Sunday in December

The dry skin of his hands had cracked and opened tiny wounds between the dermal ridges. For days he had slacked on the aesthetic upkeep of his pubic area and the stubble that formed at the base of his penis poked rhythmically into the cuts on his left hand. The intervallic stabbing felt like torturous acupuncture, but his pleasure far outweighed his pain. He persisted. Eventually droplets of blood seeped from seemingly random spots on the insides of his fingers, between the knuckles and at the tips. The deep red soon covered his hands and crotch. The scene looked like a massacre – or at the very least, an attempt at a do-it-yourself vasectomy.

He continued still. He had not yet noticed the horror he held in his hands for he had his eyes closed and mistook the blood for excessive penile secretion. When he opened his eyes after a while – he enjoyed watching himself work sometimes – he wasn’t all that shocked, not even at the stains forming on the cloth of his houndstooth computer chair or the new blemishes on his white carpet; nostalgia kept him from doing so.

There was a teacher with whom he had been infatuated as a schoolboy: Annabelle Nora, from Glenview Kindergarten. She wasn’t the prettiest teacher, or the nicest; in fact, she was somewhat of a cunt. But Sam had always liked how she bossed him around and he did his best to please her. One particular Wednesday, Mrs. Nora in an unfamiliar white sundress – “It was a birthday present,” she had cheerily told the class – announced as usual that the class was to finger paint. This happened to be Sam’s favorite activity. When she said go, he immediately sprung for the color palette that lay in his cubbyhole against the back wall. As he sat down with his paper and his colors he already knew what he would draw: a fire truck. He coated his hands in red paint, squinted and poked his tongue out ever so slightly in concentration. As he began to form the body of the vehicle he remembered something he had to tell the teacher.

Sam raised his hand. After straining his arm for a child’s eternity, Mrs. Nora finally waved him toward her from behind the desk. Hands still coated in red paint, Sam ran toward the front of the room, around the left side of the large cherry wood structure where his teacher calmly remained, as if in preoccupied thought.

“I…” Sam fell before he could get out a word.

Without warning, Mrs. Nora rose to her feet inhumanly fast, “Look what you did to my beautiful new dress!” An accusatory finger shot invisible bullets of pure rage mere millimeters from Sam’s forehead. A large red stain, like a circular target covered the crotch of the woman’s dress.

“But I…” Sam stammered.

Mrs. Nora cut him off, “Principle’s office. Now!” Tears formed on both faces; fear and shame overwhelming the pair.

Frozen at first, Sam willed his legs around the desk and toward the door.

“But I didn’t touch your dre-” he tried again unsuccessfully to defend himself.

“Out!” She would not let him finish a goddamn sentence.

Head down, a confused Sam shut the door of the room behind him breaking the gaze of twenty-eight attentive eyes.

“I swear I didn’t touch her dress,” he whispered to himself as he sulked down the long hallway.

And it was true. He hadn’t even come close. Years later Sam realized that he had been used as a scapegoat to cover for his teacher’s embarrassing negligence regarding her female monthly.

The thought made him laugh now as he looked at his hands and pondered at the parallel. He finished himself off easily with the thought of hate-fucking Mrs. Nora, both parties covered in blood, a shared mixture of their fluids flowing freely onto a once white canvas, now Pollock-like in its abstractness.

Anabelle was still a regular character in his masturbatory fantasies, but never before in this context. This time, the fantasy was perfect. He would try again tomorrow to reproduce the scene, faithful in every respect. Maybe he would even try again in a few minutes; he didn’t have anything else planned anyway.