The Pure Ones

The Pure Ones

By Plot Roach

(All characters and events are fictional, yadda yadda yadda...)
(All rights of said story/characters/events belong to me. Please do not steal. Copyright Plot Roach 2014 yadda yadda yadda...)

Now hold it out Bobby, he heard his mother’s voice say in his head. So I don’t splash any on the rest of you. He smelled the fumes of the gasoline as it coated his private parts. Sometimes she used bleach and once even weak acid she had taken from a chemical supply store. He remembers the burning and the pain. He remembers crying and telling her to stop. She wouldn’t listen to him then, and even if she were alive today, he doubts that she would listen to him now.

He remembered the humiliation afterwards as she held him and told him that it was for his own good. He needed to be pure in the eyes of their lord and savior. The first half of his life was spent in fear of this great and powerful entity that could watch him everywhere, even in the dark. And that he found Bobby sinful even if he toughed himself to pee.

Those days he thought of god as one big word “Lordandsavior”, and his world was comprised only of the wrath of his mother and the promised wrath of the Bible. He was older now, no longer “Bobby”, but “Robert”. But he would always see himself as that tainted little boy.

He shook himself out of his thoughts of the past and registered that the gas tank was full. It was the smell of the gas, he told himself. Not the dead spirit of Mother haunting me. But try as he might, he found her everywhere: in the waft of second hand smoke, in the snagged nylons of an old woman, in the screams of small children –even at play. He remembered her, and no matter where he roamed, he could not hide from what plagued him within his own skull.

“My good boy.” She always crooned to him afterward. “I had wanted a girl, but our Lordandsavior brought you to me instead.” She sighed and patted the area above his pants where his ‘bad parts’ burned. “If only you had died as a baby, then you would have been pure before the gates of Heaven and in His judgment. Now I fear you will not meet me in Heaven when the End Times come.”

He got into his car, unable to shake the feeling that he was lacking something, that he was corrupt and without a soul –much less a pure one. He started the engine and slowly backed into traffic, his mother's nagging voice still haranguing him about purity and the afterlife.

Why? She had asked many times over, why couldn’t you have been born a girl? Girls were naturally pure, born to the kingdom of all that was holy. After all, didn’t God use a woman to help make our Lordandsavior and not a man?

He winced at the sunlight reflected off a window from a passing car shone into his eyes. He had a splitting migraine and knew it would only get worse as the day wore on. Knew he could not escape the pain as he could not escape his mother’s ministrations as a child.

You left me alone, he heard her voice say. There will be no one with me in Heaven. She had never actually spoken those words allowed, for he had never given her opportunity to. Instead those words rang like bells for the dead from her blank eyes as he strangled the life from her. He buried her body at a friend’s house just before the man had a pool installed. At the time he laughed as he thought of his mother’s disapproving stare up at the scantily clad people swimming above her corpse.

Then the words came, her angry voice a wasp in his brain. Constantly stinging away, yet never dying.  You left me alone, she said. You left me.

The traffic in front of him was a horrendous stream of cars, with no end in sight. He looked in the rear view mirror and saw a small child, a girl, pull away from her father’s hand and run behind his car.

Suddenly, he put the car into reverse and stomped on the gas pedal as hard as he could. That was when the screaming started. But, blessedly, his mother finally shut up.