'his little how high'

Memories don’t typically start to form until the two-year mark, when a child has grown enough to understand the concepts around them. However, we’re all born into the world knowing one definitive fact: our mother is our first love, and it was her womb that carried us to term. Wombs are safe—warm membranes that coddle our forming limbs while we stretch and develop. Do babies know that they will soon be ejected from the fleshy walls? Or do they cry when born because they’ve been torn from their sacred home? Easterman couldn’t remember what being an embryo was like–obviously–but he longed for the impervious chamber of his mother’s womb. To be held, to be loved so unconditionally that he could retire his sense of self and simply exist as a shapeless fetus once more. 

As he pushed himself deeper into your cunt, he could feel the muscles contract around him, beckoning him closer to the safety beyond your cervix. It both welcomed and mocked him, offering him something he could not physically attain anymore. He shuddered and dropped his jaw with a moan of discontent, yet it sounded no different than his usual utterings to your ear. Feeling the cavity in his chest grow, he hunched down to press a clammy hand down into your abdomen, the added pressure making you squirm with a few slurred words. He didn’t catch them, too focused on trying to palm the warmth of your womb into existence; that if he pressed down hard enough, he’d be able to touch the forbidden chamber within. Easterman was brought back by the touch of your own hands, grasping at his forearms with filed nails for a semblance of an anchor. Eyes flitting to your much smaller hands, he was torn between need and disgust, having half a mind to shake you off but not having the heart to do it. 

Hendrick despised that the only way he felt valued as of late was during your sporadic visits. It was supposed to be a one-off thing, a lapse of judgement. He missed Irene, missed hearing his name be moaned rather than screamed at him. So, when you didn’t shrug him off when he went in to kiss you in a moment of weakness, he took it as God giving him a small grace after months of torturous silence from the man upstairs. It snowballed into you showing up every so often, letting him empty himself in you or bury his head between your pillowy thighs just to feel normal again. And though he’d never voice it, it showed in the way he inhaled your perfume, burrow into you like a bear cub seeking warmth from its mother, that he longed for approval just as his reagents did.

As much as he hated the soulless mop of a woman his mother was, he would never deny that he ached for the weight of her arms around him or how he missed the way she’d comb his hair before bed. Plastic prongs gently scraping at his scabbing scalp as he held still for her, letting the comb kiss away the throb of torn follicles whilst his mother recalled aloud how he had his grandmother’s nose. It was private moments like those that convinced him his mother still loved him, despite the incessant abuse. That she would hold him for years to come — even when he started looking more like his drunk of a father and less like the photo of his grandmother on the mantle. 

‘Such a pretty girl you could’ve been,’ his mother would coo under her breath, eyes far away as she dried his mousy hair once more with the towel. ‘If only God was kind to me.’

Maybe that’s why Easterman became a shink: to figure out why a mother would say such a thing to her eleven year old son. 

He still didn’t know.

Easterman wondered if you’d like him all the same if he was a girl. If he could dawn a pretty dress, like the ones his mother would squeeze him into on slow Saturday afternoons, that you would tell him how pretty he was, how much you liked him. If maybe then, he’d be allowed to wear his heart openly and not feel like a failure of a man when he’d cry upon release. Why was it okay for you to cry when you came, but when he did it, you looked at him like he was a pathetic worm—something better off thrown aside and alone, rather than held and comforted? It was envy he felt towards you, not truly hatred. Envy that you could cry in his arms after a cathartic orgasm, just as you cried when you entered the world, and he was left to wipe away his own tears in the dim light of his office after you left.