall red-headed kid who wasn’t even looking at him as he went, and casually, spilling from his lips as if they had always been friends, he said “how’s it going, Pisspants?”

And that’s when your dad knew. They would no longer be calling him Mariah Carey any longer.

They pulled up into the parking lot. Your dad smiled as he casually noticed the cars around him. He didn’t say anything, but if your mom were only looking at him instead of at the front door where people were standing around smoking, she would have noticed the pride on his face. And when he turned and looked at the back of her head, her body cradled in that plush leather seat, his pride doubled.

He put the car into park, looked ahead, and then slammed on the accelerator. The engine revved loudly, startling everyone, grabbing their attention, including your mom. And when she looked over at him. He was just staring ahead at that brick wall, smiling.

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It had taken a while for anyone there to recognize him. Not only were the lights dim, but he had hit his growth spurt at 17, only a few months before graduating. Before anyone had even noticed him, they noticed your mom first. They could spot her a mile off. The way her figure moved through that room, rapidly, but with enough poise to keep the drink in her hand steady, even at a distance she was hard to ignore. Especially with that attention-grabbing red dress she wore. Many wondered who she was, what ugly duckling, or, at the very least, plain jane, had turned into the vision they were witnessing before them.

It didn’t take long for them to figure out that they had never met her before. She was there with somebody else. And that’s when they began to pay attention to the man she hung onto the arm of, and when not doing that, hovered at a close distance around like a honeybee over a flower. And when they made out the face, underneath that head of handsomely receding hair, and above that broad chest and shoulders, they couldn’t believe it.

Many hadn’t even remembered him by name. They remembered him by his nickname. The last of the nicknames he was stuck with before graduating. Most of them had. But when he saw that familiar face peaking out from behind those thick frames and lenses, she said “Joe! Is that you? Oh my God, it is!” It was as if she wasn’t the one responsible for the nickname being picked up and adopted. Maybe she had forgot.

She was standing next to her overweight husband. Her face looked the same as it did all those years ago, but now it was stranded within a sea of fat, her smile rich with laugh lines. Her chin, doubled, and her boyish body now looked vaguely feminine, but not in a way that was attractive. And her tight baby blue dress was doing it no favors.

“How are you, Jan?” he asked with a grin.

“I’m great,” she said, smiling from ear to ear. “I’m doing really good. Hank, this is my old friend Joe,” she said. “We used to sit next to each other in English.”

“What’s up?” said the fat man. A plastic cup full of beer in his hand.

“So,” said Jan, enthusiastically. “What are you up to these days, Joe? Have any kids?”

“Yes,” your dad said. “I have a boy. He goes here actually.”

“Really,” she said, her eyes wide. “Wow, that’s so exciting. He’s sitting in the same chairs that we used to sit in, probably learning from some of the same teachers, I’m guessing. What a trip! Like father like son, right?”

“Yeah. In many ways. How about you?”

“We have three kids,” she said. “they’re 13, 16, and 21.”

Your dad just nodded.

“They’re quite the juggling act, the three of them, but they give us plenty to be proud of,” she said. “Isn’t that right Hank? …Hank?”

Hank stood there, looking over your dad’s shoulder at something that demanded his attention.

Your dad began to smile, and he lifted his cup to that smile and chugged it back. And then a soft hand grabbed him by his shoulder. “By the way,” he said without turning to look. “Have you met my wife?”

Jan’s jaw dropped. “This… is this your wife?”

Your dad just nodded his head. Your mom said “nice to meet you.”

Jan leaned forward for a hug and when she pulled back she was smiling from ear to ear. “Oh my gosh, you’re so beautiful.”

“Thank you,” your mom said, embarrassed.

“Sorry,” she said. “It just slipped out. Where did you two meet?”

As your dad began to explain, with your mom interjecting in spots to fill in blanks in his recollection, Hank just looked your mom up and down, with as much subtlety as he could scrape together. He wasn’t the only one. Many others across the gymnasium were having the same issue. Including one man in particular, who was standing behind a table with ginger ale in his cup, completely bald, wearing his late father’s suit and jacket. He stood there, taking measured sips, while looking down at the stack of red jello which jiggled with each motion and gesticulation of the woman who looked up at a mystery man that she clung to the arm of.

Who is she? he thought. I think I would have remembered someone who looked like that.

And then as she looked up at the man next to her, the man she clung to the arm of dutifully, someone had fallen into a litter of chairs on the other side of the gymnasium, and the man turned his head along with a everyone else to see the source of the noise. And when he saw the side of the man’s face, his eyes went wide. He remembered a younger version of that face, with its eyes wide with pleading and neck craned underneath an aluminum shelf, seconds before he slammed a locker door on it and walked off down the hall.

I can’t believe it, he thought. It’s Pisspants.

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A shoebox sat open on the silk sheets of the bed. It had been hollowed out of all its contents. To its south, the mirrored glass of the closet door was open. To its west, the top drawer of the dresser hung awkwardly, pulled halfway out of its cradle.

The bed shook. “Mmm, fuck yes,” was practically exhaled through a fervoured voice. Next to a naked thigh sat a stack of photographs. On the top of the stack was a photo of the top inch of a naked female ass, as it peaked above white jacuzzi water. Underneath it were dozens of photos of similar kind. You lay there on the bed, completely naked, but for a mountain of bras and underwear which lay over your crotch in a pile, obscuring it from the light above. You held a single photograph above you with one hand, and used the other to hold the indistinguishable clump of fabrics over your dick and balls as you humped into it. Your cock, your balls, your hips, your pelvic region, and your thighs were bathed in its series of sensations, which overlapped between pieces, yet each piece remained its own. This is how they must have felt over your mom’s body.

Staring back down at you in the image that you held, which now eclipsed the lightbulb above, casting a shadow over your attentive face, was your mom with her hand out, her palm flat and fingers spread wide, as if to say “get out of here!” She sat on the toilet, pulling the bottom of her T-shirt down over her crotch with her other hand. Her butt sat, smushed into the porcelain. Her eyes looked worried but playful.

Your cock thrusted itself deep into the twisted mass of soft fabrics and scents, just as you sat in the cloud of your mom’s perfume, which permeated the room like her specter, reminding you that yes, she really does sleep here with your father.

You kicked in pleasure, sending the photos sitting neatly on the bed crashing to the carpet, creating a kaleidoscopic circle of photographs of your mom in her underwear, bikinis, or in various costumes and uniforms, from those of the cliché, to those that you could never imagine buying for anyone. Occasionally her ass would be bare, yet still obscured, partially or entirely by something else. There were no clear and unbroken shots of her butt crack, or any other private part of her, in any of the photos. Some side-profile images, and a few straight on shots taken through glass clouded with steam so thick that nothing of value could be made out.

That shoebox had been the greatest thing you had ever discovered. You knew something like this had to exist. And you knew today would hold the only pocket of time available for you to really have the freedom you needed to search for something like this. You were going away to college in September, so your time sneaking down the hallway and listening in the dark, your bare heels lit by the strip of light that came out from beneath their door, to your mom getting pounded by your dad were coming to an end.

And then you found this shoebox. It was as if it were a going-away present just for you. It was exactly what you knew had to be there, but you still needed confirmed for yourself. And now it was confirmed.

And yet, through the inborn jubilee of it all, it was, in its essence, the largest tease you could imagine. Not a single fully nude image. It always being so close, yet the camera lens was always deprived of it. It stunk of your father. It was his M.O. to a tee. Even the camera lens couldn’t have his most prized possession. Your mom saved from its every probing click by exactly the right factor. Each image a con. As if your mom’s naked form could only be perceived by his eyes alone, a descriptive law of nature, and not a prescription from his mouth or hers. As if every image of that unguarded crack were corrupted within the camera. Such perfection, for his eyes only, even as he flaunted everything up until that finish line. Like a man, eating cake in a restaurant window, as the hungry stood outside in the cold, looking in. An open closet full of tight dresses stared back at you, confirming, in single file, what you already knew to be true. It was just who he was.

You couldn’t believe that you were about to do it, but you knew you had to. You were going to take a souvenir. You looked at the clump of bras and panties on your crotch and you picked out a black pair with your index finger and thumb, and then the photo in your hands of your mom’s ass pressed to porcelain you set aside with it. Even now, it looked like she was objecting to you stealing the photo within the photo itself. But her playfulness in the image did her no favors. You gathered up the remaining panties and put them back in the drawer and pushed it shut. Then you picked up all the photos off the shag carpet and you stacked them and placed them within the box, exactly as you found them and you placed the box back into the closet. When you closed the sliding closet doors, you saw yourself within their mirror surface, standing there naked and erect in your parents’ room. You had never even sullied this room with your bare feet before this night. Yet just a minute ago, you sat with your naked ass on the same bed where your mom’s cheeks got clapped by your dad’s exclusive pelvis semi-regularly. You knew the sounds, but not the sight. Yet you could imagine it happening behind you, visible in the reflection, as clear to you as day.

Your mom’s imaginary eyes looked up at you.

