Lamb and Shepherd

You stood in the doorway, between kitchen and dining room, looking in at your mom. She stood there, her bare feet against kitchen tiles, squeezing a copious amount of icing on one of many cookies on the tray. Your dad had warned her not to do that. He had warned her plenty of times, telling her it could mean diabetes. Telling her that diabetes meant being really sick.

She only stared at him when he said it, her mouth hanging open, her eyes bright, always, but with it never implying understanding.

He wasn’t here now. She looked down at the cookies in this moment, her eyes like porch lights in the dark, her tongue extended out the corner of her mouth, as the icing built until it looked like a to-scale model of a mountain.

You stared at her ass, the way it bobbed playfully in its bright red dress, youthfully despite its womanly size, from left to right, as she lifted the cookie and crammed it into her mouth. You watched her ass, it still moving, bobbing back and forth carelessly as she chewed.

She then suddenly stopped. She looked up, then she looked over at you, apparently noticing you there only now, despite you being there for a while. She stared at you, her mouth caked with icing. “Hmmgg,” she hummed, with her mouth full.

You looked into her eyes, saying nothing.

Then you moved into the kitchen. You looked out its opposite doorway as you neared your mom. When you saw the driveway empty of your dad’s car through the window, you placed your hand on the small of her back.

You looked into her eyes. She looked back into yours, without understanding and without confusion. Without much of anything at all.

You grabbed her hand with yours, your other hand holding her in place by her waist, as if she were a sheet in the wind, something which could just float away.

“You’re getting very sticky there, mom,” you said. You stared at her, your teeth and gums unsteady. “Do you think maybe you need a bath?”

She shook her head and hummed.

“But you’re getting dirty…” You felt against her lower back, feeling what lay below, it curving outward, swallowing more space than her thin waist would imply.

Again, she shook her head, this time more frantically than the first.

“But you’re sticky again,” you said softly. “Do you want to be dirty when dad comes home?”

You pinched her dress between your thumb and forefinger, and you began lifting it upward, its fabric sliding audibly against her thighs as it went.

She jerked away. Her dress hem snapped back into place.

You stared at her as she quickly backed up into the corner, her eyes glued to the ground. That was her usual response to stress. It was as if she could make you fade by not acknowledging you.

She, despite every inborn disadvantage, had been picking up on your tricks, and she knew when to distance herself from you when you started another one.

Despite the fact that she was no tattletale, you knew your father had to be picking up on something at this point. At this point, you were surprised he would even leave you alone with her, even just for a second. Though nothing explicit ever happened, you felt as if your intentions were so intense, while also being so shameful and strange, that some sign of them must have existed somewhere outside of yourself, visible to your father despite your wish to hide them. But then it figured that he would be clueless any sign, no matter how visible, his heart being as large as it was, that he’d have trouble spotting what dark corridors, sticky and humid, sat reverberating in the hearts of others.

He left her with you, for small pockets of time, because he trusted you. He also had no choice. He couldn’t bring her around anywhere. Or he at least lost the patience for it. Her strange noises and behaviors always drew attention, her humming, sometimes subtle and ritualistic, other times obnoxious, the loudest thing in the room.

He remembered once, taking her to the bank. They stood in line, nearing the clerk, and as she stood there, next to your father, expressionless and silent, typical besides her beauty, a young man approached her with a smile in the corner of his mouth. After greeting her (your dad looked on apprehensively, and not for the reason a husband usually would), his smile dropped out of existence. He backed up, watching as the pretty lady devolved, first into a slow hum and fidgeting, and then into a maelstrom of millisecond-long shrieks and mumbles.

Everyone in the banked to turned to look.

Your dad gabbed her by her elbow, losing his spot in the line to walk her quickly toward the door. When he did so, he did it with dual worries, the first for her and her state of mind, the second for what it must have looked like, him walking a babbling incoherent woman, a beautiful one at that, out of the establishment, new patrons coming in, witnessing it with even less context than those who had been there. Him explaining what was wrong with her, why she was the way that she was, wouldn’t help. It would only bring up more questions. He always thought about lying and telling anyone who asked that he was her brother, removing many of the most uncomfortable questions. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it, his throat tightening whenever he spoke in lies. Instead, he’d leave people (and he could see it in their faces) with the obvious question: What would a man’s intentions be in marrying a woman who was like this?

Taking her around, as much as it pained him, was out of the question now, but he couldn’t leave her alone either, her very existence, her careless whims, being a hazard, not just to property, but, more pressingly, to herself. Her gorgeous body was occasionally marked by little signs of accidents past, two fingertips rough from meeting a glowing stove element, strange beauty marks on her hip that just showed up one day, a weirdly charismatic spot on her lower lip where her fang thrust downward in excitement over a squirrel.

It was quite the lifepath your dad had carved out for himself, living a life as a barrier, a safety rail against impending disaster, the likes of which loomed about her like infirm stalagmites ready to drop. The thing which made this life on serious eggshells tolerable to him, and, more than that, the most ideal life he could have ever hoped to live, was her. Everything about her. He came home to her, his eyes as bright as hers were when they locked together again after absences which must have felt like lifetimes to her. He would always behold her, even after an hour or less of separation, as if it was his first time seeing her. And even that day, that fateful moment early on, the one which would steer the trajectory of his entire life since, he remembered it as if it were yesterday.

He saw her staring at him, without shame or reservation, from across the venue those decades ago, shocked by the assertiveness of her glance, and after being encouraged by his dad, he walked over, feeling attractive enough to do so in his white dress shirt (the top button undone). He started, stuttered, and then cleared his throat before beginning. “What’s your name?” he asked her. She stared at him with the same unflinching gaze for a second longer.

He stared into her still beauty. He was about to speak again, just something to interrupt the silence.

Then she opened her mouth.

His face dropped.

He sat in the backseat of his parents’ car, and he saw her being guided through the parking lot by her mother. Your mom’s gaze floated about, as if she were continually seeing the world for the first time. She shot from one sight to the next, distracted by every passer byer and bird overhead, and then she looked over. Catching your dad in her sight, her gaze seemed to be frozen in place now, nothing else seeming to be worthy of her attention, and she just stared. He stared back at her, his mouth hanging open, not knowing then, but taking in every inch of her face, despite the ridiculousness of her expression.

When her mom got her attention, guiding her into the passenger seat, it was only then that he noticed the shape of her body, just as it was first growing in. He still remembered it, as if it were in slow motion, the bending her dress fabric against that pronounced peach-shape as it was guided into the car seat.

He lay in bed that night, looking up at his ceiling, seeing the shape of her face in the ambiguities of the darkness, the solitary beam of moonlight cutting across the roof looking like the sun across her cheek.

And then he heard it in his mind, her voice, and, after the shock waned, he was surprised to feel what was left: his fluttering heartbeat in the darkness.

It would be six months later when her mom got into contact with his, and their get-togethers between mothers became get-togethers between him and her. As he sat with her in the living room, staring at her, their couches opposed, unsure of what to do with her, how to handle her, he felt as if he was being watched. He turned from her downward face (always gazing at the carpet) to see her mother sneaking glances at him from the kitchen.

