Geriatric Or Treat? - Flash Fiction

He knew he would never ski again. Nor ever take a swim in the sea. No more playing football, not even kicking a ball around in the garden with his grandson, doddering versus toddling. And tonight, he gathered, was to be his last occasion of carnality. 

As the woman divested herself and confronted him with her nakedness, though hardly a mirror, her quailing, failing flesh reflected his own. She looked no less ravaged than he did, even though he adjudged her considerably less advanced in years. Her rot was presumably more protractedly drawn out, the pain more blunted than his own onrush. Nudity presented her scars, both surgical and unqualified corrective and regardless that he himself currently had no wounds, he knew his senescent body was beyond any ability to heal itself.

Prostitute propriety had proscribed kissing which probably represented a joint reprieve. A mocking respiration as each would be moiling to breathe some life into the other. His mouth usually so dry, was now brimming precipitantly with a necrotic bubbling of mucus and deliquescing squamous epithelial cells. She had her own earthy tang, but he certainly didn’t want to be trajecting his own inhumation reek into her mouth. 

Incrementally he winched himself atop his mount like a chainmailed cavalier of old. Immediately his body protested the (im-)posture. Muscle memory evacuated his tissue like vermin from a holed ship. Fluid drained from the interstices around what was left of his sinew definition. Blood fleeing his capillaries going god knows but where. Replaced by rheum and serum. Watering him down. Diluting his puissance. Depleting him. Swelling skin and tumescence everywhere except where it was required. He was drowning from within. Saturated and suffocating. He wheezed an appeal to swap positions, if she might otherwise mount him. Wordlessly she hoisted her dimpled flank and allowed him to burrow beneath. 

Perhaps this had all been a fiendish plan by his son. To kill off the old man. An Oedipal closing of the circle, from when he himself had inducted him into the art of lovemaking by taking him to a prostitute on his 18th birthday, as many fathers were charged with back then. Now returning the favour in full knowledge of its likely fatality. If the blue pill accelerant he had slipped into his hand wasn’t fit to burst his heart, then the exertion against the rockface of the woman might see the endeavour through. Dying while on the job, passing over with a smile on your face, wasn’t that supposedly the dream of every male of the species? His facial musculature so atrophied, that a smile was beyond it, rather it being set firm in a permanent rictus. But how could his son possibly possess such precise knowledge of the extent of his physical decay? Could he have precociously gleaned the indignities that come with age? He hoped for his sake he did not. 

She was jouncing costively over him, with each crush landing buffeting his legs as though he were on a Medieval torture rack. Her pigmentation atop him never altered a jot, while he felt his own becoming pallid and bloodless. He looked down at himself and saw the spreading bruises. His body was collapsing. Putrefying before he had actually died. He imagined the bones of his skeleton becoming disarticulated, no longer bound together by sinewy ligatures. Her hollowness was so stark, he couldn’t ascribe to her any intentionality, but it was if her movements were trying to shuck him from his body. In a quest to leave what, to distil his soul? He snorted mordantly, or perhaps it was his own inner corrosion that eructed forth the snort. 

Tears filled his eyes but were too insipid to break over the levees of his reptilian folds of skin. Tears elsewhere on his rind, stretched taut by desiccation until the rolls and wrinkles of his puckered ancient parchment rent. Where there were lesions he could only picture writhing worms. Where there were blisters he envisioned scurrying flies laying their eggs. He conceived his own stench to be even more flagrantly putrid now, beyond the parochial hook of his own nostrils. None of this exhumed any lust. Liquid discharge from every place on his body except the essential, focal one. His own member was the ultimate recruit to the army of worms, mucilaginous, shrivelled and blind. He closed his eyes. 

