"Family Ties"
By Beth Dolson
He looked around the room, which was in total disarray. He didn't realize the irony of his actions. He looked down at the hammer he was still clutching in his left hand and stared blankly at the congealed blood and the clump of blonde hair stuck to it.
He let out a loud sigh of frustration. "Mama is definitely going to punish me from the TV," he thought, looking around at the mess he had made.
Damn her. Damn them all. Why did she have to call me those horrible, filthy names? Why?
Balefully he kicked his sister’s corpse. Her dead eyes fell accusingly upon him.
"You bitch!”
He grabbed her by her clotted hair. The dent in her skull had stopped gushing; the coagulated blood had formed a gelatinous plug.
Mama would be home soon. He will have to work fast and dig a grave. He walked back into his bedroom. His cherished magazines were strewn all over the floor, torn pages everywhere. He sat down and cried as he tried to piece them back together. He was glad she was dead. She deserved it. She deserved worse. As he futilely attempted to reassemble the pages, he noticed the stench. He knew what it was; he had heard her bladder release when he struck the final deadly blow.
He got up and walked back across the hall to where his sister's lifeless body lay, all twisted and bloody.
It's all your fault if you just hadn't called me those names why did you have to tear up my magazines why did you have to say those things it’s your fault and you know it’s your fault why would you do that.
What was so wrong with wanting to look at young naked men, anyway? Just because he found himself getting a little more aroused every time he looked didn’t make him a F. He couldn't even bring himself to think of that horrible word let a lone say it, unlike his sister who was screaming it at him as she tore up the magazines.
He couldn't help himself. He just liked to look at the pictures. So what? He was fascinated by how perfect those young men looked. If Mama found that he was looking at those kinds of magazines, she would take them away. He went back to his sister's body and stared at her nudity in disgust. Sometimes he spied on her from the closet while she dressed and undressed. It was just curiosity; sexual pleasure had nothing to do with it. But he had never seen her thing up close. He touched her thigh but pulled his hand away quickly as if her skin were hot. It wasn't, though. In fact, it was starting to get cold.
"I hate you," he calmly informed her, placing his hand back on her thigh. He didn't pull away this time. Instead, he spread her legs apart. Between them on the floor was a puddle of urine the size of a pancake. “You’re disgusting,” he said. He gave her crotch a curious poke and found that although her body was cold and pallid, she was still warm inside. Soft. Wet.
He had to stop. Mama would be home soon. If she saw him doing "the nasty" she would be quite upset. Mama hated "the nasty," something Dad found out the hard way. All Mama liked was knitting and sewing and those game shows, especially The Price Is Right. She really liked that Bob Barker guy.
His sister was yielding and doughy; but she didn't compare to the rippling muscles of the young men in the magazines. He had bought his first one when he was eighteen and his sister was only five then. From then on over the last ten years he had taken advantage of the order forms in the magazines.
He noticed how she had matured into a beautiful young woman. He really didn't hate her all that much, but she shouldn't have destroyed his only pleasure. They were only magazines. It was nothing new and he wasn't doing anything wrong, but she would have told Mama, and Mama couldn't stand having that kind of filth in her house. That is why he had to hide his magazines in the first place. Mama was so old-fashioned he had to hide a lot of things.
He went to the garage, fetched a shovel and began digging in the garden. He had to finish before Mama got home. The soil was tender and in a half hour the job was done. He went back inside and started cleaning up the mess. He grabbed a towel from the linen closet and went to his sister's room. He took both her arms, pulled her back a few feet and noticed the puddle had stained the carpet. He carefully sopped it up and threw the towel in her closet.
As he dragged her down the hall, he passed his bedroom door and saw his torn magazines all over the floor. He realized he had to hide them, as well. He pulled his sister into his bedroom, picked through the pages, and figured he would just have to bury them with his sister. He decided he would tape all the torn pages to his sister's naked body as a reminder of what brought her to this demise.