He looked back at your mom’s downturned face, realizing she had no way of registering the nuances that he, in his inexperience, was only picking up on now.

It was a year after that, after numerous hours of socializing (if that term could even be applied here) when her mom walked in on the sunroom, where he sat, holding your mom’s soft hand within his. He looked up at the woman, in shock, letting go of that soft, warm hand. The woman stood there, staring for a moment, shocked herself. Then she turned and left the room.

He looked back at your mom, terrified he had done something wrong. He found your mom’s eyes locked on his. That’s when, despite his fear, he leaned in for his first kiss.

As he did, his lips electric against hers, her mom, beyond the doorway, her back pressed firmly against the wall, clutched her hands together, her eyes shut. She opened them, looking up toward the sky, mouthing to whoever was watching: “thank you.”

A few months after that, she was dead from leukemia.

She had left guardianship, as astonishing as it seemed, to your dad’s parents.

He spent a lot of time, sitting with her, clutching her hand in the sunroom. Nothing ever more than that.

And then your dad turned eighteen, and she would follow a month afterward. And then guardianship passed to him, after they were both married.

He smiled out at his family, spread around in clumps surrounding white-clothed tables, and she gazed out, blankfaced, at what was left of her family occupying a dwindling table-and-a-half near the front.

The silverware clanged against glass, enticing the couple on. He looked at her. She stared out at the cacophony, unnerved by it. He turned her compliant face by her chin. Her eyes locked with his, doing so as if nothing else existed, not even the hundred heads and clanging glass. Her worry was gone. He leaned forward. Their lips met, and when they did so, they did so to the crowd’s joy.

A camera snapped.

That night, for the first time under the light of the small bathroom nook, he had seen her naked, standing with her arms rigid, her elbows slightly bent, against the relaxed softness of her curves. He grabbed her, pulling her in close, clutching her nudity against his own. The rigidity in her arms slowly gave, her elbows losing tension, falling unbent. She gawked at their dual expressions in the bathroom mirror, her mouth hanging open, and his next to hers, much the same way, kissing the side of her face with his palms against the sink counter as he thrust into her softness from behind. Her humming, first ambivalent, becoming sweet, and then gaining in volume as her right eyelid drooped in sync with his own. His body slowed down its thrusts against hers. And then they stood there, under that harsh light, pressed firmly into one another, their bodies warm, comfortable where they were standing there and against one another, never wanting to separate.

They were still pressed firm in the bed. He brushed her black strands of hair, then he leaned to find her lips in the growing dark.

They had his parents’ cabin to themselves, and when their bodies weren’t locked in this chafing oneness, she would spend that honeymoon laying at the edge of the bed, making noises as she tugged on the sheets’ edge, winning or losing at some strange game, one that only she would ever know the rules to.

When he came back from the outdoors with a uniquely shaped rock, its edges consistently smooth and pearl-like, he had found by the dock, she grasped it as if it were the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

He sat on the edge of the bed, next to her lying form. Her arm extended off as she slid that rock against the ground, watching down on it consistently with fascination. He smiled at the side of her face, with joy beyond joy at seeing her happy.

Twenty years passed, and you existed now, possibly a product of that night (or many nights like it), and you could sometimes hear them, both on the bed in their room, just like they were all those years ago, your dad watching her slide that very same rock against the sheets. He’d lean in and kiss her on the side of her head whenever the compulsion came to him (and it came to him often). Sometimes he would run the softened edges of the stone up and down the curves of her body. It seemed to relax her, and for him, his excitement would rise, even with the therapeutic peace of it, especially as the rock, slowly but surely, moved inch by inch down her waist, over the shape of her hips, and then over the coming hills, the crevice between them sometimes cradling it toward her thighs. It would travel all the way down to the sole of her foot, finding vacation there, before turning, taking its journey home, over the calves, the thighs, those rustic sun-baked hills (again across or through their crevice), up the architecture of her hips, lower back, and shoulder, before finding her on the cheek of her face, her riveted eye, piercing light and all, marvelling down at it there.

You would then wait for the silence, feeling thrilled moments after it started at hearing the hushed murmurs and the occasional “shhh.” And even during that silence, and that subtle ruffling of sheets, you could still hear the mousy sounds of him kissing her on the side of her head, as if she were a priceless heirloom, holding her close to him, his body against hers. You wondered what she did then, and why she was so silent, so consistently, during, her usual hum all but disappearing. You wondered how good it must have felt for your dad. And how she could never truly say no, even if she wanted to.

You had grown up this way, so close to your mom, loving her unconditionally and not knowing anything about how your family life was different from anyone else’s. It wasn’t until you came home with school books (See Spot Run and The Cat in the Hat), expecting your mom to help you read them, like all the other kids in your class did. You didn’t know how she would, but you knew that it would happen somehow. Your teacher had told you all it would with such confidence. All your classmates seemed to be sure, and it began rubbing off on you despite your initial trepidation.

Your mom stared down at the books you had placed before her with anticipation, looking at the letters as if they were hieroglyphics.

You stared at the side of her face, seeing the lack of connection in her eyes, and the sense of overwhelming, looming inability. Not just inability, but uncomprehending, not even seeming to spot anything that should be comprehended to begin with, nothing beyond the colors. Even the images seemed to sail above her head.

Then you heard the front door open.

Your dad stood there, looking back at you two.

He hung up his coat, and then he slowly, awkwardly, came to the dining room table. He looked down at the two of you, a strange, ambivalent look in his eyes.

After that, he sat with you reading, while your mom, her dress tight against her body, lay against the floor, sliding around her rock to the sound of her own humming.

Years later, when puberty hit you like a train, you would watch her as she lay on the ground, sliding that rock across the hardwood. Despite your numerous chances, you couldn’t muster enough courage to kneel down next to her, pressing yourself to her side. You only ever watched her, liking the look of her ass as she lay there, in the clothes your dad picked out for her, bought, and dressed her in. You imagined her body naked in their room. You imagined dressing her. You imagined (and failed) having the will to have her like that every day, after every bath and every act of womanly maintenance, and somehow restraining yourself from devolving into a sweating, humping, grabbing, gripping, grunting mess every time, your hard cock moved against and inside her like a burning tongue through fruit juice. You couldn’t understand it, how your dad could possess a life and career at all, at least one which existed outside of her. Even his hobbies and leisure time (which existed few and in small amount) seemed like a distraction from what you processed as his own little personal chunk of heaven on earth.

You lay in your bedroom, often, looking down at your hardening cock, it seeming much bigger, its testicles much hairier, every passing month, the air against it vivid to the very inch, and you pondered on never having her alone to yourself. You pondered on your dad, who always held her near, watching her, waiting on her, guarding her, his lips against the side of her head, his eyes over her every inch of face.

