by Julia Kent
Joe’s warm, hard body was suddenly behind me, his arms hooked in my elbows, pulling me back from murder.
“What are you doing?” I screeched.
“Trying to save you from embarrassing yourself, Darla. Or going to jail again.”
I yanked free of him, propelling myself into a display of cat tongue vibrators.
The cardboard display was no match for my righteous fury, and while Joe tried to keep me up, he failed, grabbing only the back of my shirt, which ripped right down the neckline with an impressive, aggressive noise that I couldn’t hear over the sound of my screams.
I heard “bitchwhore” and “asshat” and “holestuffer” and a bunch of other words that got lost coming out of my mouth as eighty or so vibrator wands with pretend cat tongues rolled over me, covering me with pink pussy plastic.
The giant stuffed cat that rested on the top of the display landed with a surprising whuff sound, right between my legs, its face on my hoo haw, tip of the nose exactly where my clit was underneath my clothes. The precision was almost calibrated, and for a brief second I thought to myself, maybe these animal fetish people were on to something, because what guy gets it dead right like that the first time he goes into the pink jungle?
Blood rushed through my head to the point where all I heard was an erratic buzz, my nerves so shot, it felt like scores of pieces of sandpaper were touching my body, scrubbing and stroking.
And then I realized that wasn’t a metaphor.
Some of the cat tongue vibrators had turned on and were actively performing pussylingus on my body, in broad daylight, my shirt ripped to my navel.
This was my low point, I thought to myself. I’ve hit rock bottom.
“Darla. Josephine. Jennings.”
Every molecule in the universe fell into my big toes.
“What in the hell do you think you’re doing, chewing out your stepdaddy in public, at his workplace?”
Mama? What in the hell was my mama doing in Vegas?
And just like that, I realized I’d been wrong.
This was rock bottom.
I knew that wasn’t an actual question out of Mama’s mouth. More like a belt whuppin’ in word form. This wasn’t even a lash. It was that moment when your parent grabs the end of the belt and you know what’s coming.
Just then, a life-size dildo robot rolled on by. Looked like R2D2 with a mushroom cap. It was handing out venison-flavored condoms.
Workplace?
I turned around to stare straight into the eyes of my mama, holding onto her cane, her prosthetic foot wearing a three-inch high heel boot (along with her regular foot), her body dressed in a slinky black outfit, all silk and sleek over her round self. Her eyes were smoky and done, made to look like a cat’s.
And she was wearing whiskers and a headband with cat ears.
“JOE!” I bellowed, climbing to my feet while my ankles were licked by fake cat tongues.
“I’m right here,” he said, inches from me, dodging the vibrators like they were mousetraps.
“You fed me peyote! Or PCP! What hallucinogen did you sneak into my food, damn it?”
“Nothing! I swear.” Trevor’s blond head bobbed in the distance behind Joe, clearly looking for us. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or horrified, but as I looked at Mama, I realized I needed all the reinforcements I could get.
Mama was the color of the canned beets she used to make me eat when it was the day before her disability check came in and we had nothing else in the cupboard.
“Aw, now, don’t you wish this was just a figment of your imagination, Darla Jo. I sure do wish I was just imagining it. But nooooooooooo. This is my worst nightmare. My baby girl screaming at my husband that he’s a fornicator, and doing it in front of our customers, ruining our livelihood.” Mama reached for a riding crop on the table next to hers and Calvin’s. “Why don’t you just gag me and whip me right here in public? Use a cat ‘o nine tails. It would hurt less.” She jabbed the crop at me, mouth twisted down in rage and disgust.
“I am never, ever complaining about my mother again,” Joe said under his breath.
“Hardcore,” Trev replied, wincing, now next to Joe, looking deeply uncomfortable.
I swear I heard a few people in the small crowd behind us whispering “Do it.”
As I stood in place, Calvin behind me, Mama shooting laser beams at my soul, I felt my body expand, like someone hooked up a bicycle tire pump to it and I just grew. Each breath made me bigger, my eyes going wide until I could feel the skin around them growing too tight, almost to pain.
