Sour Milk & Bad Blood

As his old, calloused hand worked his mostly flaccid penis with no real sense of rhythm, Mister Jennings couldn't help but wonder why he'd bothered to lock the bathroom door. Nobody lived there anymore. The threat of being caught had vanished in a cloud of exhaust and the echo of some angry words over twenty years ago. Five years before that, Missus Jennings had succumb to the charms and riches of a Spaniard who took her away from her husband. The half-decade that followed was a sequence of awkward silences and bitter squabbles as a pubescent daughter left without a mother turned into an inspired young woman with an uncanny love for everything...

... except her father.

One day the mailman arrived with an escape disguised as an acceptance letter, and the fruits of loins, labor, and love attacked Mister Jennings' manhood, career, and relationships before, like her mother, leaving him forever.

Six weeks later Mister Jennings lost his job when a delivery truck backed over his ankle.

With nothing but family albums to talk to and unemployment checks to live on, the part of Mister Jennings that had begun to rot twenty years earlier, his pride, finally died so that the rest of him-what little was left, anyway-could hope to go on living.

He couldn't call what he had a life, though; couldn't convince himself he was living. The last of his life was taped up in his bathroom-every photo of his cheating wife and wayward daughter pried from their construction paper frames and adorning the warped mirror and aged drywall. It was there, under the watchful, still-smiling gazes of what had come and gone of his life that he masturbated in a futile effort to find some joy in what he'd had; to dredge up some mockery of pleasure at what had been lost.

But he saw nothing but judgment in their eyes, and he heard nothing but the ghosts of laughter and mockery. There was no pleasure in the act anymore, nothing but the embarrassing sense of dedication he still felt he owed. In some way, strange as it was, he could still dedicate himself to them somehow.

His eyes strained as he looked between the years-vacation to Florida with the little one laughing beside a giant, grinning rodent, a family reunion at the in-laws, anniversary trip down Route 66-and he worked his wrist through a sudden pang of arthritis. Still the old man pumped on, willing his exhausted penis to cooperate despite the shame of abuse and the ache of that prior hour's attention. Vision faded, and as the faces of his past vanished into oblivion it became easier to bring himself to full attention. Spurred by the hope that it would be over soon, he pumped harder, capturing what little rhythm he could to achieve his needs.

He couldn't remember the last time an orgasm gave him any real pleasure. His routine, in fact, had turned the experience sour and increasingly painful over the years. The last rope of jism dribbled into the sink, and a grunt-far from one of satisfaction, it was the sound of a day laborer finally free of his burden-slipped past his old, trembling lips.

"I remember when..." he panted, finally allowing himself to take in the husk of a man he'd become. The words felt better slipping out than his own seed, and he nodded at the first real pleasure he'd had in decades. Finally, he dared another "I remember" before the tears slipped through the sandy stones of his eyes.

He looked so sad. He looked so tired. The death of his pride had done a number on Mister Jennings that he hadn't noticed in so long. But the mirror hadn't been for its reflection in so long.

Remembering felt so good that he allowed himself to fall into a pool of memories too deep to swim, and then he lost them again and again and again.

Then he didn't want to remember.

The blade tucked into the old, tarnished Gillette was in bad shape. Like Mister Jennings, it had been left unloved and untouched-its edges had lost their sheen and clung like a desperate lover to old bits of stubble.

The first pass, like the memories, felt so good that he had to have another, then another. He let the blood flow into the sink so that it could flow and creep around the still settling puddles of ejaculate, and as he took in the spectacle he found the pleasure give way to pain all over again. The sight of white and red-a cruel, backwards symbol of his spilled agony and pleasure-turned into a kaleidoscopic blur as a new wave of memories washed over him.

And there, against a swirling backdrop of sour milk and bad blood, Mister Jennings followed after his long lost pride.