Your cock twitched, and you furrowed your brows down at it desperately, tugging it at thoughts of what-if. You once heard her crawling down the hallway floor, her humming, and the scraping of her rock against the hardwood, getting louder. You tugged away, until you could hear that rock running against your very door. You imagined opening up that door, grabbing her by her waist and shoulder and dragging her in like a trapdoor spider, shutting the door behind her round peach of an ass, leaving the hallway dark and empty, empty all the more due to the space she once occupied.

Then you imagined, the thought sobering you, her screaming, high-pitched and inhuman, like she usually did when stressed. You imagined your dad running in, as vigilant with her as always, to see her there, eye-wide, the cheek of her beautiful face pushed outward and round by the head of your penetrating cock. And your face there, further up the bed, staring back into his own, a guilt and fear supreme above all others.

As the thought came to you, the intensity of the moment making it more vivid, you felt yourself giving into orgasm. And though you had to experience it silently, you could hear your mom outside, vocalizing for you, her humming rising as her rock crawled up the door.

You could hear your dad’s footsteps coming down the hallway. “What are you doing here?” he asked, his tone sounding no different than it used to sound addressing you when you were only a six-year old.

You knew he was standing there, outside that door, looking down at her. She wasn’t listening, or was listening without looking.

The thought of it, your dad’s upright, authoritative stance compared to her leaning child-like husk on the floor, though you had replaced his look of love with a look of longing in your mind, caused your cock to twitch. It didn’t even take for him to lift her to her bare feet, and to guide her to the back of their room for you to feel the next orgasm come.

And again, it was accentuated by her rising hum, rising, even as she was being guided away and into their bedroom. Their bedroom door shut. Her humming stopped.

At your graduation, you looked out at the seats, holding your diploma. Your dad sat there, next to an empty chair. A piece of paper was taped to its backrest with your mom’s name on it. She was at your grandfather’s, playing with her rock on his floor as the TV aired the news. That was around the time you noticed your had stopped taking her places. You were old enough to pick up the slack, a second pair of eyes on her at home to keep her safe. Maybe that was why. The burden on him was less now that you had developed the maturity she never could.

Your mom stood there in the kitchen, her mouth (and somehow her cheek and bangs) still caked with icing, her gaze dragged downward toward the kitchen tiles. Her ass, in her attempt to gain an impossible distance from you, was pressed into the sink counter, giving pressure and shape to it which was pleasing to the eye, even as her shouldered hunched downward in a strange insect-like stance.

The tray full of cookies, only a few of them iced, but always iced excessively, sat on the stove next to you.

She continued staring into nothing. Her meek rebelliousness, which had been gaining for a while, was beginning to get old to you. You wanted to raise your voice again, like you had that one time and her eyes went wide, her hum growing in volume. She stood there, shifting in place, her finger in her mouth, sucking the tips of her two rough fingers. You stared at her, and then, while staring at the icing, the signs of her guilt, on her lip, cheek, and hair, a thought occurred to you. You turned and looked to see the bag of it sitting there on the tray, a trail of icing messily worming from its nozzle. You picked up the drooping object, it expanding between your fingers.

You shook it around, making that gelatinous noise with it, to get her attention. She looked up.  

“Here mommy,” you said. “You want your icing?”

She stared at you for a second, her bottom lip hanging open.

You shook the bag a few more times, wordlessly. “Here.”

She stumbled awkwardly forward. She extended her hand, her fingers open, reaching for the bag. You continually backed up, beckoning her out of the kitchen with it.

She followed you, first wide-eyed and single-minded. But as she, progressing forward, felt the darkness of the hallway close in around her, her apprehension built. She followed now, but with each step being slower than the last.

“This way,” you said, waving her back with the nozzle.

She again stepped forward, her bottom lip trembling.

“Come on,” you said, talking softly. “You can have the whole bag of it if you’d like. Daddy isn’t here to ruin the fun.”

You let your left hand fall to your belt, and you began to undo it, slowly as to prevent the clanging noise. She had learned to fear that noise already, at least when it came from your belt.

It will be so easy, you thought, as she took another step toward you. You imagined the sensation of the icing as it poured over the length of your cock, going up its shaft, a surplus of it twirling into place over the incline of your cockhead, excess amounts dripping down your balls and thighs as you squeezed more onto its throbbing surface before her, looking down at it, your head against your pillow.

And then you imagined her breath against it. And her sticking out her tongue. And then…

Suddenly, something jabbed you in your heel, you screamed and you fell, your back slamming against the hardwood.

You looked up, expecting to see your mom scurrying away.

Instead, she was leaning there, looking down at your crotch.

The bag was gone, off to the side, a shotgun blast of white icing caking the wall and floor before its nozzle.

She ignored it, moving closer toward your crotch, lowering herself into a crawl.

Your eyes went wide.

Your cock began to harden, pushing hard against the crotch of your jeans, it bulging visibly before you, her open-jawed face approaching it in a crawl.

And that’s when you felt it, just at the moment when her hand met the floor between your kneecaps.

Your stiffening cockhead felt it pushing, the source of the pain against your heel.

She reached out and grabbed it, and then held it before her face, her eyes wide.

It was her rock.

She held it close to her cheek, nuzzling with its smooth service, rocking back and forth on her knees in the growing dark of the hallway.

You stared at her, your cock, though disappointed, still not softening.

Then you saw it, the glimmer. It flashed and then slowed down, gaining volume against the roof.

Your eyes went wide.

You turned and looked to see the bag of icing laying there.

You didn’t have time.

You turned around while rising to your feet.

By the time your bedroom door slammed shut, the front door had opened.

“Sweety!” your dad called. “I’m home!”

You listened in your bedroom as he greeted her. He went silent. Then he progressed down the hallway slowly. He then began chastising her softly for using the icing, talking to himself, after realizing the futility, about how he’d have to hide it from her, if even ever purchasing it again. “Who needs sugar anyways,” he said softly, after some thought.

You could then hear his hand sliding along the length of her body, the same way it always did when he thought out loud, speaking to her as if she were capable of understanding, the same way any man would to his wife.

You could imagine her out there, looking him in his eyes like she always did, or, if still startled, staring down at the innocuous, uncomplicated face of that rock, holding it to her lips, pushing the icing along them like gloss.

And as she did what she was doing, whatever it was, you sat there, your heart beating like a jackrabbit’s, drumming along to the melody of her unending hum.

---

He stood there, his hands in his overall pockets, not listening to his coworker speaking (incessantly as usual) about sports. He instead looked around the office with a dismissive glare, his eyes curious, always curious.

He then looked back down at the framed photographs.

You looked back up at him from the image, a lot younger then, beneath the faces of your mother and father.

“You think their kid is retarded too?” he asked his friend, interrupting him.

His friend stopped, a second longer due to the inertia of his interrupted thought. He looked down at your picture. “I don’t think he’s a kid anymore.”

“Yeah, but do you think he’s a retard is what I’m asking. Like his mom.” He stared at your mom’s face, noticing the curves of her body, like he always did, the most apparent thing in this office. “You don’t grow out of being a retard.” He looked up at her open-mouthed face. He couldn’t look away.