The best (?) sex was that in which you surrendered awareness of your body. Either your mind was so transported in bliss that it could no longer register its containing husk. Else your whilom wrapping had melded with that of your lover so you could not tell where one ended and the other begun. But here he was utterly conscious of each grievous corporeal symptom. And not because it was borne out of the commercial nature of the congress, nor down to the lack of intimacy through being two complete strangers to the precise nature of each another’s mien. The best (?) sex could either peel you or melt you sweatily clean away. But always at the agency of the other’s body rather than your own. Yet gravity’s grubby force was archly engineering this cast. A geometry of failed configuration and solipsistic arrangement. Two incongruent bodies, blankly bearing neither surfaces nor curves, instead succumbing wholly to the pressures brought from within. Mutual self-absorption without any design on autonomy. Lacking any stout tensility, his vermicular organ kept squirming out from her shaved crevasse. She must have been sensate enough to register this slippage as she bevelled her pelvis to try and handlessly re-inter it into her catacumbal vault. But her stubbled apron only served to triturate and thresh, as if his stub were a cigarette she was grinding extinguished under a booted heel beneath her lamp-post. Sometimes in the past, sexual agonies could be thrilling. Tonight they were just annihilating.

The brain would be the last thing to go. But then it would be forever persecuted by the constant realisation and acknowledgement of each preceding deficient organ and wanting apparatus. Of all the activities its courier was no longer capable of. Lashing it cruelly by constantly revisiting unobtainable memories. His ausgespielt body was too decrepit to sustain his rage against it. It shouldn’t be like this. It was never like this. The act of coition which ceded life and germinated cell reproduction, now disintegrating his cells and culling into death. 

A Literation - Flash Story

Children carbon copied their creators. While the physical outcomes of the genetic wheel of fortune retained a whisper of protean unpredictability, speech and acculturation remained utterly undifferentiated from that of their parents. Glossal guardians, stagnant syntactical statuary. Consummate chips off the old blocks, kids were cultivated colloquial clones.

Initially imbibing milky morphology mutely with teat-stuffed mouths at the mammary, while mum suckles safe words for them. Sat at her knee, bottled blather iterated, infused and introjected. Mounted in the high-chair of babble, being spoon-fed more solid sonant syllables minced and mashed into building brick morphemes. Until the child evidenced an incipient ability to word string sentences for himself. From there on in, the parlance predisposed, perpetually prefigured and impervious to independent importation.

Scions were unable to shuck themselves from their die cast speech stamp. They artlessly echoed the same means of articulation as their extraction. Whatever their emotional bent, which like their physical features could lie anywhere on the continuum provided by the DNA chemical crap shoot, they were devoid of the vocal means for varying its expressive pitch.

The theories of Sigmund Freud darted back for favoured diagnosis, as Oedipal dissonances were played out in the most derisory fashion, since none had the diction to defy the discourse. Juvenile abstractions might fleetingly seem unregimented, but they were soon shunted along tramlines once terminology was brought to bear to transliterate them into tangible thought. 

Bilinguals were to some extent immune. For they could slip in and out of their twin vocabularies in any manner of their choosing. Thus was their language uniquely minted beyond predictability. So radical educationalists swept aside the Sciences and even English, in order to place primacy on second languages. But the rote inculcation by lifeless textbooks proffering limp assimilations of Jean-Paul’s first day at school, or Otto writing to his pen-pal, were no less arid than the way adolescents had acceded to their own mother tongues. Fluctuating between two stuttering fluencies furnished them neither felicity nor facility. 

Yet a few whippersnappers managed to strike out on discoveries of their own that enabled them to snap their linguistic shackles. They didn’t enter such a course knowingly in a spirit of seeking to expand their verbal palettes, but merely ventured into the neglected libraries- (there were no bookshops anymore) and picked up novels to read. They were swept along the unadulterated imaginations of authors and buoyed by exposure to the words therein which cast them free of their own constricted palates. They envisioned new horizons, disinterred wonderment and evolved the means to encapsulate it in voiced reactions of their own. Then they set to work writing books to liberate the next generations that would come after them. 

Dirty Money - Friday Flash

This one didn't even make it into my new flash anthology "16FF"!

At age thirteen I came into quite a considerable sum of money. Courtesy of my father of course. Not by way of any tasteful convention through a legacy. Since he wasn't dead, far from it. But it was purely and simply because I was his son.