Not quite. Close, though.
“You have the brass balls to come to Calvin and scream at him when he’s here running our business, Darla?”
“But you said he was on a fishin’ trip!” I shrieked.
“Because you been acting all weird, asking questions about him. You spent the last year treating him like a piece of wallpaper and suddenly you’re asking more questions than a sweepstakes investigator for a major brand. Something was fishy all right, and it wasn’t Calvin on a canoe trip.”
“I treat him way better than wallpaper!” I shouted.
“Just ask Josie,” Trevor mumbled.
“You’re not helping!” I screamed at him, able to unleash my anger directly on him but hopelessly chastened by Mama.
My mama. Who was here, in Las Vegas, at an animal fetish convention, dressed as a cat.
Remember how I said it was gonna get weird for a while?
Shit just turnt.
And not in some good way.
“Hold on there, Mama. What in the hell ‘business’ does Calvin have at an animal fetish convention? Why was he giving a hotel room card to that woman? And why are you dressed as a cat? ”
The implications of those two separate questions and some of the answers hit me like, well, like a box of vibrators being thrown from a distance.
“Cathy,” Calvin said from behind me, his voice laconic and slow, like always. “We can handle this in private.”
“Hell no! Darla attacked you in public. She’ll take her punishment in public, too.”
The word punishment was like spraying aerosolized Spanish Fly and ecstasy in the room. By and large, animal fetish folks were a kinky bunch, and there was a strong subset of BDSM AnFet devotees in here, too, judging by the flushed faces and heaving breasts.
“If you’re going to whip her, which animal will she be?” asked a very interested giraffe.
“I ain’t whuppin’ my mama!” I screamed.
Calvin had deferred to Mama the entire time, standing quietly by, letting her take the reins. While he twisted his hands with worry, I could tell he was also thoughtfully taking in the full scene. As I started screaming, though, he walked towards us, holding some kind of chocolate lollipop as a peace offering.
It was a chocolate chicken.
“Darla, I am so sorry about the confusion,” he said, long face even longer as he spoke with a solitary sadness that was so stark. “Your mama and I didn’t want to tell you the truth because it’s just too weird.”
“What’s too weird?”
“We sell real fur butt plugs to people with animal fetishes,” he explained, nice and simple. Forthright.
Blunt, even.
“You… what?”
“You heard me. I take tails off animals and attach them to sex toys for anal pleasure.” Calvin’s description was hypnotically atonal, like he was reciting a carefully memorized elevator speech.
What was next – Mama and Calvin on Shark Tank?
“How did you start – what made you think butt plugs and taxidermy – how on earth did you two stumble into this profession?” I asked, dumbfounded.
“Jenna.”
Jenna was Calvin’s daughter, my slightly-creepy stepsister, who was younger by a few years. It all started to click into place.
“Jenna’s into cosplay, Calvin. You told me so when you and Mama got married.”
“Yup.”
“She doesn
’t, um...” I gestured toward the display of butt plugs. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a sale sign. Foxes were twenty percent off. Huh.
“No! Or, if she does, she keeps that part secret,” Calvin corrected himself, blushing just at his cheekbones but keeping my eye. “She told me there was a demand for certain items in the cosplay world involving authentic fur. She suggested this.”
Jenna has now been upgraded from “slightly-creepy” to “don’t look in her freezer.”
“You mean plastic that people shove up their asses for sexual pleasure, with dead animal tails attached, so they can pretend they’re an animal while they fuck people,” I clarified.
“That’s another way to put it, yes.” The man blinked about twice a minute. All two blinks happened in about one second.
“So my stepsister got you into producing real fur butt plugs.”
Calvin pivoted slightly and turned back to me, holding a butt plug with a long feather at the end. “And chicken tail feathers. They’re very popular today,” he said with a bit of a pinched look, as if surprised.
“Cluckbuddies,” I muttered.
