by Rex Hurst
He felt a twinge of guilt at the schadenfreude of the idea of his sister turning into a bar hag. In a very real sense, she was as much a victim of her parents, as he was. This dead-end street her life was on had been foisted onto her by the pair. She may never really have had a choice. When a world of pleasure is tossed at you, it’s difficult to say no. Especially when you’re too young to know better. Still it was pleasure and not a similar pain that was constantly pounded onto him, and for that he was jealous. For that, he would have a little nasty fun at her expense. He needed a pick-me-up after witnessing his bike’s destruction.
Jon pulled a frozen hotdog from the freezer and thawed it a little by swirling it around in the toilet after he’d pissed in the bowl. He picked up an iron poker from the fireplace—the thing had been bricked up years ago, but they kept the paraphernalia lying around for some reason—and jabbed her with the poker. She stirred and blurted an incomprehensible phrase in a dreamy accent. He poked her again.
“All right, Ian,” she burbled, still three quarters unconscious. “Just gimme the shit, man. I’ll get you the money later. My daddy will give it to me.”
“No,” Jon said, barely suppressing an evil laugh. “You pay me now.”
“I’ll suck your dick. I’ll suck your dick. Just gimme!”
He shoved the soiled hot dog into her mouth and laughed as her filthy gums worked around it expertly. Eyes crusted over, she grunted in appreciation as she fellated the dead meat. Every time she shifted, a new foul smell wafted towards Jon. One way, vomit and stale beer. Another, a yeasty fish. Third, diseased semen. Fourth, spoiled mayonnaise.
“You’ve gotten bigger, baby,” she burped onto the hot dog.
Suddenly thirsty, he went back to the kitchen and poured himself some green apple Kool Aid from a glass pitcher.
“I forgot you weren’t cut. Sexy,” she burbled in a bad seductress voice.
It was disgusting and fascinating at the same time, like a horrific accident, impossible to tear your eyes away from. He slurped heavily from the glass as her tongue expertly worked along the meat stick’s edges. It was rhythmic, hypnotic in a way. The weird taste of the off-brand Kool Aid hung thick on his tongue.
“Are you gonna cum soon baby? I need. Need . . . ”
Reality became shiny along the edges. Some underpaid editor had over-saturated the colors. Things behind him? A door creek? Cold air? The world began to . . . No, not the world. His mind! His mind began drip-drip-dripping
plop
drip
drip
collecting
into a puddle of
nonsense at his feet
lights and boxers and monsters
in a pool of liquid rock, shaking sticks
waved and played and talked the stock market
then drank a bubbling milky scum from a big skull
Aya. They yelled. Hua. They barked. Ska. Ska
monoamine oxidase inhibitor their god
there was a man from Nantucket
who showed a left hand
until until
Plop!
Where the hell was he? His room? Yes, his room. It had to be . . . but. Oh Christ, he was tired. If he had slept, it couldn’t have been for long. He was naked in his bed on top of the covers . . . and his mother stood over him, frowning as usual. He covered up with his hands quickly.
“Oh, please, there’s nothing worth looking at on you.”
She threw a piece of paper on his skinny chest. A note written in Father’s hand.
“It’s for yesterday,” she said. “An excuse for school.”
“Yesterday?” he said weakly. “I went there yesterday.”
She stuck her face close to his, snarling contempt. “You got home late two nights ago and literally slept all of yesterday. Lazy asshole. I would’ve woken you up, but Father said to let you lie around. Not today, though. Get up and get out.”
A day? A whole day gone? He flipped his feet over the bed and tried to stand, but his legs were spaghetti. Jon’s face hit the hardwood floor. His arms barely had the strength to push himself into a sitting position.
“Hurry, I don’t have time to mess around with you,” his mother yelled and stormed out. “I have to take your sister to her school and check up on Michelle at the hospital. She almost choked to death after she fell asleep eating a hot dog.”
That woke him. “What? Is she alright?”
“What do you care?” she stepped into his doorway and considered him intently.
