by Glen
“Hold still!” he shouted, and slapped her arm.
The old lady’s mouth opened, her eyes wide.
The slap was exceptionally hard.
“There was a bee,” he said. “Come along, Mother.”
The man tried to remember what he was saying. It came after ten more steps. The woman was rubbing her arm as she walked beside him near the creek.
“But when I think about her,” said the man, “I don’t care what she says or what she feels or if she likes me or even knows me. I only want to sniff and smell her ass.”
Nate stared down at the meadow grass as his mother kissed her arm where he had slapped it.
“And when I think about her it is the same as seeing her. It is beyond my control. And happens before I can stop it. Like a reflex.” He slapped at a bug. “I begin whiffing… go down on her in my thoughts. My face bouncing off her soft cheeks like a moth glitched out on artificial lights.”
His mother had taken care to pin her hair perfectly. She wore a dull dress that smelled musty but Nate couldn’t tell. Everything smelled old. She squinted at the sun. Her arm was again fine and vanished from her mind.
“I am lucky she does not speak to me because I could never understand her. I would be obsessing on that hole of hers. I hope she never talks to me.” He looked down the steep decline at the water. The sun sparkled too bright on it. He shut his eyes. “I hope my brain dies.”
“I am at an absolute loss,” he continued after they had walked another quarter mile, still near to the stream, “to why I obsess on this. But it isn’t me, really. The inclination just jumps out of the blue. Sometimes people look at me strangely and I wonder if I made some unforgivable gesture. That tree over there, across the water, is quite wild, isn’t it?”
They walked a little farther on. The sunlight had weakened.
“Look at that red flower, mother.” He got down on his stomach near the flower. His mother kept walking. He sniffed repeatedly and absolutely no scent came. He plucked it and ran to catch up with the old lady.
“Here, Mother!” he said, handing it to her. She looked at the flower for a moment, looked into her son’s excited eyes, and finally took it.
“What a strangeness smells are,” he said. “They are like dreams. I think of one and millions come screaming back. Dreams and smells. They send me so much I could just fall down. Dizzy dizzy.”
They walked a tiny trail around the bend of the stream. He should have taken some gum along. They had traveled a long way. When he was in the light of the sun he had the desire to spit. Chewing gum helped.
Nate spit.
“Why it is not the pussy but the ass I want is insane to me. To sniff, I mean. There is something incredibly absurd about the ass. Maybe that is it. I can understand pussy. But ass is another matter entirely. I try to think about god and spirits and things but there is always an asshole there. Maybe those are the two opposites. Love and assholes. Did the ass create love like a rose from manure?”
He shrugged.
Nate noticed she was no longer at his side and looked back. She stood in the high meadow grass looking down with her chin quivering.
“Mom, what…”
Her eyes were full of anger when she saw him and then she began to cry, wiping the tears out of her eyes as she searched the ground.
“Come, mother. What are you looking for? There is nothing there but grass.”
He touched her shoulder and she looked up at him like a snake.
“Who are you!” she shouted and began walking backwards in terror.
Her son ran and grabbed her before she fell down the levee into the creek.
“I am your son, Mother. I am the one you gave birth to. I am…” She looked terrified and grunted in his arms. “Mom, I’m a cheap Dollar Tree plastic alien.”
He was familiar with this shifting look. At first it was sheer hatred and then it became terror. His last year of high school the ridiculous symptoms began. The doctor told him what was occurring. A young intelligent doctor with a handsome face. Very tan.
Apart from the times she seemed to realize something was wrong, and her face shifted to terror, his mother possessed a blank look. This was her usual face, like she had forgotten the world. Aloof to everything. At those times Nate made up stories about his life to try and wake her up.
First he told her little lies like his accidental impregnation of the fat woman down the road.
Then he advanced them. He would run down from the attic and shout that he had seen a ghost. He left a realistic rubber snake in the toilet. She was deathly afraid of snakes. He watched her pull the snake out of the water like a hairbrush had fallen into it. She placed it on the dresser in her room.
At times he saw her watching him from across the living room as she sat in her chair. He swore she was faking senility because she was embarrassed of having birthed him.
Twenty-nine now and still hadn’t put his penis…
He kicked at a grasshopper that Mother had startled.
Had the three people who knew him in school forgotten him? Likely a few days after graduation. Forgotten and completely lost to the bustling world. Left rotted like a cherry tomato that even birds didn’t want.
But what did birds know?
After exhausting the physical pranks, even suicide where she just stepped over his dead body, Nate began telling her elaborate stories. He was proud of the tales he invented. Fairy tales he had undertaken in his hours apart from her.
One he thought up while sitting on a park bench at dusk. He gave up wearing glasses and when the air grew darker the blur was so fascinating that he felt instantly like something was telling him that outright murder was noble and good. “Yes, Mother,” he told her later, “it was the twilight blur of death which whispered to me that evening. It said, ‘There is no God to care. Go play-go play!’ and I could hear it slapping its lips.”
He told her a story of how he would take an old lady down to the river and kill her.
“And then he cuts off her head,” he would say, then laugh and clap his hands.
Neither it or any other story had the slightest effect on her.
Only a few days before their walk did he have an epiphany as he woke with panic in his throat, which he grasped as though cancer swelled inside. He would tell her his dreams, his sadistic thrills, his intrusive thoughts with no more invention or guile. All the whispers from his cells he would give her. No more playacting. All would come off-the-cuff. He supposed that was the truth if anything was.
But it terrified him and he didn’t try it until just minutes ago near the stream when he told her about the desire to smell a girl’s ass. And even as he held her to keep her from falling down the embankment, he wondered if it best if he just let her go. But he realized he needed her just as much as she him.
How was he capable of getting any other income than what the state paid him to take care of her? His mind was, in its way, just as gone as hers.
When he finally released her away from danger she fell and would not get up.
Maybe, he thought, after finally telling her a true thing inside him that it had made her forget how to stand and walk. She crawled through the dry meadow grass like an old dog and he crouched down beside her.
“Mommy,” he said, trying to stop her, “please get up.”
“Help!” she shouted, seeing him again. “Help!”
“I am here, Mother! It is me! Your stupid son!”
There was no use. He stayed where he was and she crawled fast until she fell and rolled over on her back.
“Oh look!” Nate said. He hurried over to her and handed her the red flower and they smiled like children at each other.
“Was that it?” he said. “Was it not the truth at all that you was looking for but that flower?”
He lowered his face into his hand and smiled while touching it all over.
“Mother!” he said and she looked up at him like a small girl. “I had such a dream last night. I must tell you!”
She looked at the flower and spun it by the stem in her fingers.
“We were laying out in a prairie just like this. And the sun was just as bright and I could even smell how spiced and dry the field was as the grasses burned out all their sweet resin. And when I turned from the sky to look… You had changed! You were no longer my mother but you looked exactly the same and I embraced and kissed you and you pulled off your dress and panties and I stripped off my shirt and my balls sank into the core of the earth. They swung like a great pendulum as I got on top of you and slapped against you as you screamed, ‘Put a baby into me, put it into my ass!’ And I said, ‘Ok, Mother, let’s give it another try! Let’s make something much more than I am. Let’s hope this new crying infant has something to offer the world!’ WAH WAH WAH!”
And both of them laughed like children playing together in the lovely sunny meadow. For a moment it was just like a fairy tale.
Glen is a genre writer from Ohio. @diremerlin on twitter