You looked around and made sure everything looked in its rights place, and then you left the room with your little souvenirs. As you walked down the hallway, you suddenly felt a craving for sweets. Maybe some skittles and a slurpy. You put your prizes underneath your bed, got dressed, and then left the house, leaving all the lights on to scare off any potential burglars, as was the family custom. And you went peddling down the glistening wet street toward the nearest 7-11. You had no idea why you needed to do this. But you did. It would turn out to be the luckiest decision of your life.

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He put his hand out, toward the shoulder of the man who was inexplicably as tall as he was. It was as if the jet black back of his head, its purity only interrupted by the earliest signs and stages of a bald patch, waited there for him, watching to inform the other side of the head when that someone finally came. When his palm met the man’s shoulder, the man turned around, and when he saw the face of who had touched him, he smiled.

“Ray? Is that you?” asked your dad. “Wow. How’s it been, man?” And then he took a sip from his drink.

Ray was taken aback for a second. Not just by the solid weight of your dad’s upper body, which Ray could feel now through the subtleties of his own arm, which rested limply on your dad’s shoulder, but by the lack of anything even approaching apprehension in your dad’s voice.

“I’m doing fine,” Ray said. “How’s it hanging Joe?” He asked it in a dry voice, and then he put his hands back in his pockets.

“I’m happy to hear that. I’m… I’m doing great actually. You know, just the normal kind of stuff. A wife, a kid. I actually run my own business now. It was rough at first, but things have been going really well for the last few years now, I’d say. How about you? What are you doing?”

Ray stood there for a second, just staring, trying to mask his discomfort by slowing his reaction time down. “Me? Just the usual. I work… I’m doing construction work.”

“Nice,” your dad said, grinning in a way that would appear to be in good faith to any outside observer. Even Ray couldn’t tell. Not until your dad continued. “So,” your dad said. “Where’s the wife? Knowing you, she’s probably quite the brawler. Who else could keep u-”

“I’m not married,” Ray said, wishing to cut the charade short.

“Oh, I see,” said your dad, barely concealing a grin. “You’re living that bachelor life. I should’ve known.”

Ray just stood there, looking at your dad with those same dark eyes, the last pair of eyes he seen before that metal door close on him, sealing him into his future reputation and nickname. For years afterward, your dad would wish that that door was the lid of his own coffin.

But not anymore.

“Say,” your dad said. “You meet my wife yet? She’s around here somewhere.” Your dad looked around for her, until he turned his head around and realized she was standing a few feet behind him, talking to Jan. He looked at the golden yellow hair on the back of her head, and then down at her red apple of a bottom, and then he grinned, looking down and to the right the way one does when thinking about the person or thing standing behind their head. Your dad looked back up at your mom and called “honey!”

He turned around to look Ray in the eye, and he lifted the plastic cup to his face to take another sip, just as your mom turned to look. She came up behind him, as if on cue, looking at the side of his face and said “You called, babe?”

He swallowed pepsi bitter with rye, and then said, while still looking at the man in question, “you ever hear me talk about Ray, babe?”

“Ray? I don’t really recall,” she said. “Nice to meet you.”

Ray just nodded at her. She was as beautiful up close as her body implied at a distance.

“Weird,” your dad said. “He was a big part of my life. I’m surprised I’ve never mentioned him before.”

Ray looked your dad in his eyes, both meeting each other’s gaze, him not daring to look over at your mom, not willing to give your dad an ounce of satisfaction. But when beer leaked out the corner of your mom’s mouth and the cup in her hand fell to her side, and she put her hand up to her face to hold the rest in, he failed.

He looked over at her, and the extra second he took to take her in, though completely involuntary, was all your dad needed to know he had won.

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You thought about the two asses ahead of you in line back at the 7-11. The way they giggled and stumbled, grabbing at chips and magazines, making statements about them, as if they were eager to buy, and then putting them back on the shelves. The two guys they were with, almost certainly mentally high-fiving each other that the girls they were out with had gotten this drunk. It was just a sweet moment that social butterflies lived their whole lives around. There were millions of moments like that happening within this hour on the clock, the world over. And as they were just beginning on this side of the planet, the opposing side, which was now currently being kissed by the morning rays of the sun, was feeling the reality-sinking haze of the morning after. As sun shined through the window on its children, jackpots of plenty, whether plenty beauty or well-placed fat and shape, as they still slept in beds they never knew, nor would remember getting into. And beside these well-timed gifts of circumstance and shape, the satiated bodies of the less-attractive sex, which could lie proud in the previous night’s luck and success, a rain which fell on them and washed away their frustrations and angst. Every man a desert, every woman a cloud. And rarely the two shall meet.

Your bicycle sat, leaning on the bench next to you. You sat on the table, with your feet on the bench seat, occasionally feeling the droplets of water from the branch above you. It wasn’t often you came to the park at night. Mostly you came during the day to watch girls in their daisy dukes and gym shorts as they walked or jogged by. There was none of that now, instead it was replaced by a peace and silence.

The eyes of an owl sat in the distant darkness, half-a-foot above a branch, glaring at you, capturing what little light there was in the night, reflecting it back at you in two little saucers. If it wasn’t for that owl, you probably would have been jerking off right now. Nobody would see you. This wasn’t a particularly busy part of the park, even during the daytime. And now, all you could hear was the distant cars and the sound of droplets of rain falling to grass and pavement and the pressured wood of your bench.

You took a sip from your slurpee and you thought about what would be happening to those two asses. They stood there, as clear as day to you, as if you were still standing in that line. You groaned to yourself with your eyes closed. Then you looked up at those two wet saucers of light. That damn owl, you thought. He wants to watch. Pervert. I wouldn’t tug myself in front of him if he paid me.

You took another sip of your slurpee, and you ran your hand over your stiff bulge. The image of those two asses played back in your mind, one in yellow, the other in green, highlighted, as the two girls that carried them laughed and stumbled out of that door, with the two men they were with close behind.

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Your mom pulled on the bathroom door handle and stood stunned that it wouldn’t open. He watched her from afar. Your dad was mid-conversation with a few of the guys in front of him, as one of the guys raised his voice, too loud even over the music, while asking your dad a question. “Do you remember our nicknames?”

Ray kept your eyes on your mom, with the blue image of a stickwoman in her dress just over her shoulder, placed onto the upper center of the door. She tried one more time to pull it, and was shocked when the door handle left her hands, as the washroom door folded inward. A frumpy woman walked past her as she stumbled out of the way. And then when she had the space, your mom pushed her way into the washroom with her shoulder on the door as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“You don’t remember?” one of the guys asked.

“No,” your dad said.

“Mine was Motorhead, because I was always coming to school in my dad’s old chevy. Even before I had a license, I’d park it in the strip-mall parking lot down the street and walk here.”

“Yeah, man. I remember that. You remember mine?” asked the other guy and laughed.

Your dad took a giant swig of his rye and coke, while he watched the two before him with big eyes over the rim of his cup.

“I think I do,” the one in grey said. “It was… oh that’s right. It was Benchpress, because you were always in the gym. Wait a second, now. What the hell happened to you?”

Benchpress looked down at himself and laughed. “I got married. That’s what happened.”

“So,” said Motorhead, looking at your dad. “What was your nickname?”

Ray looked over as the woman’s washroom door was hit from within suddenly. He could tell that it was without hearing it because the metallic rectangle around the doorhandle reflected a vibrating light instead of a still one, the way shiny objects often do when they face a violent force. Then the door swung inwards, and your mom tumbled out of it.

“I…” your dad began to explain, and then he looked over at his wife as she walked away from the washroom door, looking at the ground. “I didn’t have one,” he said, not looking at his inquisitors.

“Oh come on! You had one. Everybody had one.”

“I think…” your dad started. “I think it was Iron Maiden,” he said, still looking away.

They followed his gaze, and when they saw what was at the end of it, Benchpress said “Geeze. Who brought her?”

Your dad smiled to himself.

“I don’t know, but whoever it was… god bless. Look at that thing! What nickname you think she would’ve gotten?”

Your dad took another gulp of his drink, the curve of the cup perfectly matching the curve of his mouth.

“I’m not sure. Maybe… 16 Wheeler?”

Motorhead thought about it for a moment, then asked “Why 16 Wheeler?”

“Cuz she’s carrying a heavy load.”

Your dad bit his tongue, marinating in the moment, which, like all moments that exist before the illumination of a glorious fact, was the sweetest among that which life had to offer. Your mom stumbled, not quite in a straight line, towards your dad’s general direction. And when she got close enough, your dad looked back at his two conversation partners. Your mom looked up, and spotted him, all two of him.

When she came up and grabbed onto his grinning shoulder, your dad just stood there silent, but for the smug smile on his face, which spoke loudly enough.

The two men stood there awkwardly, unsure of what to say, or where they stood before saying it. Ray stood on the opposite end, looking at your mom’s butt from behind, your dad’s arm wrapped around her waist, holding her tightly to his side.

Your mom looked up at his face as he stared ahead. “Drunk yet?” she asked.

“No,” your dad said.

“Me neither,” said your mom, and she hiccuped.

“I guess you two haven’t met my wife here.”

She looked at them, her eyelids heavy. “Hello,” she said.