Long ago, Jon had mastered the art of the unintelligent blank stare. A man under as much enemy scrutiny as himself needed a defensive mechanism, a fallback face to deflect any suspicion. It was a masterful expression. Blank unintelligent surprise with a touch of sadness at the corners. The eyes mutely crying how can you suspect me? It had gotten him out of more than one jam. This time, Mother bought it.
“Father is down there now threatening a lawsuit. They’re trying to put her in rehab or some Narcotics Anonymous bullshit. We’ll have to slam the sue hammer down on them.”
His younger sister appeared briefly behind her mother’s legs and stuck her tongue out at him, then ran down the stairs giggling with evil intent. His mother burrowed into his blank face, mentally trying to tear it away and expose some dark guilt. Her brow furrowed and lips pinched in concentration, but the eternal enemy, time, got in the way. She glanced at her watch and stomped off. The front door slammed. Now that the source of tension had evaporated, blackness claimed Jon.
He snorted awake sometime later, still sitting propped up against the bed. The alarm clock was blaring, must have been for hours. He wiped the crud from his eyes. 11:30. Christ, half the day gone. Well, no point in going now. The way punishment worked at the school, missing part of the day was as bad as the whole of it, so he might as well take full advantage. The malaise affecting him earlier had washed away. A few minutes of stretching later, he felt absolutely great. Ready to take on the world.
The clothes he had been wearing were thrown in a pile by his closet. Like everything else, he had no memory of taking them off. Jon did an inventory. Jeans, T-shirt, underwear, socks. Sneaker- singular. Sneaker? Where was the other one? Damn it. He franticly began digging through the mess that was his room. In the closet, under the bed, by the dresser, around the desk. Nothing. He had to find it.
Not that he even liked them. They were just another reminder how his parents cheapened his life. All his pals, even broke-ass Louis, had Nikes. And what did Jon’s affluent parents bequeath him? KangaROOS, a knock-off Australian brand in ugly grey with pink trim. Their only distinguishing feature was a little pocket and zipper on the side. The pocket might sound pretty cool, but it was too small to hold anything thicker than a dime. Essentially it was just a useless zipper to spice up the look of a poorly stitched shoe.
Still, there would be hell to pay if it was lost. He could feel his mother’s tongue lashing against his back already, yelling at him for hours. Maybe buying him an even worse pair if that was possible. He scoured the living room, the last place he remembered being, but there was nothing. All of the puke had been expertly scrubbed out of the carpet and couch. Maybe they’d found the sneaker and tossed it somewhere.
The rest of the downstairs also yielded nothing, so he hit the upper floors. Perhaps Catherine had taken it. That would explain her laughter earlier. He kicked open her door. Decorated in the style of a fantasy princess, her room was full of pink and white, silk and lace. The bed was the most comfortable around. The TV was prominently displayed with a horde of plush animals surrounding it. Every Barbie accessory a little girl could want was crammed in there. Every top-of-the-line ballerina accouterment, batons for twirling, and makeup as well as jewelry for when they hit the child pageant circuit. Everything was beautiful and spotless. He hated it. And as far his rooting could tell, there was no sneaker.
Michelle’s room, actually a converted attic space, was locked up tight. The only way in was a ladder that extended from a pull-
down rope. Jon had never seen up there. He’d only smelled dubious odors wafting down.
That left his parents’ room. A place he feared to tread. He creaked the door open, half-afraid some booby trap would swing out and decapitate him. It was pleasantly arranged. Nothing audacious. The decor was almost muted. Catherine’s room was far more extravagant. It wasn’t until he opened drawers and closets that the decadence shined. Designer clothes, racks of fashionable shoes, expensive scents, tasteful jewelry, a drawer full of Rolexes. The St. Fonds did not practice self-denial.
He was digging through Father’s shoe trees, filled with Testoni Italian leather shoes, when he heard a click. His elbow had hit a concealed button along the line of the wall, invisible to the naked eye. The back of the closet dislodged from its base and retracted a quarter of an inch. He pushed and the back slid to the left. There was a small alcove with an electric hum.
