Mommy Is All I Want for Christmas

A mother gives her son what he wants for Christmas...her.

My husband died at 47-years-old working the mines, a life I didn't want for my son. They said it was a mining accident that killed him but, if you ask me, it was no accident. It was murder and it was the men he worked with, the miners who murdered my Ray. Of course, I have no proof of that.

The owner of the mine said that if I wanted to make trouble, he'd hold up his life insurance settlement, until after the investigation and after the trial, if there ever was to be a trial. Yet, there'd never be a trial because there'd never be an investigation or an arrest. The owner of the mine owns this town and nearly everyone in the town works for him, including the Sheriff. There's too much money at stake for trouble to shut down the mine's production, even for a day. The mine's owner has a history of making trouble disappear, no strikes, no complaining, and no trouble.

He said that if I made trouble, it may be discovered that my husband committed suicide and there'd be no life insurance settlement, after all. Extorted to remain quiet, powerless to do anything, unable to afford an attorney to sue or a private investigator to investigate, I didn't want any more trouble. Now with no man in my life to support me and protect me and with no jobs here for me to get, I needed that life insurance money to leave this corrupt town and start my life over again elsewhere.

With a lot of money at stake, the mine's owner didn't want me talking to the federal authorities, OSHA, and/or the Mining Bureau. Because of that, I feared they'd be coming after me and my son next, too, to permanently quiet me. So, I took the life insurance settlement and ran to where no one knew us.

They didn't like Ray, after he married me. They were all jealous of him. Articulate and able to make them feel bad about themselves with his words, as well as with his fists, he was too outspoken, even more so, whenever the other miners said something inappropriate about me.

He wasn't like any of them. He was different. He liked to read and write and he enjoyed reading the poems he wrote to me. He was attending classes at night to better himself and to get a better job, a job above ground, instead of below.

We met at the library reaching for the same book. I was young and pretty then. Something those other miners would never understand, why someone like me would be attracted to someone like Ray.

He was good to me. He was kind. When I turned my head in his direction, he kissed me. Love at first sight, it was that first kiss that sealed the deal. We married a few month later and have been together ever since.

The other miners were all typical macho men. They were heavy drinkers and were rough and rude in their disrespectful treatment of women. Having grown up here, too, the women they married were just as crude as they were.

They weren't the same caliber of man, as was my Ray. Ray had culture. Ray had class. Ray was sensitive to me and my needs. Ray knew how to treat a woman and he loved me, as much as I loved him.

"I love you, Susan," he'd say multiple times a day.

A day didn't go by that he didn't tell me that he loved me. When he left for work, as if it was his last time, in case he didn't come home, he hugged me and kissed me good-bye.

"I love you, Ray," I said, in case that was the last time I'd see him.

They were drilling a new mine shaft miles below the Earth and if something was to happen, this was the time for miners to be trapped and die. It was a dangerous job and even more dangerous, when drilling a new shaft.

"I love you, Susan," he'd tell me every night and every night we'd make love, until he got so sick that all he could do was cough.

Now that he's gone, I can't remember the last time we made love. It had been a while. He was so very sick at the end and I did all a wife could do to ease her man's pain.

Having more difficulty suffering through their own little lives, I reminded his co-workers of a better life that was away from this horrible place and not within their grasp. If only for being contrary, it doesn't take much to be an outcast in a small mining town. The people who live here don't need an excuse to dislike you, to hate you, and to kill you. The quicker I leave of all of them and this dusty town behind, the better. If this had been a hundred years ago, a mining town with tents instead of houses and with transients straggling in hoping to make that one strike to make them rich, instead of small town folk, after killing Ray, they would have come for me, too.

They figured, no doubt, because of me, that Ray thought he was better than the rest of them. Ray told me they said he thought he was someone special because his wife was so young and so pretty and because he was going to school to educate himself. All the other miners did is drink. All he had to do was to marry an outsider, one who was younger and prettier than their fat, ugly, and toothless wives and suddenly, even though he grew up here and knew these people all his life, he wasn't one of them anymore.

With only two choices to make, one or the other, if he was no longer with them, then he was against them. Imbedded in their little lives and in their smaller minds, they were too petty and small to just leave Ray alone to allow him to live his life. He had something they wanted, but couldn't have and that was me. His life was the only thing they could take from him. Now that he's gone, I'm not safe here.

Maybe it was because he wasn't suffering their misery anymore. Maybe it was because he was happy and they weren't. Definitely it was because they were all jealous of him being with me. They all wished it were them in bed with me sucking and fucking their cocks, instead of Ray.

With all the coughing my Ray was doing and the pain he endured, he would have died soon anyway, as he already had evidence of Black Lung disease. He could have stayed home and filed for Workers' Compensation benefits, but he wanted to work, instead of hang around the house. Even with their respirators, most miners' life expectancy are, at least, ten years less than other folk, and worse if they smoke, too, as did Ray. Waking up coughing and going to bed coughing, he was always coughing.

I stayed away from all of them, after my husband died fearing they'd rape me or worse kill me. Maybe being down belowground in the dark without the sun to lift their spirits made them a mad, mean mob of men. Down underground before sunup and not up above ground until after dark, some miners don't see the light of day anymore, until Sunday. It's a horrible job but a job that some wouldn't give up, even if they could, with their family being miners for generations.

Maybe it was just this town. Even after I moved to another county, not afraid to use it, I kept a loaded shotgun in my bedroom. With the money I received from Ray's life insurance settlement, the money we had saved, his back pay, the retirement plan he had, and the vacation and sick time he had coming, I bought a small place of my own with a bit of land that I worked with my mule.