Your dad looked down at the top of her head. “We were just talking about nicknames.”

“Oh?” she said.

The two men started to blush and fidget. Benchpress chugging his drink nervously.

“Did you have a nickname back in school?” your dad asked.

She thought for a second, her body swaying as she did. Her eyes narrowed. “Matter of fact I did.”

“Oh?” your dad said.

“It was Spiked,” she said, and smiled up at his profile.

“Spiked?” asked Motorhead, breaking the ice.

“Yeah,” she said. “I was captain of the volleyball team.”

“Oh,” said Motorhead. “I get it. Spiked.” Then a look came to him, as if he suddenly recalled something. “I got it!” he exclaimed, and he looked into your dad’s eyes. “Your nickname,” he said, causing your dad to tense up, something that your mom could feel in his arm as it pulled on her hip. “Your nickname was… oh, how could I forget it? It’s on the tip of my tongue?” He snapped his fingers twice with his left hand.

“What was it?” your mom asked, smiling up at the side of your dad’s head. He blushed invisibly in the darkness.

“Umm,” continued Motorhead.

You dad pulled your mom into himself even tighter.

“I got it!?”

Your dad stopped breathing.

“It was Mariah Carey!”

Your mom could feel your dad’s arm going limp around her waist. “That’s right,” your dad said. Almost enthusiastically.

“Mariah Carey?” your mom asked, indignantly. “I hear him sing, every morning in the shower. He’s no Mariah Carey.”

“Oh, you wanna see how well I can belt it out?” your dad asked. “All you have to do is wait ‘til I get settled in there, and halfway through, throw in a frog.”

“That’s right!” said Motorhead, connecting the dots in his mind.

“Yeah, I put Mariah Carey to shame on that day,” your dad said.

Your mom looked up at the side of his smiling face. She could see the humor in it, but she could also pick up a hint or scrap in it resembling something close to relief, like he had just dodged a bullet. And when she felt it, she felt relief herself.

The only one who noticed anything in either of them was Ray, who could see the exact second the moment had past. Because that exact second was the exact second that your mom unclenched her butt cheeks.

They were soft and loose now, as loose as they could be in that dress. And she grabbed your dad’s cup from his hands and downed whatever was left in it. This time she didn’t even notice when it dribbled down the side of her chin.

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The owl stood there on his branch in the darkness. His eyes mirrored the moon, and he watched from a distance. A young man lay on his back on the park bench table. Only an owl could make it out from a distance, but the young man lay there completely naked, humming silently in satisfaction whenever a sweet droplet of water fell from the leaf above and tapped the part of his shaft that met his balls.

You sat there, feeling like you had touched freedom for the first time in your life within the cozy embrace of that darkness. The thought occurred to you: what if they have cameras here that can see in the dark? Well, you thought, playfully. Hopefully I inherited mom’s gene for never being caught naked on camera. You laughed to yourself, imagining your naked body, green from the night vision, all visible from your head to your toes, except for the leaf tip that jutted in front of the camera just enough to block your genitals from being seen.

What an amazing superpower to have, you thought, sarcastically. Good on Dad for documenting it.

You took in a deep breath, almost as if it were a sigh.

There’s got to be more somewhere. Another shoebox or something, you thought. This can’t be as far as it goes.

Another droplet fell and massaged your swollen piece with its wet fingertip. You thought again of your mom’s big bottom pressed firmly into that white porcelain, and you hummed to yourself surrounded by nothing for miles in each direction. Without shame. The forest belongs to you and you belonged to the forest. You were hidden by its treelines and dark distance just as the thoughts were hidden within the lockbox of your head. You were untouchable.

Another droplet fell from its leaf.

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Jan stood outside, hanging onto the door frame of her family SUV, holding a lit cigarette at her awkwardly-shaped side in the darkness. “Are you sure you’re going to be alright?”

Hank sat inside, his eyes already closed. “Yeah,” he said.

“It’s not good to sleep outside. Too much humidity today. Come on inside.”

“No,” he said, groggily

“Come on. I want to dance.”

“Then dance.”

“I need a partner, silly.”

“Find a partner, then,” he said with as little effort as possible, as if the sounds were just escaping from his lips.

“Oh really now. And what if that partner pulls me close and starts squeezing me? Would you be okay with that?”

“No.”

“So you’ll come in and dance with me instead?”

“No.”

“Oh Hank. You know me too well. I’d never do that to you.”

“Cool,” he said. He hadn’t moved his head or opened his eyes the entire conversation.

“Okay then, Hank. Get a good night’s sleep. We’re going to have a long ride home in the morning.”

“Okay,” he said.

Jan turned around and stumbled back to the school in her blue heels, the front door a blur to her currently. So much so that it took her a second to distinguish the lights from inside from the headlights of the rusty-white truck that was coming in the opposite direction. She walked off to the right and then she saw Ray in the driver’s seat, looking ahead.

“Ray! Don’t tell me you’re coming to sleep in the parking lot too.” She leaned onto the doorframe before the truck even came to a dead stop. She hadn’t even noticed, even as she took a few steps to stay level with the window.

Ray didn’t say anything. He just looked at her with his dark eyes.

Jan’s eyes were barely open as she spoke “You leaving early?”

“Yeah,” Ray said. “I have work in the morning. I should probably go.”

“Oh no. Don’t tell me it’s going to be another thirty years before I see you again.”

“Yeah, I know,” Ray said. “It sucks, but I have to get going.”

Jan was staring at him, drunkenly.

“Otherwise I’ll be laying asphalt while I’m falling asleep,” he said. “I’ll get someone killed.”

His eyes were wide, and his disposition was wiry.

He’s changed a lot since we were in school, Jan thought. I didn’t even like the old Ray, he was a bully, but this is just sad. “You’ll be hung over though, won’t you?”

“No,” he said, looking at the street ahead. “I don’t drink.”

“Oh,” she said. She turned her head. Sitting in the backseat, on top of a decrepit mess of tools, workclothes, and cardboard, sat a copy of Playboy magazine. “Playboy? Ray, you dog! It’s been years since I’ve seen one of those. Hank used to get those. Now he just looks at internet porn.”

Ray looked back nervously, then he looked back up at Jan.

Jan noticed through his fidgeting that he was embarrassed. She tried, as was her usual habit, to make him feel better about it. “Don’t you find it fascinating how back then the only thing every guy wanted to talk about or look at was ‘tits, tits, tits?’” She bobbed her head with each ‘tits.’ “But nowadays, just all of a sudden, it’s all about butts?”

Ray looked up at her. He clutched his steering wheel tightly with his fist. “Yeah… I guess,” he said. A more sober Jan would’ve heard the hint of aggravation in his voice.

“Hank is a butt guy. Big time. So is Joe, apparently. We all learned that today, I guess. How about you?”

Ray was looking in his rearview mirror. “I don’t know,” he said, briskly.

“Hmm,” Jan said, with her hand to her chin. “If I had to guess… hmm… I’d say that you’re a tit guy”

“And you’d be right,” he said, impatiently.

“I knew it,” she said. She just stood there for a few seconds, her eyelids heavy. “Not that I have any dog in this fight... Anyways, it was nice seeing you again, Ray. Let’s hope it’s not another three decades.”

“Sure,” he said, and he looked out his windshield at the wet streets.

“And say hi to your mom for me. She was such a nice lady growing up.”

“Will do,” he said, and he let go of the brake.

“Goodbye.”

“Bye Jan,” he said, and stepped on the accelerator. Then he rolled up his window manually with the knob, watching Jan wave in his rearview as he did, and when it was finally closed he said to himself: “…you fat bitch.”

Jan watched his truck disappear down the road. It looked like it could fall apart any minute. She heard a final put-put from its exhaust before it disappeared from view and then the night went silent as if it had never been there at all. “Poor Ray,” she whispered to herself. He was a real jerk back in the day, but if someone is trying to make him pay for it now, they’re overdoing it.

She started moving back in the direction of the front doors. She would take a few rapid steps, then slow down to stabilize herself, then she’d do it again, not being able to keep a steady pace, the washroom was calling her.

She passed behind the back of your dad inside as she went for the bathroom door. He stood among a crowd of smiling, boozeflushed faces. Your dad laughed along with the others, though he could barely hear what they were saying anymore. He was one of many, a head of black hair among many heads, some blonde, some black, most in various stages of gray or graying, bald or balding. Beards, mustaches, clean-shaven. Women walked through and between, shadows of their younger selves. The weight hard to keep off, especially with a desk job and a couch in front of the TV in the evening. Crows feet and laugh lines. Haircuts that were ten years too late, or cropped like a boy’s hair for convenience. Dresses hung to their bodies, in pail-imitation of what they once were. And songs from their youth provided the soundtrack. If the DJ was only a bit younger, it would have been patronizing.

Yet still, even within the tangible reality of what it was, who they were, the smiles hung to their faces, genuine and bright. And the joy for life had never left, each of them, man, wife, or currently divorced, excited to be in the stage of life they were currently occupying, and even, with some reservation, excited for the stage to come next. Most of all, genuinely excited to catch up with old friends.