“I know, I know, I just meant…”

“Gentleman.” They both turned to look and see your dad entering the room, not even looking them in their eyes, his loud tie hanging from the white collar of his shirt. “What’s going on?”

The curious one turned his body away from the photograph, looking your dad as firmly in the eye as he could, his mouth straight, your mom’s face, open-mouthed, sitting on the desk at his hip.

Your dad cut between the two men, placing a defunct gauge on his desk and wiping his hands. Then he looked up at them as they reoriented themselves on his other side. “Well?” he said, impatiently.

“Uh,” the curious started, making fists in his pockets. “It’s about Lieberman’s car. The rear axle.”

“What about it?” your dad asked, adjusting the gold frame of the family portrait.

“We’re gonna need a new one.” He said it nervously, adjusting in place.

Your dad looked up at them, his eyes wide.

They both adjusted, nervously.

“I thought we agreed we could just bang it back into place.”

“Well…”

“Joe’s a friend of mine. We told him we could do it for nothing.”

“Boss, we tried, it’s…”

“Oh,” your dad said, looking out the window with his eyes wide. “You guys busted it, didn’t you?”

“It was already buste-“

“We agreed you’d be able to bang it back into place. You looked me in the eyes and told me so.”

“But-“

“You were careless and you banged it too hard,” your dad said, authoritatively, as if he could imagine it better than they could remember. “Either that or you forgot what you were doing and kept hitting it when you already had it straight.”

“It was weaker than it looked, boss.”

Your dad stared at the curious one, seeing his nerves, but not seeing the rebellion in him. He never could. “Listen, we’re not making Joe pay for a new axle. What you’re going to do, because you’re the one who messed this up, is you’re going to go to Gary’s, and you’re going to search through his scrap for an axle which fits. I’ll give him a call to tell him you’re coming.”

“But what if I can’t find nothing?”

“Then you find the closest thing, truncate it, and then use that.” He scratched his forearm. “Joe will be fine with it. The car’s a beater anyway. But I’ll let him know to be sure.”

The curious one only stared at him.

Your dad looked up, furrowing his brows. “What?”

“’Find the closest thing,’” the curious one repeated, sounding like he was trying to understand. “’And truncate it?’

“Oh,” your dad said, his voice dry, looking down to scratch his arm. “Truncate it means cut it short. To length.” He looked up, directly into his employee’s eyes. “Now do you understand. To length. Not too short. Not too long. Do you understand? Have I explained it slow enough for you to get it this time?”

At hearing that, feeling it sting initially, the man looked down at the family portrait, seeing your mom’s slackjawed expression. The sting began to wane. A smile formed itself in the corner of his mouth.

His friend looked at him, curiously, noticing, and fearing, the smile.

The curious one looked back at your dad. “Yeah,” he said, grinning. “I’ve been playing crosswords a lot recently. I think I’m almost smart enough to get what you’re laying down, boss.”

Your dad shook his head. “Whatever. Just do it.”

As the two men left the office, the curious one nudged the other. “Says we have to find a new axle, that’s what we gotta do then. I’ll drive. Let’s be on our A-game. We wouldn’t want to disappoint his high standards for human intelligence.”

His friend stared at him as they went.

“Don’t worry, it’s not too hard to get on his good side again. All we gotta do is outpace a retard.”

His smile formed, its edge curving along the memory of your mom’s curvy body, and the surprisingly pleasant shape of that indistinct look in her eyes, and the pleasing black which peaked out of her open jaw.

“Does it fit?”

“More or less,” the curious one said, standing beneath the car, hammering the newly-cut piece into place with such violence that the entire garage looked over. His body below the head was visible, the arm swung blindly, hammering the object as if he were automata. “Okay,” he said. “It’s in.”

The other one leaned over, looking up at the work. He stared at it.

The curious one looked to him, his vacant glare. “What?” he said.

His friend looked to him. “You bent it.”

“What? No, I-“ he looked back up at it, seeing a bend in roughly the same place where the previous axle was bent. He sighed. “Fuckin’ Gary and his shit parts.”

The other one didn’t say anything, knowing that the piece was pristine, especially for scrap.

The two of them stood there, looking at the fruits of their laboring, not even noticing what was coming from behind.

“What the fuck,” was all they heard.

The curious one shut his eyes for a moment, wallowing in the bliss that came with darkness. He then looked up, slowly turning around to see your dad standing there, looking, exasperated beyond all reason at what they had done.

“What the hell is wrong with you two?”

They stared back at him.

“You have two dozen years of experience, the both of you, and you can’t even put in a fucking axle.”

“It’s Gary’s parts, they’re shit.”

“Gary works at a scrapyard,” your dad snapped. “His parts are supposed to be shit! I sent you there to find something that wasn’t.”

“We’re not miracle workers,” the man said.

Your dad put his fist to his forehead, and exhaled slowly. “No,” he said. “No you’re not. You’re not even mechanics. You’re nothing.”

“That’s… I wouldn’t go that far…”

“I would,” he said. He couldn’t even look at them, his voice drained, straining. “As of now, you’re both terminated.”

He stared into the shaded lines of his fingers, hearing only the background noise of the garage. After a while, he looked up to see the two men staring at him.

He looked back and forth between them. “Terminated,” he said again. “It means you’re fired.”

The curious one stared at him, his expression unchanged. He then began to slowly shake his head. “You don’t need to explain that to me,” he said calmly. “I know what it means. I’m capable.” A smile began to slowly form in the corner of his mouth. “I’m not your wife.”

Your dad had his hand halfway lifted to his face, but it stopped in dead-air. He looked over it, seeing the grinning face of his recently-fired employee staring back at him, its rebelliousness screaming at him now, its broken deluge of hidden thoughts laid bare with just the upturned curve of his mouth.

Your dad felt the rage rising, it rising with the thought of your mom’s beautiful face, her eyes which shone with a love only that much more precious because of how out-of-nowhere it seemed to spring into being, how genuine and direct it was in between a molasses of indistinctness and ambiguity.

His face was growing into a burning red, so pronounced that even mechanics on the other side of the shop, who knew nothing of the current conflict, looked over, their awareness giving way to curiosity or fear.

And then everyone heard it. It was a snap.

And as mechanics, they all knew it was the worst kind of snap.

It was the snapping of a lift arm.

“Watch out,” the curious one called, falling out of the way. His friend did the same, but in the opposite direction.

Your dad, filled with thoughts of defending your mother, was the last to react. And rather than jump, he took his last action by turning around, seeing the growing grill of his friend’s car as it throttled toward him, riding the trail set for it by gravity. His eyes shot wide.

He looked out from between the prison of his golden picture frame, smiling out at the faces of all who knew him. The blue sky behind that golden frame, and above the brown wood of his closed casket.

You stood there in all black, your mom’s hip next to yours, with the sounds of weeping around you. Family, friends, business associates, and even employees cried as they all looked down at the photograph.

You stood silently. Your mom was silent next to you. You couldn’t look up at her. Her, of all people, with an expression uncategorizable. You could sense something was off about her, but you could never know the shape of what it was. She had shrugged and twitched away from you, naked and afraid, as you put her into her black dress this morning, your fingers falling over her various curves in your parents’ room. And then, at some point, she had just given up fighting it.

