Lionel's Monologue

            It had been a sunny, summer day that had promised hope and happiness for the future. I had been sitting in my father’s old dinghy clinging to any semblance of normalcy, trying to remember the days when we had been a happy family sailing out on this boat together. Now, it had just become my fortress to hide in, defending the now with the past memories that lay in the wood of the tiller and fabric of the sails.

            Then, she arrived.

            She asked why I was running away as if she didn’t already know the answer. She tried to come onto my boat, but I wouldn’t let her. It was one of the few things left she hadn’t tainted.

            I still remember every word she said. “I’m so lonesome for you.” I could feel myself cringe on the inside, every bone in my body wanting to run away from her. But then, that little voice traitorous in the back of my mind, that longed for her embrace. I didn’t understand when I was a kid.

            Every time my father would leave for New York on a business trip, my mother seemed to tick with nervousness and excitement until he left. And then, that night, she would sneak into my room every single time. We’d play games. She pretended to be a high-class admiral. She’d show me a new, secret bugle call that I hadn’t yet heard. I had been so excited as a kid, obsessed with the sea.

            In return, I’d undress and join her in bed. I still remember the feel of her delicate hands crawling around my prepubescent body at five years old. It felt wrong, but what choice did I have? The burning smell of the cigarette she would light when we finished still wafts through my mind every time I think about it.

            Time and time again I would try to run away, but she’d come back and find me the same way her hands did beneath the covers in the dark bedroom late at night. I remember trying to run away from her to the park, rolling a marble over the crack in the pavement. I rolled it back and forth and back and forth. I kept hoping it would veer off its course, but it never did. It was like watching my life play out in front of me. Back and forth, back and forth, rolled around by my mother, and never able to change direction or run away.

            She found me soon after. And for a while, everything was okay. Daddy stayed home, but eventually he had to leave again. Stupid bastard. As soon as he left, in she came. The next day a boy at school told me I stunk. That’s what mother would always say to me before she stripped me naked and helped me into the bathtub. I ran.

            “This is a keychain,” she said. I just remember staring at it, my five-year-old self enraged that at all she had done to me and all she would do, trying to quell me with a keychain resembling that of my never-present father who allowed me to be abused. In seething rage, I took the keys and threw them overboard. I would never accept one of her gifts. She would never unlock my heart.

            But I was only five. And I didn’t understand the emotions I had. So I cried. And I let her onto the boat. And I let her stick her hands down my pants to ‘adjust my shirt.’ It was the first day I had truly let her in, if unintentionally. And for years after, she accepted it as an open door to come into my room late at night more often.

            I take a long drag from my cigarette as I remember the affair as if it was only yesterday. “Lionel,” the woman calls from the bedroom, “do we have any pickles left?”