Your dad laughed again at a joke he could barely make out. And after his laughing died, he stood there, looking ahead at nothing in particular. Even as the circle of faces before him erupted at another joke, your dad just stood there, stonefaced, uninterested in it all. He looked down at the face of his Rolex. Then he sighed and closed his eyes. He opened them again to see more laughing faces. After a bit, he began looking around. Where’s my wife? He thought. Then he smiled at remembering something; 18 Wheeler.

He took a step backwards away from the circle of faces with both hands in his pockets and he craned his neck as he looked around.

That’s why her dress is red, he thought. So I can find her in the dark.

When he couldn’t see her, he stepped away from his circle of faces without excusing himself. He went out the front door. Two women stood there with cigarettes in their hands, holding their free arms across their chest. “Anyone see my wife?” he asked.

One of the women answered no, but the other one asked “who’s your wife.”

“She was blonde, in a red dress, about yay high.” He held his hand up to demonstrate her height with where he held it, while also inadvertently demonstrating his inebriation with how he held it.

“Oh, her. No, I don’t know where she is,” said the woman, and she put the cigarette to her mouth. Its cherry lit up red-orange in the darkness as she inhaled.

Your dad went back inside and looked at the gymnasium full of half-memories and near-memorable faces. Greys, blues, blacks, whites, even dark burgundies, but no red. And apples, pears, stick-figures, and the trunks of trees moved through and around the floor, but no hourglass. He began to walk around, walking circles around crowds and tables, trying to make sure she wasn’t hidden behind anyone or anything. He began asking people: “have you seen my wife?” or “have you seen the girl in the red dress?”

He saw Motorhead and asked him. “No, I haven’t. I’m sure she’s around here somewhere.”

He asked Benchpress, who stood next to his Indian wife, and got a similar response.

He asked another one of his old classmates, one he didn’t even remember by name, “have you seen the girl in the red dress?”

“Have I,” the guy said. “How could I miss her?”

“Where?” your dad asked.

“Just around,” the guy said. “She’s been all over.”

“When was this? I’m talking about recently.”

“Oh, no. Hmm, I don’t think I’ve seen her for a bit. Why do you ask? You planning on getting her number or going home with her? She’s not from our graduating class. I think she came with somebody. I doubt he’s going to let you get anywhere near her, the way that she looks. I wouldn’t let a girl like that out of my sight for a second if I were him.”

Your dad went out the front doors and stood off to the side as a group of three stood around smoking. He looked through his phone for your name, and then he called you. It rung a few times before you picked up.

“Hey, it’s dad,” he said. “You home?’

“Umm, yeah,” you said, “why?”

“Oh nothing. It’s nothing. Is mom home with you?”

“Umm, no. She’s not here. Why?”

“Oh. I was just wondering. She left, I was just wondering if she got home yet.”

“Not yet,” you said. “Did you try calling her num-“ and your voice cut-out mid word.

“No, no, I haven’t. I didn’t want to bother her. I was just phoning home to checkup on you and I figured I’d ask. That’s all. If she does get home, can you call-”

“Dad. Sorry, I’m a bit busy now. I have to go. Okay?”

“Okay… look though, if she comes home just text me.”

“Okay, sounds good. Bye,” and you hung up.

“Bye,” he said to no one.

He pulled his phone away from his ear and looked over at the smokers, their faces and hands just barely illuminated by the rings of light around their cigarettes. A few of them looked back at him. He looked back down at his phone and opened up the contact “Sweetheart.” He pressed call. Then he put his phone to his ear.

As he listened to the ringing from his earpiece, he slowly began to pick up a distant noise. It sounded like an ice-cream truck. He was too drunk to even think about it, never mind question it. A few of the smokers turned and looked out toward the parking lot. Your dad looked out there too. And then as soon as the ringing stopped, and your mom’s phone asked him to leave a message, the tune in the distance stopped.

Your dad stood there, not listening, just looking out at the cars and empty parking spots. “Leave a message after the beep. Beeeeeeeep.”

He hung up. And then he dialed her number again. And again he heard that jingle in the night. He recognized it now.

He held his phone by his side, allowing it to ring, and stumbled through the vibrating blur before him, wet concrete and lights in the distance. Each step felt like a foot away from the circumference of the familiar. At the same time, every inch felt like and inch moved toward a small circumference, a dot on the landscape, that held within its point, a fact alien and dark. His breathing became heavy as he moved. The jingle got louder with each second, and its nature more definite. And then he heard it, near and around him, as if it were the soundwaves it emitted which produced the blur in the air instead of rye. And then at some point, as if a switch had been turned, the sound became quieter with each successive step.

He turned around, and inside a bush he could see a bright square of white light peeking through at him. He sticks his hand in, barely feeling the pricks on the brambles, all sensation in his hand unknowable to him, and the music plays in carnival-like repetition, and he grabs onto something, the source of it all. And he picks it up and pulls it toward his inebriated eyes, exposing their inebriation with the light of the object itself.

And when his eyes finally focus, he sees a familiar face. It’s his own. It looked back at him from the screen, a grin from ear to ear, as your mom’s face, smiling as well, satiated in her love, also looked back at him, resting on his doppleganger’s shoulder. They stood still there as the device that projected their image vibrated and relayed its jingle. A jingle that was familiar to him. A jingle that was always followed by his wife’s voice, instead of by silence. And the last thought he had, before dropping his wife’s ringing phone to the wet pavement below and running back into the school screaming gutturally, was that his wife must have jokingly changed his listed name just recently.

Because instead of “Hubby” being what was listed over the image of the two of them, with a green and a red phone symbol below, like it had been this morning; now, at the very top of the image, in plain white letters, written by playful and inebriated thumbs, it said “MarIah Carye”

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It was one o’clock in the morning now. Your cock was wet. You could feel the cool sweet water all over your prick, balls, and thighs. You had never felt more alone ever before in your life. In a good way though. As if the park had become your mind manifest, and you were now existing within your own solipsism. Even the owl had left. I should jerk off and nut right here, you thought. I could just play with it here and let the water drip on the tip of my penis every few seconds. And if I cum, I cum. Who’s going to stop me?

You thought about coming back here more often, at least until you left for school. If it was this silent on a Saturday night, it would only be more so on any other day of the week.

As if in defiance of your thoughts, you heard the put-put sound of a bad exhaust. You couldn’t move. From around the corner appeared a truck. It’s paintjob a white that had yellowed with age, and with splotches of orange and brown from rust. You sat there, naked in the darkness, watching the truck which was only as visible to you as it was because of the glowing aura created by its headlights. Then its brakelights went red like the cherry of an inhaled cigarette, and the truck stopped. Then it fidgeted in place as the driver put it in park and took his foot off the brake. You could hear Guns N Roses playing from the stereo.

You lay there, looking over, not moving a muscle. You couldn’t even see your own elbow before you. The lights inside the truck turned on, and you saw a man sitting there. He turned around and started rummaging through junk in his back seat with his right hand, frantically. Then when he couldn’t find what he was looking for, he sat up, hovering over his seat, searching his back pockets for something. Whatever it was, it was important to him. And not having it had implications.

Suddenly, the bench you rested on began to vibrate. You looked down at the seat of the bench and you saw a light coming from the pocket of your pants. You rolled off of the table and went down on your knees in the grass. You pulled your phone out of your pocket.

Without thinking, possibly because you wanted to kill the light before it was seen, you answered it without even checking to see who it was.

The man stepped out of his truck, leaving his front door open. The guitar solo from It’s So Easy was projected out into the silent woods. The owl watched from afar, as if disturbed by the violation of its night’s perfect sanctity. “Where the fuck did I put it?” he growled to himself. “How am I supposed to get inside?” His teeth were clenched in his mouth as he said it. You could hear it.

Your fascination was interrupted by a voice on the line. “Hey, it’s dad,” he said. “You home?’

Not able to explain why you wouldn’t be, you said “umm, yeah,” quietly. “Why?”

“Oh nothing. It’s nothing. Is mom home with you?”

“Umm,” you said. “No. She’s not here. Why?”

The man pushed tools aside, threw around clothing with reflectors that shone in the darkness, and lifted large squares of cardboard upward to look underneath them. “Fuck!” he yelled.

“Oh. I was just wondering,” your dad said in your ear, his voice subtly cracking. “She left, I was just wondering if she got home yet.”

“Not yet,” you said, your bare naked toes and the fingers of your right hand in the grass as you peaked over the bench. The man grabbed his stack of cardboard and swung them lengthwise out of the truck. You continued, “Did you try calling her num-“ suddenly you stopped cold.

Down in that back seat, or rather lying on the floor of the truck, among clothing and boots, dust and dirt, whatever scrap cardboard was left in the truck, and large metal tools, you could see something that didn’t fit. Something that stuck out to you like a sore thumb. Or rather, everything around it was a sore thumb, and it stuck out by virtue of the blessing that it wasn’t.

It was golden blonde hair.

“No, no, I haven’t. I didn’t want to bother her,” your dad said.

You weren’t listening. Because among that golden blonde hair, or rather behind it from your perspective, was something. Something which jutted up behind that blonde head, something larger than that head with all its hair in vertical space, and wider than that head with all its hair horizontally. Something that was bright red.