In this religion our family paid chapped lip service to, a boy supposedly became a man when he reached that callow age. For the mere public demonstration of having learned to speak in tongues, or a specific alien variant of it at least, strange people would come up to me, ruffle my hair, pinch my cheek and pronounce me the spit of my father and then press a cream envelope into my hand. Most managed to have my first name inked on them, but not all.

Since I barely knew these people. Friends of my parents, my father, who passed me like ships in the night as I scurried for the haven of my room when they came round for a dinner party, a card evening or a more casual drinks and natter. Any that I coincided no matter how briefly with in space, were usually appeased with an even more fleeting "Good evening" and I was released from further adult interaction. now at thirteen I found myself having to thank them, gurn as they touselled my carefully layered hair, or sucked in the smarting sensation after they pinched my skin that seemed to be on offer.

They were rewarding me not for anything I had done, few of them shared the family religion or appreciated the significance of its rite de passage. They were rewarding me for whose son I was. Their mate's progeny. Their large as life, good egg, top value- both socially and professional, pal. In their bourgeois you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours world, everything came down to an envelope of money. I felt myself being inducted into a different adult wisdom to that the religion had in mind. Genuinely more co-operative species remove parasites from each other. In those hard to get at places. They don't satisfy themselves with raking claws down the other's back. I didn't know how I knew at such a tender age, maybe that's what the religious fathers really meant by solemnising this occasion, but I knew when those friends turned up at our house with their wives, they were being unfaithful to them.

When I was sixteen, I took a decision. I started seeing a psychoanalyst in secret. There were Oedipal conflicts to be resolved that was for sure. I went privately so as not to leave a paper trail and funded it from my nest egg as soon as I could legally access it. Nest egg, yes we'll pass on the obvious symbolism of the maternal egg for now shall we?

More often than not, lying there on a couch in a room heated to hospital ward swelter, I fell asleep for my fifty minutes. Ironic seeing as anxiety dreams peppering my disturbed nights, were the ostensible reason for my attendance there. For his part, when he deigned to offer comment in the skimpy house style, he opined that at least it showed I felt secure enough in his room and in his presence to fall asleep. Yeah, two different meanings of the word security rubbing up against one another there I reckoned. My zoning out, aka emotional security, his financial security. Must have been the easiest cash he ever earned.

Came the point where I had no lucre left to continue the alleged treatment. We talked about and around the issue (issue, that's funny, being another word for bank notes, a connection he failed to make, though of course the issue of a parent...) We agreed that such money had been dirty in my eyes because of its source. In that laconic way of his, I think he was trying to finesse me into opening up negotiations with him about staying on, paying a lower rate (though is that all the value I placed on myself?), which also might entail me earning it and thereby make me engage more with reality. But I refused to take his bait. My first salary just to pay his bills? How self-involved could a man be? Maybe he anticipated me going cap in  hand to my father. We agreed to terminate our sessions, both imagining that it had been of some utility, though I suspect his notion being far more therapeutic than that of my own. For me, it was more transfer than transference.

My secret leaked out eventually. I was ready to walk out of my University course before even completing the first year. I was unenthused by having to interpret the great works of literature through the prisms of Marx and Freud, but that was all the course seemed to offer. As if I wasn't well versed in both of those theories already, having helped empty my life of meaning and value (there is no such thing as surplus value).

As my father berated me for lacking staying power, for ever seeing anything through, for the blow to his prestige, I committed the error of commenting how my further education was likely to bankrupt me. My Shrink no doubt would have said that I had done so deliberately.

"What about your savings? There must be oodles of cash built up in there by now? It's meant for things like this, to set you up in life".

"I laundered it".

"You laundered it? What does that even mean? Laundered it? What, like it was drug cartel money or something?"

"Some sore of cartel yes".

He just looked at me with complete incomprehension. He couldn't recognise me at all. Certainly not as his own son.

Which is where all this started. Money received under false pretences. Mistaken identity. Job done I'd say.

Time to go out into the real world and assert myself.