You pulled the dress slowly over her naked flesh, giving it shape through her.

You zipped it up the length of her back and you stared at her, feeling something strange amongst the miasma of loss. You both stood there, not saying anything, not knowing what to feel, until you heard the knock at your front door.

You stood there now. Your grandfather, weeping, handing you the photograph. You looked down at it, your dad’s smiling face, as the casket was lowered.

And then, amongst all the weeping, a strange hum began to form, growing, growing louder, first so only you could hear it. But as his casket settled, and was covered with spadefuls of dirt, others heard.

And by the time the casket face was caked with soft earth, the crying had subdued, either gone entirely, or numbed to the point of a small whine, all listening, hearing the growing, impenetrable hum which seemed to come from a well of sadness so deep, so profound, that no one else there, not even you or your grandparents, felt the right to compete with it.

Your mom fell to her knees, her humming only growing as everyone watched her, her sadness expressing itself at the edges of her being, growing louder.

And it continued, her forehead against the grass, as your dad’s grave was packed flat with one last run of the shovel.

You sat there, next to the plot, as she lay, running her hands against it. Occasionally, she would dig at its dirt with trembling fingers, and you’d let her for a moment, before stopping her.

“You think it’s time to take her home?” your grandfather said, his face growing more vague against the darkening sky.

You looked at her, her ass up in the air as she dug, the thought of those two men from earlier, the men who left in that rusted blue pickup truck, the ugliest thing in the church’s parking lot that day. The men everyone whispered about when at distance from them (“they didn’t maintain that lift, even though he always told them to,” “I can’t believe they’re here. There’s no way they don’t know it’s their fault.”), staring at her every so often, one of them, the corner of his mouth rising, ever-so-subtly, even as she hummed with broken love; it played in your mind.

You felt your grandfather’s hand against your shoulder, asking his question again silently with this gesture.

You watched your mom, her face pressed against the dirt. Her ass, heart-shaped and soft, up and in the air, subtly jiggling with her humming. “Yeah,” you said, her butt cheeks shifting their weight wildly with the minuscule movement of the rest of her. “It’s time.”

You looked down at the dotted lines, your mom’s body in the chair next to you, still in black, her ass filling its wooden seat.

“Something wrong?” your dad’s lawyer asked.

“No,” you said.

“Okay,” he said. “Just like I was saying. Just sign that line, and guardianship goes to you.”

Your mom hummed next to you. He looked at her, smiling politely, solemnly, as you looked down at that line.

“It’ll be okay,” he told her, extended his fingers out to hers.

She said nothing, not even looking him in his eyes. She pulled away her hand and held it in her lap.

You sat in your dad’s seat now. You put the pen’s tip to the line, and with a few strokes of your wrist, her fate was yours to decide.

You sat behind the wheel of your father’s car, your mom silent in the seat next to you. You remembered, not long ago at all, riding in this car. It felt strange now to hold its steering wheel in your palms.

You didn’t look at your mom, only trying to remember what her body looked like this morning, as you slid it into its mourning attire. You couldn’t bring yourself to take liberties then, even as your sights filled with the forbidden inches of her flesh, its every uncovered nook and curve, her face above it twitching with discomfort, both physical and more.

But now that it was done, your father buried, your name on that dotted line, you vibrated with the thought of her. She was silent. And it was her silence now which spoke volumes to you, its uncharacteristic void, implying to you that she, much like yourself, was pondering, in whatever way she could, what was to come next.

Your cock throbbed in your pants.

You took one last turn of your wheel before your home came into view, and when it did, sitting in the driveway, itself a conspicuous eyesore, sat a rusty blue pickup truck.

Your breathing stopped.

“What are we doing here?” he asked.

The curious one looked at him with disgust. “We’re here to pay our respects,” he said. “What are you, an animal?”

The other one stood for a moment, looking around, seeing a large portrait, a photograph from your parents’ wedding, staring back at them above the fireplace. Your dad smiled next to your mom, staring out blissfully at the two employees which gave him the most grief. “Pay our respects to who?” he asked.

His friend looked back at him. “To whom,” he corrected. His mouth began to form into a smile.

They stood there in that moment, only for its texture to be interrupted by the sound of a slamming door.

The both looked to the front door to see it still shut, their dirty shoes in a heap before it and nothing else.

That’s when they realized, the slam came from the back door.

You brought your mom around the house, ducking her, with your hand against the back of her neck, forcefully beneath every window as you went. You didn’t want to look inside. You knew they were there. Your mom hummed as you rounded the back, and her humming grew in intensity as the posture you forced her into became uncomfortable. You shushed her. She stopped. But then she began again as you ducked under the next window.

Your hand ran against the small of her back in an attempt to calm her, but you could tell as you neared the back door that it was only making her more uneasy, her hum being one of many signs to that being true. You kept your hand their anyways. You couldn’t pull it away. Not until your next move. Suddenly, and with a very motivated hand, you pulled the back door open, gripped your mom, your fingers digging into the back of her neck, and you shoved her within, seeing her stumble. You slammed the door shut behind her before you could even see if she’d fall or not.

She recovered with her hands against the doorway to the kitchen, and she turned frantically to look at you through the glass, the shock in her eyes visible even through a pane of glass obscured by reflected overcast. You were never sure how many dots were being connected within her mind, or how effectively she could maintain those connections to any workable degree. As she looked at you, her mouth open, not out of routine now, but the product of a genuine shock, you only turned slowly, leaving her sight, your hand on the doorknob, holding it in place as you pressed your back against the stucco wall next to the door.

As she looked out at the void where you were, her eyes filled with horrified panic, you looked up at the blue sky, seeing the soft clouds drift aimlessly. The doorknob tugged against your fingers. You tightened them around its shape. It tugged more and twisted, the door rattling, as the clouds simply drifted. The frantic pulling, twisting, and pushing of the knob, and the door with it, grew in intensity, in desperation, and in clear and obvious intent. You held firm, not answering to what it communicated, not reciprocating to what it asked.

And that’s when you heard the footsteps within.

Two of them.

The clouds drifted past the sun.

Your mom tugged desperately at the door, grunting to herself as she did. She did this, not a single thought in her head besides escape, until she felt two shadows fall over her back. She looked up, seeing their vague shapes, darkening the outer world, against the glass before her.

She turned around slowly.

Two faces, one of them confused, the other with a smile in its very corner, looked down at her.

She stared back.

At first silently.

They kept staring.

And then a hum began to rise at the back of her throat. Her eyes, even through their vague expression, hinted at a rising knowledge of what was to come.

“Huh,” the curious one said at noticing the awareness in her face and shrinking posture, his smile becoming more smug. “I guess you’re a lot smarter than you let on. I guess I gotta apologize for doubting you.” He, all at once, shot toward her with open palms.

Her only protest was the sudden tightening of her body, and the increased volume of her already-prominent hum.

You felt one last tug against the doorknob, and then it was replaced by a telling stillness.