“I was just phoning home to checkup on you and I figured I’d ask. That’s all. If she does get home, can you call-”

“Dad,” you interrupted, suddenly. “Sorry, I’m a bit busy now. I have to go. Okay?”

It didn’t matter what his response was, you were going to hang up.

The man yelled “fuck,” before slamming the backdoor shut, obscuring the blonde hair and that red dress. The image of that red dress, full and shapely, moving down the orange hallway of your house flashed in your mind, as if the memory itself, or whatever it was that dredged it up, had a playfulness all its own. Your breathing became heavy in the dark. Your teeth started to chatter.

“Okay… look though, if she comes home just text me.”

The man got into the driver seat. Hit his steering wheel with his fist, turned off the dashboard light, and took the car out of park.

“Okay, sounds good. Bye,” you said, and you hung up.

As he started to drive off, you grabbed your pants, without your shirt, underwear, socks, or shoes; you hastily threw them on, and you made sure to put your phone in your pocket. You tipped your bicycle towards yourself and you leapt onto the seat, hopping twice in the grass with your left foot to get your right foot over the seat and your tingling butt on top of it. You began to pedal with bare feet. You moved through the darkness, seeing a light through the treeline, and when you rounded the corner you could see the truck’s taillights again. They shone back at you, a bright red, surrounded on all ends by darkness.

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A pudgy man with gray hair looked at himself in the mirror as he washed his fat hands. You still got it, he thought. He turned off the tap, forgetting entirely to dry his hands off, and he went to the bathroom door, pushing on it with his shoulder to open it. When it didn’t budge, he stood back a little bit and looked down at the handle with a confused scowl.

Within the next second, he was on the floor with a blistering pain in his head.

Above him stood your dad in the doorway. He called out your mom’s name. Then he asked the injured man, and not politely, if he had seen the woman in red recently.

He rubbed his head with his eyes closed. “Girl in re- what the hell are you tal-“

Your dad lunged down at him and grabbed him by his tie. “My wife! Have you seen my wife!?”

“Yes,” the man screamed, genuinely afraid.

“Recently?” your dad asked.

“No, not recently.”

Your dad groaned and pushed the man back down by his chest. He turned around and went back out into the reverberating sound of Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana. He turned and looked at the door of the woman’s washroom.

A woman inside flapped her hands, as the paper towel dispenser had run dry, then she reached for the bathroom door handle, remembering proudly that she had to pull it towards herself to open it.

Your dad came to the door from outside. The rudimentary and featureless image of a stickwoman in a dress stared back at him. He lifted his foot up, and then with full force, he kicked it open with the balls of his heel. He was greeted by a woman laying on her back, passed out on the floor. He stepped over her, assuming that she passed out from drinking, and knocked violently with the bottom of his fist on the only closed bathroom stall door while calling out your mom’s name.

“Joe?” he heard a voice say from inside. “Joe is that you? What are you doing in here?”

He knew that voice from anywhere.

He kicked open the door and almost fell forward. Jan stood there with her arm out. “Oh Joe,” she said after he stabilized himself by pushing against the opposing wall, his arms extended above Jan’s head. “This is really sweet and everything. But I don’t see you in that way.”

“Where’s my wife, Jan?” he asked, with the indignance of a Hebrew prophet addressing a the pharaoh of Egypt.

“That’s right, Joe. Remember your wife. I’m a married woman. We both need to stay faithful.”

Your dad thrust his fist down toward Jan and grabbed her by the strap of her blue dress.

“No, Joe! Not like this!”

“Listen, you fat idiot,” he said, and he pulled her up off the seat by her dress strap. “Have you seen my wife!?”

“No!” she screamed.

“You sure!?”

“Yes!”

“You sure you didn’t see her leave!?”

“No, I didn’t see her. I swear.”

“You didn’t see anyone leave?”

“No! I only seen Ray leaving.”

Your dad let go of Jan and propelled backwards, falling to the ground. Looking up at Jan in disbelief “Ray!?”

Jan glared down at him through her thick frames, which were now off-balance on her face, confused at his alarm. “Oh Joe,” she said, after it occurred to her what might be wrong. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about. Surely you see that?? A woman like your wife would never leave with somebody like Ray. I mean…”

Your dad looked up at her, his eyes only growing wider as she talked.

Jan looked down at him, troubled, but managing to finish her thought. “After all, he still lives at his mom’s place.”

“His mom’s place!?”

“Yeah,” Jan said. “That’s what I said when he told me.”

“Where!?”

“What do you mean?” Jan said. “You forgot?”

Your dad scrambled to his feet.

“He was just down the street from the two of us. We all used to take the same bus together. Don’t’ you remember?”

Your dad stepped over the passed out woman and came back into the gymnasium to the sounds of The Humpty Dance by Digital Underground. Then he turned and went down the brightly lit yellow and brown hallway.

He pushed the front door open, hitting one of the smokers in his shoulder with it. It was Benchpress. “Hey!”

Your dad didn’t even hear him. He rushed on, the sky getting brighter now, yet still the parking lot was a blur. He made it to his car and began fishing in his pocket for his keys, all the while wheezing to himself “oh please! Please! No! Please!”

He found his keys and opened the door. He turned the ignition and put the car into reverse. He pulled out of the parking spot, swinging the front of his car out, aiming his hood towards his desired destination. That old familiar house. The one he thought he’d never see again. And then he put the car into drive, and slammed on the accelerator.

As loud as the music was within, and as drunk as everybody had become, there were only very few who didn’t hear the sounds of screeching tires followed by a giant metallic crunch which reverberated through those gymnasium walls.

Benchpress ran around the corner, stopping to put his hands to his knees and catch his breath. When he looked back up, his eyes went wide. His jaw dropped.

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The man took every backstreet he could. Which was good because it meant that he could afford to run a stop sign or a set of lights, keeping him from looking too long into his rearview to notice you there. It also meant that his taillights were the only set you’d be looking at for much of the journey, making sure you wouldn’t mix his vehicle up with another.

You followed his throbbing brakelights so intently that you were in danger of being hypnotized by them. For moments at a time, it would be as if you had forgotten why it was you were even following those red lights to begin with. And then when it would hit you again, you would feel that overwhelming heat come to your naked stomach and chest. The image of your mom moving down that hallway kept coming back to you. And as you looked at the back of that truck, its interior bathed in shadow, hiding a grand secret, your soul and body were jittery as one. Your teeth chattered in your mouth, and your arms rattled like bones as they clutched the bicycle’s black rubber handles.

The cool night air, dense with moisture, matched your movement with air resistance. Your hair blew with the wind, and your bare feet were still wet from standing in the park grass. The sky was getting lighter, though you barely noticed. And you barely noticed when the houses around you started to get smaller. And the boards on the windows increased in frequency and the trash and mattresses on the lawns started to become ubiquitous.

The only thing you seen, the only thing that existed, that ever existed, were those taillights. It was as if everything could be summed up within the embrace of their red glow. The thought of being suddenly without them was impossible to you, as you couldn’t imagine doing any less than following them to whatever strange vistas they called you towards. No words, no ideas, no images. Just those lights. Just those lights and it would all be okay. It was as if they spoke to you in a language only you understood, through a personality unique to themselves, and they believed in you. And they beckoned you in the dark, slyly, your partners in crime.

The truck turned into a back alley. You rounded the corner on your bike, and you put your foot down toward the moist pavement. The truck twitched as it was put in park, and the man got out. He grabbed the handle at the bottom of the garage, and he didn’t lift the garage door up, as much as tear the garage wide open to the air of the night. He got back in the truck and drove it in. And after you heard the ignition go flat, the garage door rattled closed angrily, as if it were operating itself.

You pedalled rapidly up to the fence of the house and you looked through its slits. For a while, nothing. Then suddenly, the door of the garage opened, and the man came out. And in his arms, now confirming that it wasn’t a dream – not a phantom of the night dredged up by your joyous eternity within that wooded void - you saw a shapely red-clad body and blonde hair. They moved through the backyard quickly, propelled by the motion of his anxious shoes.

When they reached the back door of the house, he let your mom’s feet fall to the ground below. Then he said “well, here we go,” reluctantly to himself, and he began slamming on the door with his fist.

“Ma!” he yelled. “Ma! Let me in!”

A light went on in one of the windows. It took a lot more banging, and a lot more calling for her to get to the door. Your mom just stood, slumped over in his arms. You couldn’t see her face. Only the back of her blonde head, which hung off to the side unsupported.

His mom must have been saying something inside, because he said “Yeah, ma. It’s me. I lost my keys again. Just wait! Unlock the door, BUT-“ he said, suddenly. “BUT… don’t open it. Just get the lock. And then close your eyes, mom. I’m coming in.”

He grabbed the doorknob and twisted it, and when the door opened a crack, he picked your mom back up again in both arms and pushed his way in. You could see the fabric of a bathrobe moving aside. “Never mind that, mom,” he said. “Just keep your eyes closed.”

