A Mother's Love for Her Son

©2002 Ian Avery Bryant
All rights reserved.

ONE

Many smells permeate this room, this small space interspersed with blue lace doilies sewn with care into the very walls. Each is soaked in subtle scents, some perfumes and some human.

He knows every one of them, hundreds lining the walls like wallpaper, a great floundering mass of past experiences. Memories from people he has never met lie within these silk creations, massaged into their fabric slowly and painfully over hours of contemplative sewing; crafted with pure obsessive cruelty. Some trail tentatively near the borders of the rugs she's lain for him and the wall, their tattered edges beginning to show open loops of silk that once were closed, describing beautifully crafted whorls of maniacally thought-out patterns.

Of them all he knows this one best, for it was the first to appear, smelling of new perfume and far away places he would never see. Lying on his belly, naked, threads like millions of tiny antennae would stroke his skin from the Persian rugs strewn across the floor, to the smells encapsulated there so the hungry nose pressed against the finger can begin to read. His father's semen crusts the knot at which the whole pattern begins, the rich, earthy smell of it describing a man whose mental capacity could barely exceed his own child's after 24 months of life, the knowledge of that woven into his sweat and blood that soaked the silk. A son reading fear and hate with his olfactory glands from a man long dead, huge and swollen in his head, greedily pulling in the tale he knows so well. Delicate fingers, but worn, every one bearing a deep groove in the tip of it, pus-filled with new scars breaking over the old, the use of them constant and unforgiving. Here, where his father raped him, just 4 years old and yet understanding every moment of it, forgiving his father in a fashion no normal human boy should be able to, one unable to see the horror buried in the eyes of another, a soul decimated, a mind beyond sanity.

Keys are everywhere here, his own, his mother's, his father's. Each one requiring days for total comprehension, each one a life, and few save his mother still living to add to the threads describing their brief existence.

TWO

Houses lean in different directions along these streets, straining at their foundations, some with all their might forcing collapse, so great their desire to be rid of the hatred and putrescence within them. Few decipher the fear encased within these wooden tombs, these brick mortuaries that harbor the living dead. Of those who pass, children or dogs in tow (rarely a difference in their method of restraint), most do not see the awkwardness in the houses' stature. Only the blind, whose canes swish vaguely before them, feel the difference, the smells and sounds seeping from the homes in their distress. Nothing smells like fear, like hatred built up in one space for decades, for centuries. They avoid these streets, the blind and young children who walk alone on their way to school. Better to be late than soak in the horror emanated by hundreds of shattered lives, hundreds of rotting homes, aching for their time as capsules to be ended.

Like this one, door screaming as it is opened, howling out its terror as it releases the woman to the world. Black shawls wrapped tightly about her bony shoulders, eyes black like tar so deeply embedded in her skull she might be mistaken for sightless herself, save the moment those eyes bury their beams into the soft, happy eyes of some young child, raping the joy from that mind with a glance, sending the pure running and praying for salvation. Even these stormy winds cannot bend the boughs of a woman like this, determined and moving with dark purposes. Nothing on this earth could halt the schedule written in the mire of a mother's sticky mind, dripping with hate for humankind. Somehow, her arthritic body straightens itself, bones and joints snapping audibly as she wills the gnarled appendages to ease, the use of her hands regained through determination alone. A need to feel growing deeply inside of her, aching in her heart, burying itself in her thoughts as a purpose: to reach out and find that which will allow her child to see more of the world. Smells float upon the wind, wild as it is, attacking her, taunting her to find the source of these beauteous odors.

Musky, oily; she finds it, the origin of the aroma that tugged her from sleep, wrested her from the confines of the home. A blanket doubling as a door, littered with the trails of history lain upon it by countless men, earthen and woody, human product left without care upon the world. It crunches as she moves it aside with her arm, straight and stable in its purpose, arthritic limbs renewed by the task at hand. Polished black shoes painfully clashing with the grease of the walkway she traverses, three hours spent polishing them with spit not her own, now sliding through the oil of thousands of human bodies that passed this way, ejaculate and the remnants of lubricated organs glistening on the walls. Moving through it all, seeing everything, understanding all of it, she is untouched, unmoved. One purpose: there before her, in a room without a door, lying prostrate on a pile of kitchen towels, smoke spiraling up from lips moist with a recent transaction, body glowing deep brown with the heat of sex and opium.

No need for drugs this time. Hundreds of little silk squares in a pile, a skeletal hand patiently reaching for a new one with each task accomplished, slowly running the square along the inner labia, another into the greased anus twitching like a hungry mouth, one for the supple lips, each placed in a separate vial, airtight and faithfully preserving the perfumes she painstakingly collects. Opium paste is sampled, toenails massaged in silk, blood from a pulsing vaginal cavity, mucus soaked from nostrils straining to understand what was happening to its host. No interruptions, no pause, every bottle full and packed in the spotless leather bag.

Rising, bringing the bag close to sagging breasts that could not feed a hungry child even in their youth, sadly gazing upon the largeness of the heaving, soiled bosom of the drugged prostitute who would awaken, aching, bleeding, yet no different than any other day. Every day, the same, a different man, a different woman, a different animal. A mother's love for her son knows no bounds, this black-clad skeleton of a woman no different than any other woman with a child whose needs must be met.

