It was one of the first vacations we experienced, Mr. Therapist. We were going to the mother's beach house. She reserved it especially for her little young'un, her little Sonic, and she stowed away his father's credit cards and money and beer for him to behave on this trip. We thought good of the mother that she made an effort to protect him. He smiled, she smiled. We were off in the van, and she played lovely tunes on the radio, singing along to them with her melodic, operatic voice, and Sonic thought happy days were coming along on this shore, that finally, there would be calm waves, gentle risings, and he was happy. For once, happy.
Granted, Mr. Therapist, he didn't know about the rape. We kept that as a secret from him. He thought of nothing but good things of his mother. His father, well, not so much. He actually asked her if they could leave him on the trip. And she said no. Everyone had to participate. Even Gideon, if he was still alive.
Sonic still buried him in the rose bushes of his mother's garden, his body feeding the soil.
Many hours and eating out later (with the mother playfully feeding Sonic as if he was an infant and tickling him and all kinds of other infantile things that make me grow vile as I remember it now, while the father just ate his meal quietly, with a cup of black coffee as bitter as his future), they were finally at the beach, and Sonic played with the grains of sand, made his sand castles, let the shore tickle his feet and kiss him gently and he even watched the sunset with his mother, holding hands, Sonic unsure of exactly what happened between him and his mother the other night. He caught a recollection of it, him licking some sort of cave, but we tried to uphold the memory. Sonic didn't need to remember. We only let him remember the happy memories he had with his mother.
His father collected pennies and nickels in his pockets, calling the work people, the drones in the office, telling them that he was away. Picking up another small bottle of liquor while the children played their little games. He drank the whiskey warm from the store, the liquid amiable in his throat, feeling as if his organs were no longer solidified.
I speak matter-of-factly, of course, about Sonic's vacation, Mr. Therapist. I saw that the mother, despite her egregious manner with her only child, her little porcelain Christ of a doll on her dresser (Sonic would look at it, finger it, and wonder why she kept such an atrocious (and yet such a pretty, ghastly thing) thing in her home. The little girl looked so fragile, pale, as if she was hooked to an IV and she was ready to die any minute now. Sonic looked around in her dresser, seeing more things that caught his eye with a curious interest, such as her brand of Lucky Strike cigarettes and her dainty hookah she uses to smoke her marijuana with, along with a vibrator that Sonic didn't at all knew what its purpose was for, and as it shuddered violently against the dresser door we grew scared and shut it in a hurry, worried that the mistress would come here any minute and punish us.), would place the son's hand on her body, while she grinned harshly against the iodine light. And her white teeth like a broken shard in the hotel bedroom, smiling wickedly as she placed Sonic's hand on her chest, Sonic having no recollection of the event at all but me. She rubbed it, and I was scared. Sweat burst forth from my pores, and I wanted her to stop. This wasn't, truly it wasn't, in my calculations of the day, and I kept telling her to stop, but she got nearer to her porcelain little Christ, her little worshiped idol of her son, and she asked him that there was a snake underneath her and he wanted her to get it.
These games were disgusting, made me grow ill with unease and anxiety. She glided his hand toward her crotch, and I told her no, I didn't want to be there! Mommy can't treat me that way! Mommy can't make me touch the yucky part, where the snake has been! I cried, but she burned me with the Luckies. She told me to keep digging, I would find treasure and maybe some Reese Cups she got from the vending machine.
Father wasn't there. He drank. He could've watched his son get tortured and not give a damn. The flesh inside her smelled like a rotten, pissed-on carpet in a dilapidated house, and I wondered what the damn bitch ate that caused her to smell so bad. The smell overflowed in my nostrils, and I felt like throwing up. We all did. I just wanted to throw up in her damn crotch and see how she liked it, having disgusting things inside her. Her own son. An incestuous relationship. It all was disgusting, and I hated myself for even following her rules of the game, rubbing the clitoris, and I wanted to kill myself when she orgasmed. Sonic was a lucky bastard. He had no memory of this event, but instead, it would show up as a dream, and he would think, "Huh? Isn't that funny? I was having sex with my mother, but I never did! Mom would never do that!"
I felt I hated him for how lucky he was, to not acknowledge all the pain we felt. To see the blood and the misery on our sticky little fingers and have him not know of who we were. They told me I had to hide from him, to not reveal our hidden purpose, that we were secretly his guardians, the ones who would protect him from people like this ever coming into his life again.
She fell asleep. She was satisfied with her meal, her serpentine-like body rolling across the bedsheets, rattling and hissing through her fanged teeth. They looked like the moon. We saw that same damn white moth that followed us here to our vacation in California. I smacked my hands together in the air, crushing its insignificant, pathetic life. The moth that might as well have been an hallucination, a fleeting fantasy, was dead.