As soon as the backdoor shut, you grabbed onto your bicycle, stepped on its seat with one foot, while balancing yourself with your body on the fence, holding the top of it with your right hand so that the bike wouldn’t roll away beneath you. The fence felt like it was going to snap any second. But then you found your way over, and you fell into the overgrown grass below.

You crept through its dew until you reached the back window, and then you grabbed a dirty and broken plastic chair, dragging it to the side of the house. And then you stepped on its seat to lift yourself up to the window and look inside.

Your mom lay there, silent in the man’s arms. An old lady stood aside with her hands over her eyes as her son pleaded with her. “It’s nothing, ma. Don’t worry about it. Just…”

As he turned, your mom’s head brushed past the woman. She could feel the head of hair brush into her ribs and she pulled her hands down.

When she saw the woman being cradled in her son’s arms, she just stood there, eyes wide, saying nothing.

“I told you to keep your eyes shut, mom,” he said when he noticed, and he moved into the living room. You saw that there were sheets and a pillow on the couch, with a couple of playboys on the coffee table and an alarm clock on the floor.

“What’s going on here, Ray,” she asked as delicately as possible, as if she were talking to him in the middle of him diffusing a bomb. “Who is-“

“Ma!” He yelled suddenly, shifting the volume in the room up to a new category. “No questions! You hear!? Go to bed!”

His mom stood there, her mouth open slightly, as Ray laid your mom on their living room foot rest. “Ray?” she asked.

Ray stood up. Your mom sat motionless below, chest down, with her knees on the ground, and her arms and hair hanging downward off the edges of the tiny footrest. You couldn’t see Ray’s face. But you could see his mom’s face, and suddenly the bubbling fear and confusion was replaced by momentary terror. “I said,” he growled, almost certainly through gritted teeth. “In. Your. Room.” He didn’t yell it, as much as he forced it with power and intent towards her, as if his words themselves occupied physical space.

His mom stepped almost immediately, and then stopped in place, and stood again watching.

You reached down into your pocket with your shaking fingers and you pulled your phone out. Your mouth was dry, and your eyes alive, as wiry now from their lack of sleep and exhaustion as they were from the rattling and still only half-hopeful anticipation. You looked down at your phone, which you held below the window, and you dragged the knob on the lighting bar down until the light from its face was as dim as it could possibly get. It shook in your hands. Then you lifted it up before your eyes.

Both you and his mother watched with opposing angsts as he grabbed the bottom edge of your mom’s red dress, and he pulled up violently until it was at the small of her back. Her red thong dug in between her now-bare butt cheeks, which were soft and big.

Ray kneeded them with his rough working palms. “Oh fuck,” he exhaled. “I can’t fucking believe it.”

You looked down at the face of your phone with a look on your face that was halfway between disbelief and purpose.

When he grabbed the waist of your mom’s underpants in his fingers, wrapping all eight of them around their thin fabric, pulling that fabric away from her skin in anticipation, something in you still told you that it couldn’t happen. It was a motion away, but that motion would tear the fabric of existence before it did something as simple as move a piece of cloth. You couldn’t imagine it any other way.

Then he looked up at his mom with eyes that you would never see, as if expecting her to object, maybe daring her to. She just stood there, holding her bathrobe closed, without any real indication of her internal state. Just parted lips, through which only silence was produced.

Ray looked back down at your mom, the back of his bald head reflecting light back at you. Your mom’s butt cheeks too soft to do the same. They sat there, silent, as if indifferent. The blonde back of your mom’s head the same. Her face, dark from the shadow of her own head shielding it from the light. Her eyes closed. Her mouth hanging open.

Ray pulled downwards in one fell swoop.

Everything stopped, the whole universe, but for your mom’s butt cheeks, which jiggled in reaction to Ray’s knuckles brushing past them. In between those two jiggling butt cheeks, their jelloey motion settling, sat one, long, unobscured, black butt crack.

It sat there, a factor and a fact in your frame. The record symbol still on. And it naked in front of Ray. Naked in the same living room where he slept.

You just stared down at the phone. Your expression hadn’t changed then, but everything else inside you had. Everything.

There was a time before that moment. And there was a time after it.

You took both your thumbs, pressed them both to the screen, and then pulled them away from each other, the flesh of them dragging smeared sweat along the screen. It zoomed up to your mom’s ass. Your mom’s ass and nothing else. It filled the frame.

As if the whirlwind in your mind needed release, no matter what form it took, you heard your own thoughts come from within the house, only a foot away from your mom’s naked ass. “Ohh god,” Ray whispered to himself, or so he thought. “I can’t fucking believe it.” The words were awash in a grateful sunlight that caused them to sparkle on the waves delicately. And when he grabbed both her cheeks and opened them up wide, you could hear air escaping his mouth, making a “ooohhhhhhhhh” sound so delicately that it was hard to place whether that sound instead came from the soft object he was admiring now and not him.

Then he stood up and reached for his waist. He thumbed the waist of his father’s pants, catching his underwear with it. And just as quickly, he pulled them both down. This was what made his mom start to move, from the front door toward the hallway, where her room presumably was. She knew what was happening in theory, she had to. But it hadn’t hit her until seeing her son’s naked pelvis, thighs, and dick, which came out hard and mean looking. No woman should have to see that part of her son. And to see it in this context, with a strange and beautiful woman’s red dress pulled up to her waist in a livingroom/bedroom she had never been to before, not even knowing where or who she was or her own naked ass from her elbow. Not only did his mom not have the nerve to challenge him. She didn’t have the heart to take this away from him either. His breathy jubilees, his joy and maddening anticipation manifest as she had never seen it, all reluctantly received pings to the soul of her motherhood.

She slunk back to her room not just because she had seen how angry her son was with her, but because she had seen how much he wanted it. She knew that this moment, like many before them in her life, was her coming up against something beyond her ability to quantify or see in context. Something missing from the color palette of her mind. Something that moved strutting through the columns, even as it will do when the columns dilapidate and grind to dust, even as it did before the columns were ever erected and all that existed was wild grass and mud. What she had seen out there, just like so many times before, though more so on this wet and black night than any other, was something male.

The image of that beautiful woman, lying naked with her sweet buttocks behind her head, unaware of both its nudity and its existence, even as both butt cheeks protruded over the y-axis of her head, just as her son’s lower region became bare over top of it, was an image that would stick with her forever. It was the defining image of her son, and who he was. It was his soul in one desperate picture. And it was only now that she knew it.

You stood on that chair with your pants in a pool down at your bare feet. You somehow managed to hold your phone steady, even as you tugged your cock frantically with your other hand. Your arousal only eclipsed by your sense of pathos. Your face a surface where many emotions and states meet in unison, none overtaking the other, all getting their day in court and their 15 minutes.

I knew there was more, you thought. There had to be. Just one last thing before college.

The image itself, both up-close and expansive, or at a distance with the state of the living room as its context, spoke to you in a poetry you had waited for your entire life. It was your life, or life itself, made real. It was then that you knew that beauty had no beginning and had no end. You had seen glimpses of it through life, in chinks as slight and distant as genius. But it was only now, now that you could look into its face directly, and even record it, that you knew that beauty was all there ever was. All else was illusion.

You thought about her ass moving down that orange hallway. You thought about it in that scene-stealing red. You had never seen the red of that dress before tonight, You knew that you’d never see it again. It was purchased for tonight. Purchased for a very specific purpose. Purchased to offend. Purchased to attract. Purchased to demand attention. Purchased to highlight. Purchased to remind. Purchased to demoralize. Purchased to brag. Purchased to prove. Purchased to tease. Purchased to inspire jealousy. Purchased to inspire rage. Purchased to hate. Purchased to humiliate. Purchased to destroy.

When he came to the checkout, smiling, one year and a half before tonight, he didn’t entertain thoughts of his wife’s smile as he swiped his card. He thought of a room full of frowns. He thought of her as his grenade. His weapon that he could push into that room, expecting a crater in its place. Expecting tears. Expecting wailing. Expecting radiation and ghosts.

Ray’s mom listened from her room as the flesh of the beautiful lady in her living room was being utilized without pushback by her son. She looked at her dresser and saw the photo of her son, many decades ago, with a baseball cap on his full-head of hair, holding a freshwater bass in front of him, smiling with buck teeth for the camera.

Through her door, she heard his flesh making humiliating smacks against the unguarded and divinely placed fat of a body that waltzed around through a world that ran parallel but above her own. Your mom a saved soul that had fell through the clouds and along a white column that held up heaven, towards an earth barren of anything worthy of her since the rapture. His mom knew the difference between “in spite” and “because” of. It was exactly that and those which churned her stomach which made her son excrete soundwaves of furied pleasure as if he couldn’t control himself. To explain to him what it was would only make what it was much worse. She owned a Chinese finger trap as a kid, and she knew what it meant. She could see the concentric circles and the endless Is, even if she lacked the words to express as much.