A singular cloud, one which had occupied your attention, it looking like nothing at all, crawled through the blue sky. Within, you heard the sound of furious footsteps, a few sets of them working awkwardly as one, with another set seeming to fight against the first two.

You took a deep breath, feeling immeasurable tingling beginning to rise in your belly and thighs, a bit of it rising to your chest and throat. Then you let go of the knob. You pushed yourself off the wall and you turned to look at the stucco of the house. It stared back at you, blankly. Then you looked up, seeing the kitchen window. You ducked before it, then lifted yourself on your tip-toes to see within.

There was an empty space, occupied only by the kitchen table and chairs, which sat there for a moment. You were about to lower yourself to your heels and try another window, until you saw a black dress, moving as a formless wad, fly through, passed the kitchen doorway.

You were alert now, to the extent of the wavy dreaminess of the moment finally fading, giving way to the reality of the situation you were now in.

You stared at the empty kitchen, seeing the very edge of that dress you slid over your mom’s nudity that very morning, it lying limp at the mouth of the hallway.

As you stood there longer, curious at the vague sight of motion within, shadows which seizured through the afternoon light, a sudden shock came to you at the sight of one of the men emerging into the kitchen. You had ducked, but within the single moment with him still in your sight, you saw his frantic searching, tinged with fear, apprehension that he’d find somebody else in the house besides its alleged matriarch.

You pressed your body with absolute and trembling firmness against the side of the house.

He moved around, looking from the kitchen toward the backdoor again. Looking into the basement doorway, seeing nothing but darkness. Your mom hummed desperately in the living room, sounding like a dying animal, the sounds of his coworkers hands and breath running over her, cajoling her into silence meanly. “Be quiet,” he’d say. Or “shhh, it’s alright. Just let it happen, dumb dumb.”

The incurious one took a few steps into the dark basement, sweating, trembling. But when he was unable to find the light switch, he figured there couldn’t be anyone down there. He turned back, climbing the stairs into the kitchen proper. He then looked at the window.

Your mom’s humming rose to a frantic mumbling in the background.

He neared toward the window, your mom still mumbling with panic every few seconds over the sound of her constant, stressful hum. He lifted himself on his toes, looking out through the pane of glass.

The backyard, save for a few clothes wafting on the line, sat empty.

You kneeled, your palms on the pavement, ducking beneath the window. When you looked upward, you saw the cavernous dull face, distorted by glass and angle.

You heard an animal-like screech noise within, and it took you a moment to realize what it was.

The face then pulled away, disappearing from your sight.

You slowly rose from your knees, peeking over the rim of the window.

The kitchen sat there, again empty.

Shadows moved about on the dining room wall, hinting at what was occcuring in the living room.

You lowered yourself to your knees, looked along the length of the house.

The living room window, you thought. You took your first step there, knowing you would have to round the entirety of the house to get to it, knowing that when you got there, finding that window, ducking beneath it, and then, when you were ready, lifting yourself to look within, it would be worth it.

As you moved, you did so ignorant of the clouds which crawled linearly, slow and steady and without care, up above.

The frantic humming grew into an animalistic babble, occasionally high-pitched, by the time he rounded the kitchen doorway.

He looked up from the discarded black dress on the floor, and out into the living room, and he stopped. His mouth fell open.

His friend stood there, hairy and naked, his body facing the couch, his hand steadying himself against its backrest, his butt-cheeks jiggling in sudden muscular bursts with his every thrust.

He thrusted, doing so over and over again, grunting with pleasure as the constant hum, frantic and penetrated occasionally by a defiant babble or sucking shriek, continued below him.

He then slowed down his thrusts, their aspect satisfying and broad and continuing to be so even as he slowed them down, sensing he was being watched.

He turned, seeing his shocked friend. A smile formed at the corner of his mouth.

“Come on,” he said with trembling glee. “Just warming her up for you.”

He turned around and continued thrusting, the intensity of her idiot noisemaking rising with the intensity of his gyrating hips.

You hugged the side of the house, doing so as if to separate with it would be to let it, and what was occurring inside it, float away from you. You hugged it the firmest at each turning corner, as if you were afraid to be flung from it, out in the air and away from what you were moving toward with such dreadful anticipation.

You rounded your final corner, the sleepy street before you, obscured by the two trees in your front yard. Those would be the trees which gave you cover. Your cock sang as you moved below the large living room window, the one which peeked into the house your father would never walk the halls of again.

You grabbed the window frame’s edge, pulling yourself up, you massaged your crotch with the other hand, not believing you were about to see it, but knowing that it was there.

You swallowed, the spit, little as there was, crawling with gravity and the sucking of your throat down into your trembling chest and stomach below.

You lifted your head.

“Fuck,” the curious one said, his voice trembling against her hum. “I thought it was just her asshole that was tight. Her pussy’s like a glove.”

His friend said nothing, only breathing heavily into the back of her head, her skull, through her luscious forest of hair, vibrating pleasurably against his lips with the constant soundwave of her humming, the sensation serving as the spice to the already-delicious flavor of his pummelling against the reddening cheeks of her ass.

“I gotta stick to plowing retards, I guess,” continued the curious one, almost in shock. “This is like magic.”

Your dad sat within the picture frame, sitting next to a happier version of his wife, looking out into his living room, and the travesty that happened freely within it, with a smile.

You watched from the front lawn, your pants now pulled to your kneecaps with haste, your underwear crumpled tight against your thighs. You tugged your cock, pulling it, your mouth hanging open, the humming, chaffing, mumbling, slapping, grunting, and occasional shriek, coming muffled through the window, making it all feel like a dream.

Somewhere, beneath the oppressive earth, in total blackness, your father lay. The world continued on above him, its every happening from here on out devoid of his presense. And, forevermore, of his say.

Hhhhmmmmmmmmnnnnnnnnnnnngggggggggggggg

The curious one started laughing. “She’s like a machine.”

The other one felt her vibrating head against the sole of his foot. He thrust harder, feeling the length of her butthole tightening around his cock, its walls still humming with the vibrations that ran through her body, the mumbling making vibrations sharper, more distinct.

“Holy shit,” the curious one continued, his thoughts now on your father. “This motherfucker was living the life.” His face glimmered with thankful perspiration. “Every night. He did this every fuckin’ night!”

You watched as they pulled out of her, repositioning her like their own personal doll.

Despite their control over her, despite her lack of verbal protest, you could still see, even obscured by the white clouds against the window glass, the look of terror in her eyes. She had never had that look before. You pushed against the wall of the house firmly with your free palm, holding yourself from falling so deeply into your own ecstasy that you’d lose contact with the phenomenal world, and what was occurring within it before you. You tugged your cock with your free hand.

You had no idea how she must have felt, her body bent into that specific, clownish position, and you didn’t care. Nothing was forcing you to anymore. The only question which mattered was the one of what position they wanted to see and feel her in. What forms of clownish humiliation, all of them befitting of her imbecilic nature, would come to them next.

