I was first introduced to masturbation by an older male cousin of mine on a lazy Fall afternoon some time ago.
Sitting together on the floor of his parent’s bedroom, playing Super Nintendo as we had done so many times before, he suddenly paused the game and said he had something to show me. He undid the buttons of my pants and pulled them down just enough to expose my hairless genitals. I sat there confused but did not move, curious to see where this was heading. He took hold of my penis between his index finger and thumb and began stroking it up and down. “…and you keep at it, just like this,” he said, his voice barely able to contain his excitement and it was all so similar to the giddy manner in which he would show me his new comic books or baseball cards or video games whenever I came over to this house.
He finished jerking me off and let go of my flaccid dick. I pulled up my pants and we continued on with our game, neither of us ever mentioning the incident again.
In fact, yesterday, while I was reading this very same book, an old woman sitting next to me, seeing that my book was in English, poked me with her bony fingers and proceeded to ask me all these personal questions, like where was I from and why do I know English and why did my parents get divorced and what was my book about. I answered them all as truthfully as I could and nodded along to her words as if I understood her.
She moved her face closer to mine. An old person’s face right in front of yours. Bam. I couldn’t bear it, the frankness, the explicitness of it, so close that I could feel the heat of her withering flame, smell her lunch as she spoke. It was too much. Her face looked like a rotten rutabaga, microwaved on medium for twenty seconds. My body reacted, it resisted, the muscles tensed, and the flight response gave my left leg a manic impatient rhythm to keep, the heel of my shoe tapping the floor on every off beat. It was all I could do to keep me from doing something irrational.
I stopped listening and focused on her mouth working. The inside of it was dry and sticky and I could see what little saliva was in there, glistening like a spiderweb in the morning, disappearing and materializing again in different formations after every hard consonant. The friction between her tongue and palate made these awful noises that were distracting to no end.
I thought she would never get off but her stop came and she waved goodbye to me as she got off the train and she continued waving goodbye as she stood on the platform, staring at me through the windows, her right arm pivoting at the elbow, moving back and forth as stiff and steady as a metronome. The train took its time to start moving but the slight jerk forward of propulsion did eventually come and the train grudgingly resumed its route, the old woman last seen slowly accelerating stage right off of the window.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Os Rebeldes - Murder By Contact
Hana Pt.3
As the bus approached the final stop, a surge of nervous energy took hold of me so that I was unable to continue the book I was reading. Through the window I saw that the flat shadowy landscape of earlier had now been replaced by the urban humdrum of well lit coffee shops and desultory crowds. The combination of the bus’ stale warm air and the muffled road noise outside had gradually lulled me into a near comatose state but the sight outside disturbed me out of my lethargy and I stepped off the bus fully awake.
The bus departed and the mob thinned out. Hana appeared before me. She was dressed in black, well layered, and warm. We greeted each other tersely with nervous smiles and began to walk. She gave me a gentle push and said, after a block of silence, “Why haven’t you called me? I was waiting to hear from you, you know.” The disappointment she expressed seemed exaggerated and I had a hard time telling if she was being serious or not. “I did call, a couple times actually. But YOU never picked up.” Hana rolled her eyes, exasperated, as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She said: “How come you never replied to my text messages?” “Um, I had a ton of work at the time and it must’ve slipped my mind. Well, what were you doing three weeks ago when I called? Busy as usual, I suppose?” “Ha, I was busy! I was doing my laundry!” “You liar! It was a Friday night when I called!” “What? Is it a crime to do laundry on a Friday night? People do laundry on Friday nights!” and so on and so forth we went, exchanging various recriminations and alibis, the both of us laughing at each other’s silliness while we did so. I guess what we were really laughing at though, underneath it all, was the idea that we were actually friends, or were friends enough to have a mutual responsibility to keep in contact. Should ignoring our respective phone calls really be so amusing to us? The thought bothered me and I did my best to ignore it.
As we continued to walk, I noticed that something was bothering Hana as well. I noticed it because I have a rather perspicacious eye for the subtleties of female body language. And because she was dramatically shaking her head no while loudly venting sighs of frustration. She looked like she was dealing with a ghost that would just not leave her alone. I asked her what was wrong and she acted surprised and said, “Oh, it’s nothing.” I pressed her on the matter and she replied with vague statements about “something that happened today” and that “it had nothing to do with me” and that “I should just forget about it.” My interest was piqued but I shut my mouth, knowing in due time the details would come out
Read more
