The Majestic Hound

I’m lying down on the porch, captivated by the ants, mesmerized at how they make their way across those old, roached-out Southern Pine planks. It’s fascinating just how their colonies function. Below our feet, there’s a vast network of tunnels and chambers. Every room serves a purpose, no space is wasted, nothing is wasted.

The colony begins after the queen mates with several male ants to form a nest. She is the only one gifted with wings. Once the queen has settled and established a colony, the wings are rendered useless, they are repurposed to nourish her first brood.

The worker ants, all of which are male, have only one directive; to attend and fuck the queen. That’s it, a worker ant’s entire lot in life is to serve the needs of the colony’s matriarch.

I’ve lost track of time, and why should I even care? Isn’t the very concept relative anyhow? What’s a minute, hour, or day outside the confines of our placid little globe? At this moment, there is nothing on this entire planet that can detour me from my mild obsession. The only thing that matters is what’s here and now, and I’ve devoted my time to watching these little selfless servants as they continue with their journey across the shitty trailer deck.

Eventually, they disappear between where the boards split, toward an aim beyond my field of vision. I imagine the catalogs of tasty discoveries which await the insect explorers, a bounty of crumbs and discarded specks of food below, ready to be extracted by the tiny pioneers. I’m certain Ma or Pa have tossed one or two half cans of piss warm beer down there, enough to satisfy the insect tyrant waiting to be fucked back at the colony.

This is the only home I’ve ever known, despite the years of absence. This trailer park is the only place where I feel a link. Ma inherited the grimy old mobile home when her grandad passed. His death had come quickly. One winter he earned the pine box after a lifetime of drinking had finally reached its conclusion. The shine had eaten a hole in his liver that was too big to fix.

Ma differed from most, she was an overbearing monster, and I was unlucky enough to be the only child she would ever have. When her last blood relative died, it triggered something in the woman, setting her on an insane path with no chance of return. Over the years, the devil woman would develop an unhealthy infatuation with how she should raise me.

Later I would be told by a psychiatrist that Ma was a sociopath which meant she was unable to feel love, that the closest she could come to the concept was an absurd sense of ownership. As far as she was concerned, I came from her body; she made me and therefore I belonged to her. There never was compassion or any concept of maternal bond, she saw me simply as a possession, not only that, but she also felt that in my creation my purpose was to worship and fulfill her every need.

I’m a mechanical man, one without an identity beyond what Ma had manufactured. My entire life was built in her shadow and even now I am not sure who I am. She wasn’t a parent; she was more like some authoritarian goddess who I’d been forced to worship.

In those days Ma would rip cigs while she lost herself in mindless trash TV. Her favorites were the ludicrous talk shows, especially the ones with episodes focused on deviance and crime. Each program would fuel her insanity while her mind continued to unravel.

When I was six years old, Ma developed an unhealthy obsession (more like a psychotic hatred) for homosexuality. It didn’t take long for her world to come crashing down on me. She feared that one day I’d join the sodomy club, unless she took matters into her own hands.

“I cannot let my child grow into a cocksucker, Fred!” She roared at Pa, but he couldn’t be bothered by this nonsense. A long, hard life had worn the once proud man into a pathetic nub. It just seemed easier to surrender to her full crazy while giving her authority over all domestic issues, carelessly giving his half-ass blessing to my lifelong abuse. Ma had an excuse, she was sick, but Pa was simply your run-of-the-mill bag of shit with more care vested in beer rather than family. This was the blank check that put everything in motion.

She couldn’t have a gay son because then she would not have a grandbaby. This could not happen. Ma gleefully embraced her self-appointed role, one which allowed a damaged mind to map out the path to my hetero conditioning.

My earliest memory of abuse began in our living room. I had been bound with extension cables to Pa’s fart saturated recliner. Reminiscent of the scene from Clockwork Orange, I’d be subjected to endless hours of hardcore pornography. Ma determined that my progress was slow, so she figured it was time to kick it into high gear to draw out the soul-sucking sodomite.