Consent mattered nothing to you. It was already a troublesome concept, its primacy robbing the world of so much potential. Your mom could never give or withhold it, not in any way which could be examined legally, but her feelings on the matter, which could be read if one cared enough to pay attention to anything beyond literal speech, spoke for her.

You could see her feelings, whatever they would be at any given moment, just as well as your father could as he nuzzled up close to her longing chin and mouth. But you, unlike your father, would choose to ignore them. You would do so deliberately, and with intent. You looked into her face, into those shocked eyes, seeing her disbelief at what she was experiencing, her shuddering horror at her own sudden predicament, its every humiliating node, and you gazed on her with chin-lifted defiance, like a teacher looking down at the child they just chastised, establishing through his lack of response to their tears, that their was no escape from this discipline, not even through the pathway of empathy, that luxury which no one appreciated until it was gone. She was as stuck here as was your father, his face smashed to nothing, twenty-one miles away, in a box oppressed firmly below six feet of dirt.

All that would matter to you is what she expressed verbally, and since she could never express herself through that dimension, never being able, not even once, you could ignore that question entirely, cast it aside like spent fabric, leaving it to deflate and sag in its puddle of mud as the world, its various concerns paramount, moved on past it.

Her black dress sat empty, devoid of her body, lying without shape at the mouth of the hallway.

You imagined, tugging yourself to bliss as you did so, the sensations now within her, both physically and emotionally, the pain, the confusion, the unpleasant shifting of her form and circumstance, her sense of being abandoned, her sense of being used, her stoicism against it impossible with the uncomfortable stretching of her butthole, and you thanked your lucky stars she couldn’t protest against any of it. It meant a lot to you that she couldn’t. It meant a lot to you that you could help fill her with such angst and terror, and physical pain, and never face consequences for it. It meant a lot to you to get to be so cruel to her. It was all you ever wanted. Ever since the eroticism and rebellions of puberty struck, and she went from being your mom to being that strange noisy object loose in your house, both insufferable and painfully desirable, and both to impossible degrees. That walking (sometimes crawling) archetype of female beauty, without any known psychological archetype, at least not one which could be counted on or categorized, carrying itself, soft flesh and prominent curves and all, through the familiarity of your home, ignorant to what she was, ignorant to what she had to offer, and living in vibrating sunny bliss because of it, not even seeming to recognize who you were, even as the product of her own womb.

It was all such a long time coming. And now that time had come. You couldn’t believe your luck.

They both hammered from beneath her, banging her into the shapes they preferred, not the shapes they were ordered to. They had no boss now. She was defective, her engine not running right, he gauges communicating poorly, or not at all, but she hummed with such sweet music, the kind which reminded one of how engines worked even while signalling that there was something uniquely wrong with her own. Some tick or other, or missing piece, beneath that hood, one not implied by the beauty of her frame and paintjob, the polished glass of her windows, the full inflation and consistent alignment of every tire and the axles which held them in place respectively.

Your father, frozen in his moment of photographic happiness, face intact and much younger, stared down at her, the only vehicle towards carnal pleasure and love he had ever driven, knowing her, flaws and all, back and forth, and handling her with such care, his travels full of adventures with her, her aspect wearing his particularities. Her pristine nature, despite the mileage, all on account of his care while driving.

They, inheriting this ‘beater,’ took it for a ride. Its tires spraying up mud as its fenders dented along sudden inclines and dips, gaining bulges in its tires, and hairline fractures in its vacant windshield gaze.

“Retarded bitch,” the curious one said breathlessly, between laughs. “She’s just so tight. It’s like she hasn’t aged a day.” He snorted to himself. “Must have lived a carefree life.” He laughed again, this time more hardily. “Until now.”

Her humming again rose to an animalistic squeal, followed by the babblings of her idiot tongue.

“Shut up!” he said, snapping.

You watched your mom being smacked, ostensibly for the first time in her life, and you, despite knowing she didn’t know any better, couldn’t help but feel catharsis at seeing it. You would often lay on your bed, your focus barely able to wrap itself around the math homework sitting below you, only for your concentration to be dashed irreparably against that stupid noise, coming from the back of her stupid throat, as she slid that ridiculous rock, featureless and pearl-shaped, along the smooth hardwood floor.

Despite believing that she couldn’t know any better, that it wasn’t her fault and never could be, you couldn’t shake the sensation, feeling it in your core, that she did it out of some strange narcissism, as if she assumed the sounds she made should take precedent over the sounds of others, over their words, perhaps even over the sound of silence itself. Either that, or it functioned as some sort of revenge, some acting out of jealousy against the neurotypical world which she acted upon passive-aggressively, smiling behind the façade of her usually-stoic face.

Her intentions didn’t matter though. All that mattered, by the gauge of society, was effect. And your mom, being unfit for the usual travel of life, was being ‘banged’ back into place. Fixed by two mechanics with two dozen year’s worth of experience. Saved from a manager who neglected these “corrections” for so long.

The two men within her now, dumb, impulsive, of some sort of lower caste of being, were still both infinitely above your mom in any form of cleverness, awareness, or utility to the world. Even if they were the ones responsible for your father’s demise through their own negligence, it could at least be said that they moved the meter on life somehow. Your mom couldn’t even do that.

She would be lucky, if she lived her life without sin, to reincarnate as men exactly like the two who pummelled her sore frame now. They were philosophers compared to her, men of renown, paragons, icons, gods.

She lowed beneath them, a confused animal.

“Fuck!” said the curious one, astonished by the low orcish timbre coming from your mom’s beautiful face. “She’s really getting retarded now.”

The other one didn’t speak, only thrusting with absolute focus and gratitude as her body gave to the vibrations of her moan.

“She’s evolving to the next stage of retard. A few more minutes of this and she’ll level up to an average woman.”

As you watched the men, feverish and ecstatic, become like animals in and against her, you thought about every “Your Momma” joke you had ever heard, especially “your momma’s so stupid, she-“ and you laughed, reminding yourself that you had never heard a single version of that joke, no matter how creative or mean, which aimed low enough to accurately hit your mother’s fleshy body as its target. “Your momma’s so stupid, they told her to duck, so she quacked.” “Your momma’s so dumb, when your dad got her tickets for Grease, she packed a suitcase.” “Your momma’s so retarded, she puts airbags on her computer in case it crashes.” All of them, every single one, worked based on the assumption that your mom knew what animals, countries, computers, airbags, and Broadway shows were.

As far as you could tell, and you had been trying to tell for your entire twenty years of life, your mom didn’t know much of anything at all.

All she seemed to know was what she was experiencing in the very moment at hand. And in this moment, as you watched it through the window, she was experiencing two warm loads of blue collar cum to her face ejecting themselves from twitching cocks and landing on her stunned, twitching face.

Her eyes shut, but she was too slow, in both senses of the word, to shut her mouth. She pushed her tongue outward, as if to eject the taste, and you groaned with pleasure at the sight of that white sticky rope, born of two men, lowering itself from the edge of her lip as she adjusted.

You couldn’t hear it now, but you could see it by the motion of her throat. She was humming.

