Mother and Son
When I was young, everything I did was new. The praise I received was, in kind, new. It was intense and exhilarating, and I gauged my success by it. I wove baskets from reeds and made pottery and jewelry from clay. We subsisted on fishing and gathering roots and berries, and at some age all children were expected to learn how to do those things. It wasn't as though there was a school or a custom of apprenticeship, it was just the normal course of things that children would become interested and observe, and assist, and take the place of the previous generation. Making a basket that could hold a pile of berries or a pot that could carry water was something everyone could do, and so continuing to do so after first having learned carried a stigma of infantilism. I could do it better than anyone else, though, and from an earlier age. More and more it seemed everyone craved what I produced. But in my need for approval I focused so intently on refining those basic skills that I woke up one day and realized that all of the people I knew growing up had left me behind and that I had no idea how to fish or what foods to gather and from where. The village was so filled with the products of my labor that there was no need for me anymore. The people were so tired of telling me they appreciated what I did and so jaded by being surrounded by the fine detail and artistry that what I had devoted my childhood and sacrificed my adulthood to was now fodder to kick around in the dirt when years of abuse rendered them no longer useful. I lived with my mother. My father had died in an accident, deep in the woods. I saw no one. I tended to the chores of the household. My baskets and pottery became as nameless as they were ubiquitous, and nobody sought me out. We are otters - social by nature I'm told - and perhaps that's why I felt so abandoned. At first I hid from the world because I spent all my time making things. Then, I hid from the world because I knew nothing of practical skills outside the home. Most uncomfortable, though, was when I hid from the world from shame.
"Eat your dinner. I worked hard on that." My mother would say.
I would pick at the food and hardly finish what I was given. It wasn't that I was ungrateful, but it always felt like a reminder that I didn't know how to provide for myself or for a family.
"What is sex like?" I remember asking one night. I remember my mother's face going flush, even as she continued to serve herself food. I could tell I crossed a boundary with her, but that she had no intention of letting me know I had.
"You'll find out, when the time is right."
"The time was right years ago. Your son is a homebody. What is sex like?"
"Mothers don't talk to their sons about sex and sons don't ask their mothers. You will know what to do when it is time."
I had had enough. I was sick of wondering, and waiting, and sick of the wretched confusion and smoldering lust that under normal circumstances I would have already worked out with a neighbor's daughter. I suppose I didn't know better. I know that at the time I didn't care. I reached across the table and pressed my palm to my mother's breast. Our people wear simple clothes, and mothers never wear a shirt indoors with family, but even I knew that holding one's mother this way wasn't what a son was supposed to do. She sat there, motionless, and as my eyes studied her face to interpret the gravity of what I was doing she looked away, to the side, to nothing at all. When I stroked her nipple with my thumb she had had enough. She swatted my paw down and slapped me across the face. We just looked at each other. Dinner proceeded, but silently. Afterward, I cleaned while my mother mended clothes.
I can still remember how furious I was. I was angry that what I had done was supposed to be wrong. I was angry that I was scolded and that I had to stop. I was angry that my life had led to a point where I would do that. I was angry for reasons I couldn't begin to understand. I was angry that I was angry and that my body betrayed me - I was wearing a sarong, trying to clean dishes and tidy the home as a blunt tower of fabric stared up at me from my crotch and bobbed awkwardly with my every movement. My mother laughed at me - her pervert son blushing with anger and sweeping the floor with an erection.
My memory is somewhat hazy of what happened next. Everything went red when I heard her laughter. I stormed across the room to her.
"Is this funny to you?! Is my life a joke?!"
She tried to stop herself. She held up her hands defensively, covering her face, and leaned away. She was sitting on the floor as I stood over her, and her face was right there, next to it.
"Is my life a joke to you?!"
I remember screaming it. I remember being sure the whole village heard. I remember a meek voice in the back of my mind warning me that what I was doing could end my life - or at least change it forever. What I remember most vividly, though, was feeling as though I could sense the heat from her body through the sarong. I'm not proud of what I did, but I grabbed her head with both paws. I made fists, grabbing hair, an ear, I think maybe they I had a paw full of her cheek, I'm not sure. She froze in terror. It was only then that I realized I was no longer her little boy. I was bigger than her, and stronger. I pushed my hips forward and yanked her against me, grinding against her.
This was the first time I had ever came. All that anger and frustration and shame and lust poured out of me in this brutal and disgusting act of crushing my mother's face against my groin, only fabric separating us from so much greater a sin. It only lasted a moment but it felt like forever. It felt like everything I hated and loved and feared and desired poured out of me in sticky hot gushing spurts that soaked us both. I shuddered. She shuddered. I let go of her and I backed away. My anger was gone, but her fear was still clinging to her as if she were soaked with it to the bone.
I picked up the broom. I remember not knowing what to do or say. I was panicked. So I just trembled and swept. She trembled and mended clothes. We said nothing. It got dark, and still we said nothing.
Normally, we would sleep with the sun. Fires meant using up wood or oil that was better saved for when the nights were so cold it was needed - but my mother built a fire and called me over. We sat together and looked into the flames as the smoke rose out the hole at the top of our one room home. She wore a shirt now, and it made me ashamed.
Dogs were howling in the distance before she spoke. "I'm sorry that your life turned out this way." She said.
"It's not your fault."
"It is. I thought... I thought maybe you could always make pots and baskets. I thought the village would accept you as an artist."
I sat there and tried to think about what she said, but I didn't understand. My sarong felt disgusting. Whatever had come out of me, I was too afraid and ashamed to look at or clean up. It clung to my fur and felt slippery and sticky still - like it was a glue that would never dry. I wondered if there was something I needed to say, but she spoke again.