Inside was filled with monitors, each displaying a different room. There must have been a hidden camera hook-up riddling the house. As he looked closer, there were multiple views of every room, each from a different angle. No stone was left unturned. No blind spots were obvious. His room was there. Catherine’s as well. The attic, the bathrooms (ugh), the master bedroom, the kitchen, the basement. Two even displayed the back and front yards. These all connected up to a high shelf, full of VCRs recording every movement. Jon had never suspected anything like this.
A padded fold-out chair was in the corner, next to a Waterford glass and bottle of—he picked it up—Glenlivet Nadurra. The label identified it as an eighteen-year-old single malt. Jon didn’t know much about liquor, the smell nauseated him, but made the educated guess it was expensive.
He flipped the chair open and plopped down, holding the bottle by the neck, taking in the enormity of the find. This room wasn’t supposed to be here. He knew the architectural specs, the original ones from the 1920s he had come across in his research, and every square inch was accounted for. All of the rooms were roughly of the same dimension as originally designed. Or were they?
He moved his hands across the walls. Solid yellow pine on both sides. The nails and studs seemed to be aged the same as well, but the shelves holding the VCRs and monitors were made of plywood, and were screwed in, not nailed. The screw heads were shinier, obviously having been added at a later date. Logic dictated that this little room had been a detail added to the original blueprints at the orders of his great-great-grandfather, who went through workmen like toilet paper. How many other little rooms were there?
He unscrewed the whiskey and took a snort, then suppressed a blob of vomit. How could people drink that shit? He’d take a slug of Mountain Dew over that piss any day of the week. He had an emergency stash of the soda in the back of his own closet, which of course his parents knew.
So they had been watching him his whole life. Every cry, every panic attack, every imaginary conversation, every masturbatory incident, everything. It must be how they knew about Louis. They wouldn’t have had to read his journal. They probably knew about Kathy too. Course he didn’t remember ever dialing Louis from his house, but his memory wasn’t perfect. Maybe he should rewind the tape. How far back did they go? He popped one out. It was a specialty job, very expensive, and contained enough tape to last twenty-four hours. He returned it to the machine and pressed record.
He looked closer at the screen, was the definition good enough to pick up phone calls? Each of the monitors had a joystick that allowed the camera angle to be adjusted, a little button on top zoomed the image in. He pushed it in on the rotary phone at his little desk—another way they screwed him, everyone else had a touchpad phone extension. Yeah, the picture was clear enough.
Movement caught his eye. The front door swung open. In sauntered his mother and a stranger. He was tall and bald of pate with a black goatee, dressed in a cream-colored turtleneck and black slacks. The stranger had the same bearing Father did, command and obedience. Jon zoomed in on his mother’s face. There was something odd about it, she was almost giddy?
“Make yourself at home,” she said, surprising Jon. He didn’t realize the cameras included sound.
“I will,” the man replied. His tone was dusky and thick. A heavy smoker’s voice, with a faint trace of a French accent. “And I’ll have a drink as well.”
“Of course!” his mother tittered and scurried off like a schoolgirl. “I think we have some Privilège Cognac left.”
The man seated himself at the dining room table and threw a manila folder, thick with papers, on it. Mother returned with a glass and a bottle and stood over him, pouring. As she served, the stranger’s hand crept up her leg, feeling the muscles in his hard grip, then slipped it up under her skirt. Her teeth gnashed together and lips fluttered. In pleasure? In pain? Impossible to tell at this angle.
“You’ve been keeping yourself fit,” he said.
“Oh yes.”
“Absolom?” came the dark voice of Father.
They turned, Jon jumped. So intent was he on the scene, he didn’t notice the patriarch’s entrance. This would be interesting. A fight? A murder? An orgy? But it was none of the above.
Father sat across from the stranger, unperturbed by where the newcomer had lodged his right hand. The bald Frenchman, named Absolom, squeezed harder. Mother was paralyzed. Her fingers ground into the table varnish.