As he was covering his sister's nakedness with pictures of male nakedness (which he was finding very pleasurable), Mama pulled into the cracked driveway. She saw right through the grimy windshield and the rotting bags of garbage piled next to the dilapidated porch. “That damnable boy,” she muttered. “Just like his father.”
He got the last paged taped to her body and grabbed her by the arms again to begin his journey toward the back yard. He heard the front door swing open and slam into the wall.
Mama grimaced as a rodent scuttled from somewhere to anywhere. She came into the living room, her mind a catalog of punishment. "Boy, didn't I tell you to take out the trash?" she hollered into the air. He froze. How would he explain this to Mama; there was definitely no way he could lie his way out of this one. He would have to hide her. If Mama saw what-
"Boy," Mama called again as she hobbled into the hall. It was too late. He sat, slumped, and waited. He looked at his sister’s dead, stiffening hand clutching pictures of muscular thighs and bent over studs.
She stood above him with her cane. She was a tree trunk. "Boy, why didn't you take the trash out?"
"Huh?" He was confused by her misplaced question, her banal motherliness.
"Oh never mind." She poked her dead daughter’s body in simple curiosity. "Clean up this mess, will you?"
"Mama, it wasn't my fault. She destroyed all my-"
"She's dead, huh?"
"Mama, I didn't mean to kill her."
"You were looking at those dirty magazines again.”
"No, Mama. I have never looked at dirty magazines. I promise I haven't."
"You did. She done told me."
"No Mama." That bitchy filthy bitch, she told. He wished he could kill her all over again; she had not suffered enough.
"I told you I don't like that smut in my house, and now I catch you with those nasty pictures of naked men? What can I do with such a disrespectful boy?"
Her rhetoric frightened him. What if she took away the TV again? What if she made him take those pills? He was good at hiding them under his tongue then throwing them out the window when she wasn't looking, but what if she made sure he swallowed them? Even though he was much taller than Mama, her presence overhwhelmed him. She stepped over the body and pointed her cane at him:
"Bad boys need to be punished. That is how we keep a family together."
Swiftly and with surprising force, she brought her weapon down across his face. Not giving him the chance to recover his bearings, she bludgeoned his head repeatedly until he was a heap on the carpet.
When he awoke, he cringed at the searing pain in his eyelids. He couldn’t open them no matter how hard he tried. On his naked groin, he felt the cold security of the magazine pages, and the strangely arousing sense of his sister’s stiff, cooling body, and beneath them both, the gritty soil. Damn Mama and her sewing.
He touched his eyelids and felt the tiny-knotted stitches binding them shut.
"Boy," she called from above. "You've been bad. You won’t be looking at those dirty magazines anymore, I seen to that. Just like your father. I had to teach him a lesson too.”
He pleaded for forgiveness, hearing the scraping noises of shovel and dirt, but seeing nothing.
"Mama, please. I didn't mean to look. I'm sorry. Please, Mama-"
A pile of dirt landed on his face, covering his mouth and nose. He tried to move from his sister’s body, not sure exactly if he really wanted to move from his sister’s body. She was so pliable, so doughy.
"Got to keep the family together.”
Mama continued to fill in the grave as he struggled to free himself. He wanted to spit but could not. He wanted to see but could not. He did not want to hear, but could:
"Got to keep the family together.” Even through inches, then feet, of dirt. "Got to keep the family together.”
His arms were squeezed in too tightly to brush the dirty away, or to reach out in protest, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to protest. She felt so good, so cold and dead.
Mama!
Even through fits of remorse, throes of life leaving body, fits of wanting to be sealed to his beautiful sister, even through all that, Mama knew best. She always did.
“Got to keep the family together.”
Even through-
Maaammmaaa!
-through spasms, brief acceptance, and peace.
When she was finished, Mama stomped on the dirt a few times to pack it down.
“Gotta keep the family together.”
© 2006 Beth Dolson
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