There is titillating nudity tension in an implied incest setting, but no sex, in this story. If you are looking for caterwauling and torrenting sex, this is not for you.
***
I am David. We were a family of four. We lived in the English south coast.
At the time when this happened, I was twenty-two. I was in the publishing business.
Mum was then fifty. Being in the Tech sector, she was IT savvy. Although age had stealthily crept up on her over the years, she still looked more than appealing in a lite Rubenesque way.
Dad was fifty-five. He ran a small successful business.
My elder brother was twenty-five. He was a Humanities lecturer in the local college. Related to his academic interest, he ran a freelance photography business providing events photography services and such.
On one occasion, my laptop-PC could not be booted-up. I had an immovable work deadline to meet that night. Shit happens!
Mum assessed my PC. She concluded that the hard disk had crashed. Mum setup her PC for my use. I laboured through the night.
At 4am, I emailed my work to my editor. I was done. I felt tired. And yet, I could not will myself to sleep. This was probably due to my having stared down at the glare of the PC screen for a blast of eight straight hours.
Instinctively, my PC mouse drifted to mum's photo folders. I traipsed fleetingly through the collection. The folder names were typical. Work. Admin. Finance. Family. Events. Travel. Fashion. "Intime" piqued my interest. In time for what?
I clicked.
Mum.
Nude.
Fifty shades.
Various poses and compositions.
My first instinct was to close the window, get outta there quicktime, shutdown the PC, and get to bed. Somehow, an invisible force appropriated my being into slavish mindless submission. I just couldn't not go down that rabbit hole.
I maximized the window, and initiated the slide show. When a particular photo buzzed me a warm tingle, if not a tremor, I was moved to capture the image on my cellphone camera.
Click.
The photos were artfully composed. Collectively, they carried an unlikely aura of professionally rendered, and yet, amateurish homey casual charm. Think the best taken, artistically-nuanced classy nude photos in amateur wives websites that showcase mature allure in good taste. In the photos which featured mum's nipples, and her mons pubis, her feminine bits were revealed tastefully without any hint of lewdness. Show, but tell subtly. Sublime.
It was at the crack of a new dawn when I reclaimed a semblance of my former self. I shutdown mum's PC. I fell into deep coma sleep.
***
The haze lifted.
I was on a pedestal, installed at some kind of town square. A piazza. A surge of people of many hues swirling, milling around the place, ascertaining this and that.
I couldn't move. An imposing force had rendered me immobile. But, I was acutely sentient. An odd sensation. Metaphysical. I became more self-aware. I was both subject and object in the same dimension of being.
I was David. Not the custom me I knew too well, but Michelangelo's David. That of Florence, Italy. Regally proud and yet vulnerably naked.
It was all rather Kafkaesque.
A lady in a breezy pastel summer dress drifted off the swarm of humanity, and stood alone before me. She studied me for a time. Parsed my every contour. Her eyes traced my muscles and sinews, once over, and then again.
She reached out to hold my manhood as if taking its measure. She was pedantic about the task. Gently, she cradled my sac like treasured artifacts. I was of marble. And yet, I sensed the warmth of her hand.
She peeked up coyly, tilting her sunhat a little to take me in. The dusting of freckles at her cleavage thinned out. I could see her face now.
"Mum!" I cried in silence.
A smirk.
***
Fast forward. Three days later.
I had a quiet breakfast moment with mum at the cliff edge of our garden, overlooking a moor of sea.
It was the weekend. Dad was on business travel. My brother was on a field trip with his students.
This was our banter.
Mum: Did you enjoy it?
Me: Huh? Enjoy what?
Mum: Me!
I gazed deep into her smoky gray eyes. I saw clarity. She knew. In the uncanny way that mums knew.
Me: I'm so sorry! I'm a wretch. A creep. You had kindly helped me with your PC, and I violated your trust and privacy. I don't have a good reason for what I did. I'm so ashamed.
There was a deafening pall of silence. The cosmos went on pause.
Mum: What were your first instincts when you opened the folder? Tell me... I want to understand what possessed you to do what you did.
Me: The luring pull of the forbidden. I guess my moral fence just caved in to the beckoning pull of the taboo. This is lame. But, it's the truth.
Mum (reflecting): Thank you for being so honest with me. You would've pissed me off royally if you had danced around in a mush of bullshit. Did it ever cross your mind to tell me about this? To own up?
Me: Honestly, no. It's counterintuitively difficult to do.
Mum: I can understand that... Do you look at me differently now, with the benefit of your new insights?
Me (reflectively): As a mum, no. As a woman, to be honest, yes. I can't help it.
Mum: And how do you reconcile that?