THREE

In a house with forty doors it is a sin that only two open and shut, the others fatefully silent as they protect their secrets with horrified dedication. Dust moves in droves across the floors, stopping at each doorway, sniffing lasciviously at the miniscule cracks between door and rug, howling in rage at the passage they cannot take. Creaks announce the opening of one door, sounds of blustery winds flailing madly against the walls, trying to infiltrate the decrepit home with some freshness, but the home rebels, urged on by its cruel mistress, slamming the door in the face of nature and her purity.

She moves to a lone table, lone chair; wooden and bleak this pair, the sole purpose they serve displayed by their worn nature. Here are crafted the keys to lives, the windows into souls her son uses to look, not with eyes but with a bulbous and fanatic olfactory gland, smelling the images of humans and animals to populate his feverish world with more than the walls of so small a room, a room a room beyond which he has never stepped.

Each pattern is woven to mirror the body from which it came, the story behind the body carefully balanced amongst the hoops of silk to give the very illusion of a real body, warm, odiferous, alive. In each silken thread the throbbing heat of a sexual being can emanate, easing the aching depths of a tormented boy, without knowledge of another human's touch, save the frantic fumbling of a father whose time had come, and the battering limbs of a mother desperate to beat from that young mind the memory of so wrong an act.

With great care were the works created, knowing the need for stimuli in a brain daily hungering for new things. Dogs, trees, people, houses, anything that could be bottled and woven, adding to the world forever growing in his imagination that cruelly she would never be witness to. Daily sewing, opening the door to his room, kneeling in the oil of his languorous respite and joining yet another silken doily to the wall for him to stroke, to joyfully drool over, adding it in some twisted fashion to his internal world, God only knowing the visage any one thing might take.

It is finished, deep in the corner of the room, a prostitute in all her lasciviousness, moistness, musky oils and vaginal pleasures open for her son to inhale, to use as he must, to keep life flowing in his veins without the pain of loneliness. She does not touch him back, stands without speaking, looks not into his eyes but inward at her own soul, actually praying to God for forgiveness, assuring herself that nothing wrong has been done. Opening the door she begins to step forward, a threshold unkind today, a room not wanting to release her hollow vessel to the world beyond his. His delicate, pale fingers stroke her ankles, a bubbling sound issuing from his throat, and the word she loathes bouncing like shattering glass from her mind: 'Daddy!' As if the word is something good, a treat to be had, a toy to play with.

In her rage she strikes at him with a pointed heel, ordering him to take back the word, erase it and focus on the woman she's brought him today, hot, reeking of opium and sensuality.

His blood flows rapidly from the wound in his cheek, a gaping tear obscenely stretching his idiotic grin across one side, astonishment creeping into his expression. She falters, pain ripping up the side of her body. Heart thudding relentlessly against her ribs, she falls upon the floor, the door open wide and the dust gleefully entering the room, exploring every corner of it, sticking to the fresh issue of blood and semen left by its troubled occupant.

Even in his pain, he crawls to her, hands stroking her body from head to groin, soaking in the smell of her death, his nose buried in every orifice, a gagging scream as he shreds the clothes from her body, trying to smell every inch of her before her body finally hardens and he can ply her limbs no more. This he understands; this he has felt once before, a father hardening upon the floor, blood spreading across the room, but she wouldn't give him that, hit him ferociously when he began to smell him, burying his face in the groin of the body, between the shoulder and buttocks. His mother had bellowed, like a man, heaving him from the body in horror. But at last she had given in, making the first silken key for his mind to use to create lives, create textures for his hidden, hungry world. In his head, his father lived forever, and as he breathed her into him, so too would his mother reside within his mind, young, happy, beautiful. As the breezes from the hallway eased into the room, the man's head rose and his hand reached out, crossing the threshold.

FOUR

With absolute loathing the rain beat down upon the houses. Every one of them bore a different evil, a different disease; some the rain could wash away, but others could not so easily be dissipated. Cats retreated from the rain on the old woman's porch, under the cover of the oak tree, but tonight she was not here. Wind howling through the gnarled limbs of the old oak voiced its dismay at the absence of one so akin. Worms dropped, slimy, fetid, emptying from the decay of the trunk as if mirroring the death of the old woman.

He had run through the house, crawling mostly, limbs unused to so much space, smelling everything, soaking in the smell of the house that he'd never known. But he soon grew weary, collapsing upon his mother's body, stealing the last odors of life from her, weeping now at the loneliness he felt.

When he awoke, he began to work. Slowly, tentatively, then deliberately, following a drive that was without reason, born from the voices in his mind built in decades of seclusion.

It was not long before he found the right door, only opening five before the one he needed sat before him. The smells betrayed the contents of the ones he had opened first, though: bodies, one in each, some decades old. Men. Failed men, probably each a possibility, a ray of hope in his mother's heart at moving from darkness to light. But in some small way, each failed, and she was a good mother. Protector of her son. Perhaps eventually she gave up; so few good men in the world, what would she need with one? She would provide everything her son needed. He would never want.

How wrong she had been, how terrible a mother; he knew this in his heart. Without words, he knew.

Stepping over the threshold of the door, he leaned his head back into the rain and screamed. Smells assaulted him from every angle, sensations, his skin hungering for it. Then he ran, teetering blindly down the street, shrieking, howling with ecstasy at the pure intensity of the world.

Back to top of page