Becoming a Man in the Shadowlands: a Survivor's Story
Copyright© 2019 by Dennis Randall
Chapter 26: Mother's Underwear
It was a few months after my mother molested me I was watching television. During a commercial break, I raced down to the basement to get a change of clothes out of the dryer. That’s when I accidently tripped over an open box of powdered laundry detergent left on the cellar stairs. I went ass over teakettle and landed in a cloud of soap powder at the bottom of the stairs. My mother heard the racket and came to investigate.
Joyce had been drinking for the last few hours and was already well on her way toward getting totally sloshed. She stood at the top of the stairs and looked down at me rubbing my arm as I sat and sneezed in a fog of soap dust. Little particles of Tide lay all around me, like the remains of a winter’s snow squall.
Joyce vanished from view for a moment and then reappeared with a dustpan and brush and a face of fury. She started screaming.
“Look at the mess you’ve made, Dennis. I want this cleaned up before you go to bed!” Joyce raged as she threw down the dustpan and brush. I ducked to avoid getting hit, and the brush bounced off my shoulder.
My mother then stomped down the stairs, stood over me, and demanded that I sweep up every last speck of soap powder spilled on the concrete floor of the cellar.
Joyce took a seat on the stairs and proceeded to supervise the cleanup the process. “You missed a spot there ... over there is a place you missed ... you call that clean?” She pointed out one speck after another.
No matter what I did, it was not good enough. If even a particle or two of soap powder remained wedged in a crevice, it was too much.
As Joyce scolded and guided my cleanup process, she positioned her loose-fitting gray skirt as she sat on the stairs. Joyce rolled up the hem of her dress and draped it across her knees with her pale white legs spread wide. She continued to admonish me for missing specks of soap powder.
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