"I didn't come from this village. Your father met me inland and asked me to come back with him. Where I come from there are hundreds of otters, and other folk, all kinds of people. Some of them are like you. My father was like you. He made knives and tools all day long and nothing else. Where I come from, people like you are looked up to. People here loved what you made when you were young, so I thought it would be the same."
I had never asked my mother if she wasn't one of us. I had no idea. I had never really given thought to the existence of others.
"What did I do to you, mother?"
She reached over and held me. She held me like I was a child, and pulled my head to her chest. I had to lean over and it hurt my neck to do so, as I was no longer small, but it was comforting all the same to feel held like I was.
"Nothing. You did nothing. Please, forget that anything happened."
She licked at the top of my head, grooming as a mother does a newborn. "You're just like your grandfather. He was a passionate man. He wasn't always understood. I wish I could find a woman for you to love, but the village is too small..."
"I don't understand what I did."
"It's okay, you'll understand when it's time."
I wanted to argue. I felt the anger rising in me again. But she clung to me and she held my cheek to her chest and I let it go. She wasn't going to tell me, and whatever drug or magic comes from a mother's embrace had intoxicated me.
"Do you feel that way often?" She asked.
I nodded, and I felt myself starting to tear up. I felt like something was wrong with me, and my mother only now was finding out - like the burden of my biological urges was a secret affliction I had endured for no reason and she would now explain it all with some motherly wisdom and make it go away - or even worse that there was nothing to be done. I squinted my eyes to hold myself back from crying. She pet my head and leaned against me, letting go of me. I sat up and she placed her head on my shoulder, the two of us staring into the fire again.
"Your father didn't. Your grandfather did... all the time... but your father only did once the entire time I knew him." She paused, and her voice wavered, "and it brought me you. I love you, son, with all my heart."
The emotion in her heart was infectious. I couldn't steel myself from it. I began crying as silently as I could. My voice cracked as I spoke, and I think it caused her to start crying as well. "What is it?"
"It's how we make children, and how we show love."
I was so confused. What I had done was more hate and urgency than love, and if it was love, why had I only found out about it now if my mother loved me so much? "Why don't we do it, if it is how we show love?"
"Because sons must never make sons with their mothers." She laughed a little through her tears and stifled both back, sniffling, wiping her eyes delicately and regaining her composure. "The village... they already think we do... they think that is why you spend all your time inside and why you don't fish or gather food."
I think that I would have been more stunned had I understood all of what she said, but all the same I had nothing to say. I had nothing to think. I felt like I had been wiped blank and sank into the earth. I had nothing more to cry about, as I felt like I understood nothing. But here, beside me, was my mother. Her body was pressed against mine, and she just told me that she loved me. An entire life of reserved, quiet, emotionally guarded existence was torn apart by one violent act, and now there was this closeness and warmth. And, as if it knew something I didn't, that damnable appendage started to grow. It was inconspicuous at first, and I only knew because I could feel that slippery slimy mess as it shifted and thickened. It seemed the moment I felt myself pushing that fabric up that my mother gave a little shiver and a start. But she saved me the embarrassment of saying anything and just sat there with me.
As it grew I forgot the shame, and I forgot the anger and the violence. Concern faded away and I felt only affection. I wanted to feel that gushing outflow of sensation again, but this time it was more intense and at the same time less urgent. I wanted to ask her if we could do it again, but I didn't properly know what "it" was, nor could I ask it. But still, it hung there in my mind. I imagined asking it a thousand times while my heartbeat ticked away in the protrusion in my lap.
"Did I make you pregnant? By what I did?"
My mother stifled a giggle. I think she would have laughed madly if she didn't think it would upset me.
"No, no no no, you don't make children that way."
"Then we didn't do anything wrong?"
She was taken aback. She recoiled from me a little. My understanding of what I had just been told was that it was wrong because sons should never make sons with their mothers, and she could not have a son from what happened, so how could it be wrong? But I must have said something wrong, I thought, because there was such a long and uncomfortable silence. She took her head off my shoulder and sat up, leaving me feeling cold and distant. I thought I might cry again from waiting for something to be said.
"No... I guess we didn't"
My mind worked faster than it ever had before, and at the first sounding of the word no I dropped the guilt that hung over my head. I shrugged it off and immediately felt bright and wonderful. Before I could even consider a second time what I was about to say - what I wanted to say before but couldn't bring myself to - it was already out of my mouth.
"I want to do it again."
Again she was startled, and again she was silent. I thought I had said something terrible, so I turned to look. On her face, in the firelight, there wasn't fear or a grave expression. All I saw was a bright smile, framed by the glistening trails the tears from before had left, and a familiar face.
"We didn't exactly 'do it'" She looked like she was going to burst into laughter again, "But I will help you, son, and let you feel that again. But you mustn't say anything, and you must look away from me"
She scattered the wood and the fire died down to embers. I looked away. I saw nothing of what she did. I felt her hand reach under my sarong, and I felt that feeling when I had held her head to my crotch. Again, it lasted almost no time, but it felt like forever. Without the anger it was so much nicer. It was love incarnate. But when it was over all I could think was that it seemed like such a short, awkward, disgusting act - even stupid. But I felt better.
She poured a bowl of water and washed her paw in it. She handed it to me and told me to wash. "Clean yourself so you don't stink like sex" she said.
After that we went to bed. She slept with her shirt on. I felt ashamed. I bunched up the sarong and threw it in the coals, letting it smolder away to ash by the morning. She left before I woke.
This is my account of the crimes for which my mother was exiled. These are the actions which led the village to cast her off into the forest. I have gone to follow her. I will find her, and we will live in the village where she is from. Please do not look for us. You can all rot in hell.
- T'llk