The manifestation of that Is filled your frame bountifully. In all your dad’s scenarios and schemes, this thought had never entered the venn of possible. He had dangled bait into the lake and felt the nibble through his line, only to reel it in and see that all he had left was an empty hook staring back at him, glimmering naked in the sunlight. The delicious treat he dangled sat now at the bottom of the lake, within the stomach of a large fish, where nary a protesting word from his mouth could ever reach. Her inborn ability to inspire jealousy and angst, a trait she never asked for, had a failsafe built into it that could make its gift/curse null and void. Ray had his frustrated cock balls deep inside this failsafe. The method to scratch that maddening itch only existing inside it. She was the sickness and the cure, and your dad had driven his foe to desperation out of his half-baked scheme, arrogant in its structure, to only offer the first half, expecting no consequence. His ego inflated as if it had grown over the years to meet the size of the ass it loved.

Ray’s mother’s eyes grew wet with tears in vain, it was your dad’s mother who should have spoken the eulogy for who your dad used to be, in tears above a microphone over what he had become.

Ray’s mom had come back out again and she stood in the dining room, still, with her hands in the pocket of her bathrobe. She then went into the kitchen, poured herself a glass of water and drank it in front of the rain-wet window, then came back out, stood there and watched a little bit more, then turned around and went back to her room.

Your mom’s bobbing ass filled Ray’s mom’s mind as she moved down the dark of the hallway. She had used the family computer, and occasionally seen websites that Ray, in his long-gone days of drinking, had forgot to shut down after finishing with them, cumming into his own sock. She had found out on those occasions, quite unwittingly, the ideal of what her son found attractive in women. And she noticed when she stood in the living room that she was now looking right at it. It was as if he had plucked her out of the fringes of his thought bubbles or made her in a lab. She also knew her late husband’s penis, as well as two others before it, and she had never seen or felt a penis that was as hard and throbbing as her son’s was now. Her husband had never wanted her at any point as much as her son wanted the woman he was currently having.

Her son was living a joy rare in that of a man. Namely, the joy of sexual release with a body that implied the apex of sexual experience in-of-itself. This was the joy that men created and toppled empires for. And her son was sweating, panting, and swearing in her living room, experience exactly that flavor of joy. The type that he could be happy about for the rest of his life. The type that would make him not want to ever wash his pelvis again, out of remembrance of the sweet flesh he pressed flush against it. The night his flesh smacked against hers, he played your mom like an instrument. A virtuosa, milking her ass for every sound that it could possibly make.

His mom thought about all of this, though none of it in language. It had took for her to retreat back to her room, and catch her own reflection in her mirror, for her to realize something surprising to her. She was smiling.

Ray’s testicles looked like tennis balls bouncing off of a racket. Your mom’s ass looked like basketballs being dribbled on the court with the man’s thighs the hands that dribbled them. Your feet squeeked along the water droplets on the chair below. Your balls were taut, and your cock sensitive to all as if it had been rejuvenated by those droplets that fell on it in the park. You couldn’t believe what you were seeing, even now, but to say that there was an air of unreality about it would be a lie. You had never felt more real and in the moment than you did now. Your entire life before now had been the dream. It was only now, as you stood outside this window in the fading darkness, that you had woken up.

You thought about your father. Did he know that out there somewhere, in some hidden nook or cranny of this sprawl, that the body he loved so much was living through this reality in this moment? Was he capable of such a thought? It had been over an hour since he called you. There was no way he had become less worried since then. Had he gone home looking for her? Had he unlocked the door and walked in, to see a house glowing orange as if it were occupied, only to then discover that it was completely empty.

You thought about your mom’s ass being cornered in that same gymnasium that you went to for gym class, and the thought excited you almost as much as the end result of that happening now before you. Your mom being picked out, circled, and isolated. Her mind and good-sense doused in liquor. Her ass unchanging all the while, even as her mind was. It must have been so smooth, so much so that you wondered how it was that your dad was the one making over six figures a year, and this guy was living on a couch with his parents.

Your dad’s cow was being milked for all she had. And your dad was nowhere to be seen. The image of that dress moving down that hallway, a vision, inviolate, came back to you. Then that red dress rounded the corner, and nothing was left. Only the sound of the front door opening and closing. Then you looked over at their bedroom. And you saw the light on. And you heard your dad inside. Standing there by himself. Alone.

Ray grabbed the back of your mom’s head, and pulled her closer, and then he bent down until their foreheads touched. He examined every inch of her face up close with steady eyes, as if his lower body wasn’t thrusting violently in ecstatic repetition. And as he held her there, you knew that the second your mom regained an inch of the lost territory that was her own conscious awareness, the first thing she’d be seeing inches in front of her was going to be his dark eyes staring down at her.

And you would be there to document it on video, even if it took for you to be standing there, tugging your prick in the morning light, as the birds chirped and the neighbors watched you through their backyard windows.

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He yawned as he fished out the giant steel device. The morning sun peeked over the horizon, sending rays of light lengthwise through the moisture-thick cool air. When he got hold of it, he lifted is up till back end rested on his hip. Then he plugged it in to the hydraulic pump. As he walked out from behind the fire engine, he passed the crowd of concerned and upset middle-aged faces. Some looking around, unsure of how to respond to what they were looking at, still hung over from a nights-long gauntlet of drinks and merriment. Others, like the fat woman in blue, crying into her husband’s shoulder. He passed another pudgy man who stood there, still in shock, talking to police officer who questioned him holding a pen and a notepad.

Motorhead stood near Hank and Jan amongst the crowd. “Are you sure, you’re alright? He smashed right into you.”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” said Hank.

“How’d it happen?”

“I was sleeping. I heard a bang.”

Motorhead stood there for a second, expecting more. When he realized more wasn’t coming, he said “Okay, then what?”

“Then my body hurt so I looked up.”

“………”

“………”

“Okay. Then?”

“Then I was facing the street.”

“He hit you so hard that he-”

“Yeah.”

“-caused you to spin out onto the sidewalk?”

“Yeah.”

“Damn,” Motorhead said, and he looked out at what was left of that beautiful sports car. “Do you think it’s possible that…” he started, regretting even that. “I mean, do you think he could be okay.”

“I don’t. Maybe. Maybe no,” said Hank, dryly, and his wife’s wailing doubled in intensity.

Motorhead watched as the firefighter came with the giant metallic claw, its hydraulic wire extended all the way back to the passenger’s seat of the fire engine, and when the other two saw him, they cleared out of the way. The man picked at the flakes of twisted metal as the crowd watched on, unable to look away, yet wanting to. The hope was small. The entire vehicle had been mangled except for, conspicuously, two tires which sat on the top of the vehicle instead of beneath it.

Jan peeked up at the claw’s disentangling of heavy metal, terrified at what lie behind or within it. But hope, she being the only one naïve enough for it, kept her watching, even against her better judgement. It was impossible to tell how close or far the first responder was to his target, nothing about the car made sense visually any longer. For all they knew he was digging into the trunk instead of the overturned driver’s side door. Yet the claw’s handler seemed confident in what he was doing.

Another piece of steel was peeled carelessly like orange skin. Then another. And then with the motion after that, a ray of light came through, piercing the shadow set by the wreckage. The crowd’s attention was stuck in place. And then another piece of scrap was moved. And then just over a quarter of a steering wheel. And one more piece of scrap. And then with one last careless tug, Jan lifted her head off of her husband’s wet shoulder and stood up straight staring. Everyone’s eyes went wide. Nobody made a sound.

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Your dad sat alone in a darkness. There was nothing but darkness. In all directions, and at all levels, there was only black. He sat in a void without up or down. Without sound. Without humanity or any concept of other. He may have had a body, or maybe not, but when he tried to use it, nothing moved.

So, this is what it’s like, he thought. I guess it was a little too much to hope for clouds and trumpets. Or to come back as a peacock.

He sat there. Or, at the very least, his mind did. That was the only part of him he knew was still with him. He had learned that in one of his classes in high school. Descartes was the philosopher’s name. I think therefore I am, he thought. He didn’t miss that class. He didn’t miss that school either. In fact, there wasn’t much in his early life that wasn’t a complete write-off for him.

He had no friendships of any importance. Had no adventures or no accomplishments to speak of. He didn’t even really like his parents all that much. He had grown up poor. He had grown up without confidence or pride in himself. All he ever knew was jealousy and fear and impotence.

He looked out into the darkness which stretched forth endlessly, if look was even the right word. He thought to himself, in light of all this, being here wasn’t too bad. Sure, he hadn’t brought any of the color of shape with him here, he also hadn’t brought any of his demons. There was just perpetual silence. Nothing to compare himself to. Nothing to wish he had that he hadn’t. No violence. No judgment. No deprivation, or at least no being deprived of what others had. There were no others. Just him, and his thoughts without input from without.

After a while, the darkness itself became invisible to him. And he could see, as if it were happening again, images from his life. Sitting at the back of that bus, looking out the cracked window at that happy family on their lawn. The lockers on both sides of the hall extending endlessly. His dad drunk on the couch watching reruns of Happy Days on the tube TV. The sunlight on the face of the river as seen through the blur of his tears. All there, just as it was the first time.

Good riddance, he thought.

And if he had stopped thinking and remembering there, he could have died, or continued to be dead, forever, without really minding it all that much.

But then another image flashed into his mind. Fleshy and real before him, as if he could reach out and touch it. If only he could.