“What brings you here,” Father asked in his calm commanding manner, “besides a cheap distraction.”
Absolom chuckled to himself and pushed the folder over. “We think we may have found the perfect place. The Osbourne Canning Company has a few acres that they need to get rid of. It’s close, isolated, but not too isolated. Has that special tint we require. They bought it originally as equity to borrow against for a further business venture. On paper it looks like prime land, until you realize what’s actually there.”
Father glanced at the papers then laughed long and loud. “That’s a novel way to handle a loan. Very admirable in fact. Sneaky and bold, simultaneously.”
“It was all financed through a bank in Wisconsin. They must have sent an inspector, but he was either bribed off or was an idiot.”
“Or something else.”
“Quite,” came the grinning reply, his hand clutching deeper under the skirt, pulling out a groan from Jon’s mother. Father was absorbed by the paperwork. “Still the loan went through. Now, fifty years later, the business is about to go under, so they need to raise some capital. It’s perfect for what we want. Now that the great—”
“Enough proselytizing. Let’s focus on details. The asking price is still pretty high considering the area. What about the structures? How are they holding up?”
“Left to decay. The company just needed the deed to the land. They didn’t maintain it, couldn’t build on it, now they can’t get rid of it. Wear and tear, lot of vandalism, but that’s not important.”
“No, it isn’t,” Father agreed. “Still, there’s no reason we should get raped here.”
“Be as unfair as you want. The thing’s a millstone to them. I’m almost certain we’ll be the only bid. May I?” The Frenchman nodded to Jon’s near-drooling mother.
“Hmmm? Oh,” Father said absentmindedly. “Help yourself.” Then leafed over the next page.
Absolom manhandled her back into the kitchen. She screeched hysterically with joy, as her skirt was roughly ripped away and he ravaged her over the sink.
She submissively took the pounding, gasping in pleasure over the dirty dishes. Eventually he loosed his sperm and fell back, red face and swearing. Absolom had cum so hard that he lost control of his legs and fell, bare ass streaking across the linoleum. Jon’s mother just stood there quivering.
Father leaned against the doorframe, the snifter of cognac swirling between two fingers, dark amusement smeared on his face. “Having fun there?” he asked his fallen comrade. The other just laughed, still completely spent.
“You two’s fuckplay has fired me up,” Father growled, and grabbed his wife by th
e throat, forcing her to bend backwards over the counter, “though I prefer the front hole.” And he plunged in, rough and bestial.
Jon couldn’t tear himself away. It was an erotic car wreck. There was a dark hilarity in watching a parent you despise get hate-fucked. Still, there was something fundamentally wrong about watching family members having sex. Okay, it was a natural biological urge everyone indulged in, but his instincts revolted at the sight of his parents below.
“No, no. The ass, the ass, mon ami,” Absolom chided, still lying on the floor. “Never was a passage created that could give such pleasure as that noble channel. No slimy cunt ever fulfilled me as much as a beautifully tight anus.”
Father finished with a roaring bellow and several short hard pelvic thrusts. His wife’s face had gone purple from his grip on her throat. He threw her aside and staggered, a few stray specks of semen spat into the sink. Onto his younger sister’s favorite dish, Jon noted. His mother fell to the floor as well, gasping for air, hand massaging her neck, staring up at Father in fear, excitement, and adoration.
No one could blame Jon from taking that second slug of whiskey. This time he barely flinched at its bouquet. His parents’ kinks were something he didn’t want to know about. It actually wasn’t that much of a surprise. He had caught some clues in the past. Discarded sex toys in the trash and the like. However, that didn’t mean he wanted to be slapped in the face with a bird’s eye view. It also blew up a popular theory of Jon’s that his mother acted like she did towards him out of sexual frustration. Clearly not the case. That bummed him. The thought of her misery darkly lightened his own.
He turned off the kitchen monitors. Enough of that. Their voices still drifted in from other cameras, but it was lower, babbling. He was probably stuck there for the duration. Out of boredom he chugged a third shot and began playing with the joysticks. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Wait! What was that?