“Would you two quit talking to each other like Darla didn’t just walk into the middle of the room and take a big hot shit on top of the new TV Guide?” Mama hissed. “We need to do damage control here for the business.”
“Cathy,” Calvin said with quiet authority, putting his hands on her shoulders. “I think your relationship with Darla is a higher priority.”
Mama and I are cut from the same cloth, because we both just looked at Calvin like he was an alien.
“I know that,” she exploded. “Jesus fucking Christ, Calvin, this ain’t about my relationship with Darla! It’s about the fact that she is wrong.”
“I see where Darla gets it,” Joe muttered to Trevor in the background.
When Mama was done with me, they were so, so fucked. And not in a pink hole kinda way.
“I am wrong!” I shouted. “I admit it, but come on, Mama. You have to admit you’re wrong, too.”
Time stopped.
Universes folded in on themselves.
All matter contracted to nothing.
Whiskers twitching, Mama turned to me, lips slightly parted, the folds of wrinkles from years of smoking etching lines in her face that might as well have been artifacts.
“Excuse me?”
“You lied to me, too, Mama. I wouldn’t be here screaming at Calvin and his whore if you hadn’t.”
The whore lifted her hand to her necklace and looked at Calvin. “You think I’m sleeping with him?”
She had the decency not to be a Pretty Girl and give him the visual once over, but I could hear it in her voice.
Calvin turned a furious shade of red.
Mama, to her credit, looked right at the woman and said, “I’m so sorry for my daughter’s confusion. It’s a strange mix-up we’re experiencing here, Pauline. We’ll get it sorted out, but yes, my daughter thought my husband was sleeping with the account manager for our new international distributor.” Anger radiated out of Mama’s eyes.
Toward me.
“I – uh – well,” I stuttered, looking at the whore and realizing she was anything but. “I’m so sorry I ever thought Calvin was wick dipping in you.”
“That ain’t helping,” Mama hissed. “Stick to the basics.”
“I’m so sorry, Pauline,” I tried again. “It was a serious mistake on my part and I hope you can forgive me.”
Pauline looked at Mama, then Calvin. Her eyes darted over to Trevor for a long, hungry look, then bounced over to Joe, her fake eyelashes flying up to brush against painted-on eyebrows. “Oh, my. Are these your boyfriends?”
Not the response I was expecting.
“Uh,” I said, looking at Mama with a questioning look.
Mama jutted her chin out. “I told her. Of course I did. In this business, having a daughter with a crazy love kink is an asset.”
I didn’t think I could feel more embarrassed, but then Mama went and upped the ante.
“You – you bragged about me? Me and Joe and Trevor and our...”
“Permanent threesome? Yes. I wouldn’t call it bragging. More like I just told Pauline and some of the other people in the business. I’ve never been in a more welcoming environment than this one, Darla.” Her face hardened. “Not even with you.”
I shrank to the size of a pinhole.
“Mama,” I said, voice breaking. “I’m so sorry.”
“Well, you should be.” Her voice was tight, but I knew we were close. So close. “I miss my baby girl,” she added. “I miss having you around in my life. Not on a phone, not with them stupid texts, but in real life. I mean, it’s nice to finally be accepted by the women at the Bible study at church, but you think I can talk about this with them?” She swept her arm toward the other booths and toe-nudged a dying cat tongue vibrator. Her eyes burned with emotion when she looked back at me. “So when Jenna suggested Calvin get into this business, I wondered if it was God’s plan.”
Pauline’s eyebrows shot up.
“Maybe being part of a kinky business was a way to understand you better. To be closer to you. I miss you.” She rolled her eyes. “Aw, hell. Maybe I’m overthinking this.”
Her words made me well up, a tsunami of emotion coming up so far, I got swept up in it, my mind and heart running long past the point of reason. I didn’t know what I would say when I opened my mouth.
