Yellow Mama E zine

Oedipus Complex

 

by Zvi A. Sesling

 

          My frat bros dragged me to a party at some house in the suburbs, maybe twenty minutes from the urban campus. I was a freshman from a small town in Ohio; it was my first time away from home.

           I didn’t drink booze and had as yet to have sex. That bunch of frat bros were all juniors and seniors, loved drinking hard stuff and getting laid.

           “C’mon,” one of the seniors said, “it’s a bunch of cougars looking for young studs and we aim to give it to them.”

           So I went.

           She spotted me the minute I walked into that big living room where mothers with kids older than any of us were culling their sheep from the flock. Everyone was drinking, mixing different boozes in one glass and gulping it down like iced tea. Everyone was drunk or getting there.

            She walked up to me in a red, low-cut, very tight dress and said, “I’m old enough to be your mother.”

           She was 42. I was 18.

           Age didn’t matter here and she grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the living room and out of the party out to the street where her car was parked.

           “Get in,” she ordered, and so I did.

           Her car was a white BMW. She drove fast, too fast for side streets, took corners with squealing tires, she was faster than the speed limit. She was in a rush to get to wherever she had in mind, a hotel or a motel or some secluded place. She stopped in front of a house on a dead-end street, the last house; her house, she told me. She stopped at the end of the driveway. We exited the car and she waved her hand toward the house.

           “Come with me,” she said, not politely, but with urgency and led me up the driveway and the front steps into the house. Once inside she turned on a dim light. She didn’t offer any snack or a drink. Instead, we walked through the living room, down a short hallway to her bedroom. I followed her in.

           A bottle of bourbon and two shot glasses were on the night table. She poured herself three fingers, and one for me. She downed hers in one gulp, then poured another, which she downed, while I sipped mine and made a face as it burned its way down. After her third drink, she opened a closet door and looked at me with hungry eyes and a knowing grin.

           “Get undressed,” she commanded and as I began removing clothes, she started taking hers off as well.

           I watched her check me out, eyes looking into mine and then moving downward as her eyebrows arched slightly and she licked her lips. I stared at the first naked woman I have seen.

           She moved closer, running her fingers through the hair on my chest and laughed quietly, for no particular reason, then ran her palms up my chest to my face and laughed again when I told her how old I was and I have never done this before.

           Old enough to be your mother,” she said again, loud enough for me to hear.

           “And I have an Oedipus Complex,” I answered, and that made her laugh louder. Then she backed me up to the bed, gently pushing me down on it as she got into bed and lay down next to me.

           “Don’t worry, mama’ll teach you.”

           In the excitement for my first experience, I didn’t kiss her. Instead, I got on top and she guided me.

           She was a good teacher with a voracious nightlong sexual appetite.

                                                                                     

 

        Zvi A. Sesling, Brookline, MA Poet Laureate (2017– 2020), has published poems and flash fiction and won international prizes. A five-time poetry Pushcart Prize nominee, his flash fiction books are Secret Behind The Gate, and Wheels. His story “Chili Man” is Pushcart nominated.  Sesling’s Selected and New Poetry and his short stories Infidelities are forthcoming. He and his wife Susan J. Dechter live in Brookline, Massachusetts.

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       Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal lives in California and works in the mental health field in Los Ángeles. His artwork has appeared over the years in Medusa’s Kitchen, Nerve Cowboy, The Dope Fiend Daily, and Rogue Wolf Press, Venus in Scorpio Poetry E-Zine.