He seen a framed portrait of his wife in white, and him, a lot younger, in black sitting next to her. They both smiled. Their wedding photo. The happiest day of his life. His mom told him he had never smiled so much as he did on that day. And he hadn’t stopped smiling since.

Oh honey, he thought. She was 19 then. He was 28. And though he could barely recognize himself. She had barely changed. Her smile still the same as it was the first day he met her.

And then suddenly, he noticed something strange. There was an obstruction, like a plus sign, in the center of the portrait, just in between his side and hers. And then the image started to lose focus. He thought he was losing his grasp on it, that it would float away. But then the focus came back. And just as it did, there was a clicking noise and a second of darkness. And that’s when he realized, it was a camera shutter.

Suddenly, the viewfinder that he was looking through zoomed out, and as it did, little white fingers which held the frame became visible, along with flesh that existed below and above the portrait. And as the camera pulled out more, he could see the delicate back of a woman, and her thighs. And then, just as the camera pulled out to its furthest possibility, he remembered what night it was that he was recalling.

His wife’s face, coy but naughty, looked back at him. She stood at the foot of their bed, facing the wall, looking back at her husband, holding their wedding portrait over her most sacred place.

He snapped another picture. Then the viewfinder disappeared, and he saw through his own eyes, as he let the camera hang by its strap as he gently lowered it to the ground. “Okay, then,” he said. “Drop it.”

Your mom’s fingers went out wide, and twinkled in the air empty. The portrait crashed to the ground and fell on its face, obscuring the photo. Your mom stood there, smiling back at him, her ass, from the small of her back, to the top of her thighs, completely exposed to him. The size and round shape of her cheeks impossible. He had never seen a woman whose backside was that large or round, at least not with a waist that thin, yet here she was, standing there, waiting for him, in his room. Just like every other night.

“Oh, you made a mistake by doing that,” he said wryly, causing her to giggle and tense up. “Now you’re asking for it.”

He ran up to her, just as she got on the bed with her knees in mock escape. And then for the next few minutes, he looked down at the golden crown of her head, and her ass cheeks, which rippled with his each and every pump, a visual and sensation for him and him alone.

And then he heard his wife “ohhh, ohhh, yesss!” And he leaned down and grabbed her chin, bringing his face next to hers, check to cheek, and he hears her whisper, a sensation which tickles his ear, “I love you.”

And just then, as if a balloon popped, he sat alone within that void, blackness unending, looking back at him. Mocking him. Oh God, he thought. Please let me go back!

And when he tried to focus, he saw the cherry of a cigarette brightening in the night as a woman inhales, a crowd of men laughing to a joke he can’t hear, the women’s room symbol on a blue door, a rectangle of light shining through the thickets of a bush, the wet streets through his windshield as a portion of the hood of his car smashes into a portion of a parked SUV and the world spinning before nothing.

And then he saw a red dress moving through the crowd. And heads turning as she did. And that butt, the one only he knew the true shape and feel of, weaving its way through, tensing and releasing as it did delicate figure eights through it all. And then the feeling of her hand on his shoulder. And then Him. He stood there, looking into your dad’s face with his dark eyes, trying to not looks away. But then your dad could feel your mom shake next to him, and the sound of liquor falling from her mouth, and than He turned his head, and his dark eyes were on her.

Your dad could produce no words. But his thoughts were indistinguishable from sounds now. He screamed gutturally. The void remained indifferent.

And then he did all he could think to do. He focused hard, trying to imagine his wife’s face, but he couldn’t see it. So he tried to bring to mind every part of it feature by feature. And suddenly it started to appear to him, only just vaguely. But as he built and built, and it became more real before him, suddenly he saw it in its perfect replication. He looked into his wife’s face, but then he realized, she wasn’t looking back at him. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth hung open, her head shaking as he pumped into her with energy and passion.

Then something in his peripheral caught his eye. He looked down to the side, and sitting on an unfamiliar carpet, next to an alarm clock, sat a crumpled red dress. He kept pumping into her as he stared at it. And then he looked back into her face, her eyes without love because they were shut and her mouth without a coy smile because it was hanging open.

And he looked down at his hands which held him up, and something about them didn’t look right. They were familiar to him, but they didn’t look like his hands. And so, without slowing down his pumps, he looked up. And staring back at him across the room, underneath a bald head, were those dark eyes, staring straight into his soul. And it only took him a few seconds to realize. He had been staring into a mirror.

Ray stared back at him and grinned. Then he looked back down at the feast below him, all while he continued to jackhammer into the mirrored version of her ass. Your dad watched on in horror, all while he remained thrusting at the same pace. Then he saw the mirror version of your mom start to shift about.

He watched with panicked wide-eyes, the reversed image of his wife’s ass being pummeled by Ray’s cock before him, all while those maniacal eyes, the eyes that used to make him freeze in place, looked down into his wife’s moving face.

Don’t wake up, babe, he thought. It’ll all be okay, just please don’t open your eyes. It’s just me.

Even as he said it, he pumped into the real version of his wife below him at a rate that matched Ray’s perfectly, even rising in velocity and pumps per second to match Ray thrust for thrust. He felt his balls starting to tighten up, feeling the tips of his penis getting to places inside her pussy that he never felt before. It was as if he was fucking your mom for the first time. Fucking her as if he could punish somebody through her. As if her ass had the power to do something like that, some magical quality inherit within its large cheeks, the ability to drive another mad, an ability which, like any double-edged sword, worked in both directions.

Suddenly, he heard a voice below him. “uh, ah, immm.” He looked down to see his wife, eyes still closed, moving her head from side to side, her mouth moving now.

Sweetheart, he said. Sweetheart, please look at me.

Her eyes began to open. Yes, baby, he said. I’m right here. Look at me. And as he said it, his balls began to tighten, and his whole lower body surged with an electricity, ready to let it all go.

And then your mom’s eyes opened and she looked up at him. First drearily, but then a solidity came to them, as if something caught her eye.

Then her mouth, which hung open impotently before, was now being kept slightly ajar with a deliberate impulse.

And then as if a switch was pulled, her eyes went wide.

“AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH”

Your dad’s eyelid drooped and his mouth fell open as he began to feel the sweet, sweet pillow of orgasm, cumming with a satisfaction unlike he had every felt, into his wife, and he did so even as she screamed and banged into his chest with her fists and kicked impotently in the air with her legs.

She tried to pull herself away from under him, but he had her hooked there from inside with his large prick. And her ass was too wide to make it through his arms which were pressed down firmly on either side of her waist. She was stuck there, a fuck pinata, unable to do nothing but scream as she was filled with his cum.

Your dad looked up at the mirror, seeing Ray on top of the mirror image of his wife, thrusting his final thrusts, looking back at him with one drooping eyelid and an open mouth, still somehow smiling through it, rolling in his pleasure.

And that’s when a ray of light shot through the darkness, obliterating the image before him.

Is this it, he thought, barely able to think. Am I going to the other side?

Suddenly, the eternity of black before him is torn away, and in its place is a blinding white light. It’s so beautiful, he thinks, his eyes unable to take it. Then they start to adjust, and when they he sees many figures of indeterminable shape hanging from some baseline above ground. And as his vision adjusts further, he can see that they have palms pressed together before him, all looking in his direction. And he can hear sound flooding in, obliterating the silence, like a choir of angels.

His body is rejuvenated, he can feel his chest and arms and a vibration, infinitely wonderful, travels through them in all direction and at all speeds.

And then as his eyes start to focus further, he blinks. And the angels become familiar to them, even as they hang upside down. Including one that stares at him, through thick rimmed glasses.

Next to that one is a fat male angel. In fact, they’re all overweight and misshapen, aged, balding or gray. They stand there in three-piece suits and dresses, on a world that hangs above, faces plastered with disbelieving smiles and looks of utter but welcome shock.

He hears a voice from the crowd say “I can’t believe it! He’s alive!”

He looks over slightly to see a firefighter holding a hydraulic claw next to him. And as the firefighter picks with precision at the steel shrapnel above him, your dad can feel the cool air blowing into his bare chest. He looks up to see his suit torn almost completely clean off, but without a single scratch on his body. And while his lower half was still encased in steel, he could feel know pain or numbness. He looked back out at the crowd of his old classmates, all of them smiling at him, not believing the miracle they were witnessing.

Suddenly, the firefighter pulled a giant piece of metal away with so much force that he fell backwards. And when he did it, the jaw on each face dropped. They were looking up at his crotch. And just before your dad could crane his neck to look up, he felt a drop fell to his chin.

He looked up at his lower half to see his barenaked cock, now out in the open, erect and twitching, and from the tip of that erect and twitching cock a slow rope of cum dripped downward, suspending itself by itself in the air just over his head. And there it stood, until more cum exited from his cock in a satisfying gush, causing him to vocalize its pleasure in front of the crowd, pushing what hung down with it, it all landing directly in your dad’s face.

And as the sea of faces all looked on with horror and disgust, Motorhead just stood there, staring, until it could be seen on his face that a lightbulb had went off in his head.

And then he whispered something to himself. Jan and Hank looked over at him, wondering what it was he had said. He turned his head, looked at them, and then said it again: “Cumface.”