The Roasting Pan

This is the usual Friday non-dissertational. It’s a really short one this time, but I’ll offer the caveat that it’s gross in a way that I find rather more disturbing that the story I posted last week, like primal scene stuff gone badly wrong. I don’t know where this came from.

The Roasting Pan

It is a well-established fact that some children never grow up to raise families of their own. There are a number of known reasons for this phenomenon. There is one secret reason that no one ever discusses and only certain people know. This is what I will tell you about tonight.

It is more common among wealthy people. My aunt and uncle, who raised me, were wealthy people. When I was young I would beg them to leave my bedroom door open just a sliver. Sometimes I would hear them when they thought I was sleeping. I would hear their grunts and their breathing, their moans and their gasps and the rhythmic violence of the bed.

The last time, I stood in the dark hall and gazed through their barely open door. The moonlight made my uncle’s pale, slightly flabby body look silver in the darkness, with deep blue shadows. He had very sparse body hair. To my six-year-old perspective, his genitals were elephantine, monstrous. He lay half-reclined on his side next to my aunt.

My aunt lay on her back, her body also bare, with her knees up and spread. The roasting pan that they used for the turkey each year was placed sideways before her groin. She was still slender then. Her face was turned away from my uncle and her arms were crossed behind her head. Her dark skin and sharp nose and chin were always pretty, even when she grew older.

My uncle grasped either side of her waist with his hands and began to push and massage the muscles there, the oblique muscles that lie to the outside of the abdomen. My aunt moaned. He moved his hands inward, toward her navel, and pushed harder. It was difficult work for him: after three or four minutes, he began to breathe hard, grunting as he pushed. My aunt groaned more loudly. He moved his hands down just below her navel so that they were to the inside of the tops of her hip bones, above her thighs, and continued to push in rhythm. They breathed and moaned in time with their movements, sometimes gasping. It looked intensely difficult for both of them. My aunt’s brow and uncle’s back began to shine with perspiration in the thin moonlight. I stood transfixed before the door and could not look away.

Finally he shuddered and made a short guttural sound and she shuddered a moment later and cried out and a stream of black fluid shot from her into the roasting pan. It lasted less than five seconds, enough to fill the pan perhaps halfway.

They lay where they were for a moment. Their breathing subsided. He kissed her brow and her breast and sat up. She put her knees down to one side.

On the edge of the bed, he rested the pan on his bare knees. He sat there and ran his hands through the black fluid, feeling with his fingers partly spread for the small things that moved in it, in their dark bedroom.