I’ve seen photographs of Ma when she was young. That petite girl in denim cut-offs with a thick southern drawl had transformed over the years into a chunky pile of tapioca pudding, but modesty was never in her vocabulary. She would spend the entire day strutting around buck naked, paying careful attention to displaying her massive tits and hairy beaver, constantly waving them in my face.

I tried everything in my power to avoid the horror show. Incognito was the game, and I’d try to distract her with some soap opera so that I could earn an hour of peace, but at some point, she would peel away from the box and find me quietly playing with my toys. Then I was attacked by the bitch. She came crashing into my room, like some pornographic version of the Kool-Aid man. Instantly she would start grinding her genitals on my head, covering it in a thin layer of mucus. Sometimes I’d be in the bathroom pretending to take a shit to escape the madness when BOOM; the door is kicked in. I’d be plucked off the toilet and stuffed between her sweaty, sagging boobs before being forced to suck on her sausage nipples. 

For years I suffered in disgusting humiliation, but it wasn’t until I was eleven years old when madness would finally hit fever pitch. I would be forever scarred one cool summer night.

One minute I was peacefully dreaming that I was on the Millennium Falcon with Han Solo, when suddenly I found myself awoken by my obese Ma, fighting her off as she swallowed my cock with her toothless mouth. My rejection infuriated her.

“You wanna be a faggot, well so be it!” Ma grabbed my skinny legs with her meaty mitts, dragging me out of bed and to the living room where she ripped off my Star Wars pajama pants and piss-stained underwear.

For a while she hit me with a belt, I cowered in the corner begging her to stop. Eventually, her arm limped, and she had worn herself out. For a moment she just stared at me whimpering, curled up in a fetal position clad only in a Chewbacca Pajama top.

“Turn around and show me that ass boy.” she demanded. I begged her to let me go back to bed as I jumped up and darted across the room. Ma chased me down the hallway, buck naked and fuming with rage, knocking me down. On the food-littered carpet, I gave up, bawling while she reached under the couch, retrieving my granddaddy’s break-away shotgun. “Give me that ass boy or I’ll blow that top clean off.”

I remember praying to Jesus to help me, to stop this. I had never in my life prayed harder than I did that night. But of course, he didn’t show up. Instead, she raped me with the barrel of a loaded shotgun for a long time before finally flopping me over like a dead fish.

“Now you are going to fuck your Ma because there will never be a faggot in my house, not from my body, boy. I fucking made you and I can fucking end you. Now get that tiny pecker hard or I’ll bite it off.”

For a few more years I was raped by the monster, that is until I ran away at fifteen years old. I turned tricks for money and hitched rides to California. I was a young prostitute new to the city, and within just a few months I found myself strung out on methamphetamines and sleeping in porta-potties or vacant crack houses.

By the time I was twenty-two I had already been arrested six dozen times, served a total of three years in prison, and fathered two children from two different prostitutes. One night everything changed.

It’s hard to explain, the world just seemed to shift or something. Gravity felt off and I experienced lightness in my head and chest. The calm to follow was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, everything just made sense for the first time. I was hunched over, injecting meth between my toes in the alley behind a Chinese restaurant when I saw a dog.

“Go home, take back your life.” The dog spoke in an elegant voice, beautifully masculine but not demanding, rather it was encouraging.

The old hound opened his mouth and from within his innards emerged a green, glowing light beam that struck and shot through me. I felt relief, painlessness, confidence, bliss, and that one sensation I had always sought out since as far back as I could remember, love.

“Go to the trailer and take back your life.”

So here I am, lying on the deck of this old rotting trailer while inside are the dead bodies of my Ma and Pa. I filled them with buckshot, courtesy of the same shotgun which had once been used to rape me.

I’m unable to move, bleeding from a gunshot to my gut, a final parting gift given to me by that drunken old skunk of a dad.

It’s hard to believe that fucker got a shot off. Well, it doesn’t matter. The hound in the alley was right. In my parents’ deaths I had reclaimed what I had lost so long ago and although I will die soon, I regret nothing.