The two men left the house, their lower-halves lighter, smiles wider, less ironic, less cynical. When they neared the two sides of the truck, the curious one, halfway into the driver seat, noticed something, a flake of paper, beneath his windshield wiper.

He grabbed it, ready to throw it off and into the wind, before noticing it had writing on it. He lifted it to his face, his mouth trembling with dread.

Then he read it.

And when he was finished, his friend, his face ripe with concern, only stared.

He sat back in his seat, a smile at the corner of his mouth.

Before his friend could ask, he dropped the loose bit of paper in his lap.

His friend, not curious about anything in his life, lifted the paper to his eyes. It read:

“She can’t tell.

I can.”

He looked on, his mouth fallen open, his eyes in a panic.

Then he unrolled the paper further, exposing what was written at its bottommost edge.

“But I won’t.”

You emerged from the kitchen, your mom’s discarded clothes of mourning at your heel, and you saw her there on the couch, her face down, and her butt up in the air. She pawed at it, pulling at its cheeks, moaning with surprising amounts of humility, as if she knew she couldn’t complain too much, though you knew the reality was a far less cognizant one.

“Mhmmm,” she said, pushing against the pain in her rear. She shook her head rapidly. She pulled at her cheek. “Mmm.”

Her butthole looked back at you from between those cheeks, sore and bothered. It was clear your father had never used it before. He probably thought it would hurt her. He was apparently right.

Copious amounts of cum dripped from her face and hair, and her flesh was all amess with sweat, her own and theirs. She prodded at her butthole with her finger, then tugged it away quickly, humming with her stomach now, pushing her shoulder against the backrest of the couch to bare the pain she had just caused with her curious finger.

Just as the pain subsided, and her body stopped from twitching and twisting, she felt another sudden force against the sore place.

She spun around in a quick grunt.

You stood there, your finger outstretched, looking down at her.

She stared up at you, the flame in her backside burning.

You stared for a moment longer, then your face slowly formed into a smile.

Her eyes, filled with neutral pain, gave way to a rising terror beneath you, making your smile form wider.

“You made quite the mess,” you said. You grabbed her by her wrist, pulling her upward like a doll on the floor. “Looks like you’re going to need a bath.”

She shook her head like usual, but now it was with a violence befitting the finality of the demand. She knew that something had been lost, some guardian of her comfort and dignity, and her reproaches now, rather than to be heard by her mother or her husband, seemed to be aimed at whoever was listening from beyond. They may have been loud enough, but nobody answered. She had no guardian above you.

You dragged your mother, by her arms, hair, thighs, or wherever else you could grab, pulling her across the floor like she were your petulant child, in between bouts of her curling into a ball, and bouts of her kicking and thrashing.

You did this, smiling all the way, even as she shrieked, making noises which occasionally, likely randomly, sounded like “no,” until you got her to the door of the bathroom. With one last tug, with one foot inside it, you tugged her inside with you.

Then you grabbed the door, kicked her behind you with your heel, and, gaining leverage, you thrust it forward. The door slammed shut.

Your dad, broad-shouldered, his arms thick, laid there in the darkness. His hands, heavy and large, lay on his chest. His mouth, with firm shape, somehow sat there, serene; serene in a way that it had never been before, not since his youth. His forehead, sitting above the damage, was loose, all its stress gone. His every muscle untensed. His every tugging sinew relaxed. His every thought absent. His every nightmare extinguished.

The world continued on above him. All of it, the business, the obligations, the expectations, the duties, none of it his concern now. None of it meaning anything to him. Not object, not notion, not personality. He lay there, blind to it all, it all replaced, mercifully, by one all-encompassing, totalizing, ubiquitous hum. 

Your mom lay on the floor, her backside burning, her body sore, feeling dirty despite being thoroughly scrubbed clean.

She was naked, her hair hanging about her like wild unfurled curtains, soft and black. As she lay there, the world around her seemed to fade, the troubles in it, which had become more than she thought she could bare, disappearing, as she looked down at her only distraction.

The rock sat in her fingers. She slid it across the floor, humming as she did, as if the hum came from the rock and not her. Moving it in patterns only she could understand, for a purpose that only she would know.

When you kneeled down next to her, running your hand along the curve of her lower back, butt cheek and thigh, going prone, your body cleanly and nude next to hers, you looked at the side of her head, seeing in it, in her downward facing eyes, stoic and unperturbed, that she didn’t even notice you there, didn’t even register your touch, or your presence, or your existence in the world.

She only stared down at that little object, that treasure chest of un-understood emotions, of forgotten memories, themselves tinged with still-vivid color. That sliding inanimate stone which somehow, in a way she didn’t fathom nor think to consider, held the very edges of not just personality writ large, but of a personality, one which stuck with her. One which maybe always would.

You watched her, seeing some vague trace of it, however chaotic, in the idiot monomania of her eye.

As she watched it move in its pattern, the world around it fading to non-being, the past, the future, and time itself having no value, it was suddenly gone.

Her humming stopped.

She stared down at the empty volume of floor between her hands, seeing only a blank space where it should have been.

You held it up in the air, staring at it for a second, suspending it over her head, feeling it smooth, pearl-like in your caressing fingers. And then, within a single instant, the speed of the thought itself, you brought it backward in one large, unbroken arc, toward her lower half, aimed directly at her swollen backside, directly between her cheeks, and directly toward that puckering and unguarded hole.

She looked down at the blank space, shocked, and then she felt a sudden sensation, sharp and painful, uncompromising and cruel.

Her silence ended, but not to make way for her hum.

She bellowed loud and hard, the sound reverberating through the otherwise empty house.

You looked at her, laying down with your bodies separated now, as she kicked about. You focused on her ass, its cheeks jiggling as she went, her thighs moving in idiot terror. Her hands, becoming useful now, moving toward the unfathomable pain and discomfort in her ass. The burning, humiliating tearing sensation. She probed it, only pushing the pain in deeper.

You lay there, breathing, smiling at the source of the desperate idiot grunting, your palms clutched together, empty. And the rock? It was nowhere to be seen. Gone. It was as if it was never there at all.

---

I've decided to pour more effort, resources, and bonuses into patreon and subscribe star, starting with the opening of a discord server for supporters of all tiers. So if you're interested in that, or would like to support me or my work, tiers are as low a $2 USD a month, though highest tiers get access to stories earlier, with the highest tier getting miscellaneous content, the best of which is my science-fiction epic (imagine Dune but with Paul Atreides as an incest-loving cuck), as well as content which is quality but hasn't been finished yet. In the future, I might even produce some shorts which are tangentially related to this fetish, but don't quite fit the bill for my main website. The links for both are below. If you have an account on both sites, subscribestar is preferable for me personally.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/bluvelvet99/membership

Subscribestar: https://subscribestar.adult/bluvelvet99

Also, voting for the 2023 best-of list is still open as there aren't enough votes to justify the list yet. I recently changed a setting that was blocking VPN users without my knowledge, so if you've been having issues voting due to that, now you can have your voice heard. The link is here: https://strawpoll.com/poy9WmDzPgJ.