“Know what I miss, Mama? I miss having a daddy. I know I had one, and I build these little stories inside my head from the scraps of memory I have inside me, and the stories you and other people tell me. I have my own version of a daddy who lives in me, but I know it ain’t true. I know it’s just some imaginary man I’ve invented, like a child building a castle out of duct tape, leftover boxes, and toilet paper rolls. Good enough for pretend, but not even close to real.”
Of course a vision of Bill popped into my head just then, which just made me want to cry, because I couldn’t even conjure up a real picture of my real daddy in my mind when I needed to.
“Oh, Darla,” Mama sighed, her face turning down with a pained expression, the little cat nose and whiskers dropping as if they were melting off her face. “How in the hell did we get from the topic of fox butt plugs to your daddy?”
“I don’t know, Mama, but let’s just go with it, because I can’t keep feeling like I’m only half here.”
She closed her eyes and nodded.
“The worst part, though, is that, God damn it, I should have had a daddy. Everyone should. But we don’t. And when I get what’s supposed to be mine taken away from me, it’s like I spend the rest of my life walking a line between trying to act like it don’t matter and seeking out a daddy. Any daddy. If I can’t have the one that’s rightfully mine, then maybe I need to find a facsimile. Except I watched enough girls in high school do that and get knocked up at fifteen by the daddy they picked to fill their hole. Literally. I knew right away I didn’t want that. So I tipped myself over the line into pretending it didn’t matter.”
“But it did.”
“Fuck yeah, Mama. It did. Not having the daddy that was rightfully mine and pretending it didn’t matter meant I learned to settle for whatever the world threw my way, because that was one hell of an early lesson. It don’t matter what I want. What I want don’t bring Daddy back.”
“I didn’t know, Darla. I didn’t know it lingered like this in you.”
“It will always be in me, Mama. ‘Til the day I die. It’s not even that it’s in me. It is me.”
“You can change. I did.”
“Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’ve changed. Trevor and Joe changed my whole life. It’s only in gettin’ comfortable that I figure out my patterns. All this time I thought I acted out of common sense. You always praised me for that. Common sense. Turns out I’ve been twisting it all in my head, telling myself stories that are true if you look at them from one angle, but really, really wrong if you just move a step to the left or r
ight. I’m as guilty as anyone else of spending a lot of energy on deluding myself. Maybe I haven’t elevated it to an art form like Joe’s mom, but I’m well on my way. And you know what, Mama?”
“Hmmm?”
“It’s just as hard to live like that as it is to change. Inside, it feels like I’m flipping a coin.”
“Or spinning a roulette ball,” she said under her breath. “Bet on one? Bet on twenty? Either way, you’re just flipping a coin.”
Mama had no idea what I’d just done at the roulette table, so this made me wonder if she was taking up real estate in my brain, like a portion of her DNA lived in me and just knew.
“I was afraid of change,” Mama said slowly, like her words swam through molasses. “After Charlie died, it felt like a betrayal to change. I told you when I was marrying Calvin.”
“Yeah.”
“And now I wonder why I ever let myself cage my life like that.” She looked around the room, eyes big, a half grin on her face, shaking her head until her cat ears started bobbing. “This sure ain’t what I thought I’d get when I changed.”
“Me, neither,” I confessed.
“Me, or you?”
“What do you mean, Mama?”
“You never thought you’d run into me by accident at a Las Vegas kink convention, dressed as a cat, did you?” she asked, the words accusatory. All she needed was a ciggy hanging from her lower lip with a half-inch ash and a can of Schlitz clutched in one hand while watching Unsolved Mysteries for me to feel like I was ten again, sitting at home, wondering how I could make her feel better.
“No, Mama. I did not.” Truth is an absolute defense to being scolded by your mama.
“Well, I never expected to find myself enjoying it so much. Me and Calvin keep it quiet. We figure it’s not hurting anybody. People here are weird as fuck, Darla, but they’re nice. And if someone wants to pay Calvin for scraping the tails of roadkill off the Ohio roads and turning ‘em into things they shove up their ass for pleasure, who am I to judge?”
“Right,” I said weakly. Joe coughed discreetly to cover a snicker.