I paused, and pondered over the question. It was an apt philosophical question. A Big Question. Its answer would illuminate the way forward for us. I raised my eyebrows and looked wise.
Me: I'm not sure if there is anything to reconcile. You were my mum, and a woman, before I viewed your pictures. You're still my mum, and still a woman now. I think the only difference is that I now have a heightened appreciation of you, the woman.
Mum: You're too glib smart for your own good. Heightened appreciation, huh? I'm sure...
Me: I didn't mean to be cute.
Mum: I know. I've a cruel subterranean streak. I wanted to see you squirm some. Hmmm... the mum/woman dualism. You know, you're quite a philosopher.
Me (pondering philosophically): No. I'm no philosopher.
Mum: Let me have a think about what we've discussed. A lot to process. And I'm sure for you too.
***
The phenomenology of time. A week passed.
Mum and I again had our breakfast moment in the weekend tranquility of our garden. The passing of time had taken the edge off the nude photos matter a bit. But, that tension would emerge again shortly.
Mum: I mulled over our last conversation. Particularly the pseudo philosophical mum/woman dualism bit which resonated, not dissonantly, with my intuitions. If we extend the idea, there is correspondingly the son/man dimension. And if we analyze this at another level, there are the combinations of son-mum, son-woman, mum-man, man-woman. Then, stir in social conditioning juxtaposed against visceral impulses. An unwieldy simmering tensioned matrix brew.
Me: Wow! You've really rationalised this to a T. The pragmatic technologist in you.
Mum: I reckon we need closure to this matter, for us to move on. I guess you have stated your position with birdsong clarity. You must be wanting to hear from me. So, here goes. What happened happened. It was what it was. Nobody planned it. Nothing untoward happened. It's not like you saw me nude in rippling flesh. You saw an artful rendition of me. The man-woman impulses of the moment overwhelmed you. And I dare say the man-mum part fanned the embers to high glow. So, I can appreciate the heightened state you found yourself in. I value your honestly on this matter. Please maintain that always. I'm cool!
Me (relieved): Thanks mum for your understanding.
Mum (questioning look): Is there anything else I should know?
Instinctively, I looked away from mum. Mum read me like an open nursery school book. She wasn't sure, but now, she knew. A probing rhetorical question that had hit home.
Me (sheepishly): I don't know what to say. I took photos of some the images displayed on the PC monitor with my cellphone camera. I just couldn't help it. I will delete them now.
I took out my cellphone. I navigated to the photo album. There were ten photos in the stash. I hadn't rationed myself to ten. It just so happened that these were the ones which gave me the most compelling quivers. And they were the best representations of my most private imaginations of mum. I passed my cellphone to mum.
Me: Here. You delete the album. And then, empty the trash.
Mum took my cellphone. She surprised me. Instead of promptly deleting the album in a fit of disgust, she appeared to be viewing the photos. Curiously, she edged next to me, and positioned the cellphone screen before both our eyes. She gestured the slide show along. I could sense mum lightening up. There was no awkwardness in our viewing her nude photos with her sitting in the flesh, thigh-to-thigh with me.
Mum: The image quality is poor.
Me (sheepishly with guarded mirth): Well, desperados can't be choosers. And maybe my hands were shuddering.
Mum (pouting exaggeratedly): Only ten picks? That's rather economical on a base of fifty. Is your old mum so harrowing to look at?
I sensed a sea change in mum's demeanor. I perceived that she was angling for feminine validation. I would go along with this course.
Me: Like you observed earlier, it was difficult for me to take quality photos on the PC monitor. So, these ten were my picks under the less than ideal circumstances. If you must know, these compositions gave me the most vigorous of twitches.
Mum (in a mischievous mood): Twitches huh? So, a collection of mere pixels can move body and soul. That compelling, huh?
Me (stoically): That's about right.
Mum (in a reflective mood):
If this is not awkward for you, and it's not awkward for me, I would like to review the ten photos with you. I would like to hear from you why you picked them. A liberating catharsis of sorts. Your dad gives me feedback on my body. But, your dad is not the most aesthetically sentient of our species, a certified philistine, and he has seen my body since my twenties, so I take his comments with a lavish spatula of salt. I do get feedback from my sis and girlfriends, but that is from the female perspective. You're a young man with a discerning fresh eye. Your feedback will be useful input to my conservation project.
Me: So, are we talking son-mum, or son-woman or man-woman worldview here?
Mum pondered.
Mum: For this to be useful for my purpose, I guess it has to be man-woman. Be candid. Be brutally honest. But, no lewd or lusty comments, please. Let's keep this on a civil aesthetic plane. And you're a red-blooded young man. If you get a buzz from this, I will understand. Actually, it would be flattering, and a validation of sorts. Just go with the flow.