Growing up poor, I was accustomed to hard work and living off the land. I could hunt and fish as good as any man. I ate what I grew and hunted, and I sold whatever was leftover. I didn't need anything that I couldn't get for myself. It was a simple life, but an honest one and I wasn't beholding to anyone, not even the bank, after I paid cash for my house with the proceeds from Ray's life insurance.

Thanks to Ray, I still had enough money leftover that I didn't have to take a job. Instead, I supported myself. I made baked goods and knitted hats, gloves, and sweaters for the tourists who passed by here, before hitting the main highway. My corner lot was the perfect place for a little farm stand; they had to pass by here to get there. The money I made got me through the winters to do my knitting and preserving in readiness for next year's farm stand selling.

Not all of us are hillbillies. Some of us are educated. Most of us can read and write. Yet, with everyone dying so young where we live, our next neighbor a few miles away, and lonely mothers left alone with their innocent sons and horny brothers left alone with their sexy sisters, sometimes a warm body is all we have to get us through a cold winter night, even if it is kinfolk we're rubbing up against. Loneliness is a terrible thing, especially when stuck in a small, chilly house alone during a long, hard, cold winter. For sure, things could be worse; we could have no one to rub up against.

I always knew my son, Jim, was interested in what I was sometimes inadvertently showing. He was always looking and on those days he was as horny as I was, he'd leer. After Jim went off to college, I was used to walking around the house however I wanted, when it was just Ray and me. Admittedly, I'm human and I'm young enough to still have sexual thoughts, erotic impulses, and womanly feelings, wants, needs, and desires. It excited me that a young buck like him would be interested in an old lady like me, not that I'm old at 38-years-old but, compared to him, I am.

He was always looking and watching for what he could see of me that he shouldn't be seeing. It was a dangerous game of incestuous we played and I wasn't so innocent in my thoughts towards him either. I'd masturbate to the thoughts of him taking me and pleasuring me, as I would him, if I had the chance. Only, that chance would never come. I was his mother and he was my son.

Even though we didn't do anything more than think about doing something with one another, our mutual attraction started a year before Ray died, when he suddenly became ill. That was when we started looking at one another longer and harder with incestuous thoughts that started a smoldering fire. With the hustle and the bustle of the holiday season, while basking in the familiar sound of seasonal songs, our sexual attraction for one another escalated last Christmas.

With all the Christmas decorations, the house looked so pretty and with the woodstove a glowing, it was warm and cozy inside. With the Christmas music playing in the background, we were both in a good mood, alone in a house we owned and away, finally, from that small town and those miners. There's nothing like a fire to get me in the mood for love. I used to love to cuddle on the sofa with Ray, while he'd caress my big breasts and finger my nipples, and I'd fondle his cock. I miss that intimate affection.

For sure, I had such a horny hankering to get laid. Now that Ray was gone and buried in the cold ground, I had a horniness that I never felt before. It kept me preoccupied during the day and awake at night. Sexual frustration consumed me like a fever, but it was a fever that never broke and that never left me. Every morning I awakened hot for Jim and the only thing that stopped me from acting on my sexual thoughts, lustful desires, and sudden wicked urges was that I was his mother and he was my son. With no way of turning back after that and with incest being so prevalent around these parts, that's just one line I didn't dare cross.

It was my first year without my husband and Jim without his daddy. It was just the two of us alone bracing against the howling wind that rattled the windows, swept in beneath the doors, and piled the snowdrifts high enough against the house that made us think we'd never see the light of day until Spring. We were both still fresh with the empty pain of grief and suffering with sorrow.

Even though I asked him to go back to school, Jim decided to take a year off and not return to college in September. I admit that it was a Godsend to have him around the house during that first winter without Ray, otherwise I would have lost my mind with cabin fever. The grieving widow alone with her bad self and lonely thoughts every day, while filled with depression and sorrow, there's no telling I'd have done alone all winter long in that house without Jim there to help keep my mind occupied. At least I had my son, actually Ray's son, with me to talk to and to help me through my pain that came and went like the tide subsiding some days and flooding me with tears, as if a tsunami, the next.

Jim was Ray's boy from his first marriage and I raised him, as if he was my own flesh and blood. I had been married to Ray for fifteen years, before he died. Ray was thirty-two-years-old and I was twenty-three-years-old, when we met. He had this head of thick, blonde hair, like Robert Redford, and deep blue eyes like Paul Newman. Now his son, a spitting' image of him, was younger and even more handsome.

Ray said I looked like Kim Basinger, only prettier and, admittedly, I did back then, before I put on a few pounds. Not that I'm fat, just muscled up from all the hard work I've had to do plowing the field, baling the hay, and taking care of things that I needed to take care of without the help of Ray. At least I have Jim to help and he does, whenever he can, when he's not working.

Ray was a big man, so strong and so healthy. I never thought someone like him would be so sickly with all the coughing he did later in life. With his appetite not what it used to be, he had lost a lot of weight. He was the shell of a man that he was before and, with his strength diminished, he suspected he had cancer from working the mines and being exposed to all the shit that's down there, but he wouldn't go see a doctor.

A lot has happened in fifteen years. Now, Jim was 23-years-old and I was 38-years old and as we grew older together, I became more his big sister than I did his mother. Then, once he became a man, I was more his friend and confident, instead of his stepmom. We'd watch TV together, play a game, or just sit and talk, while having a drink, after supper. That was when I was starting to have strong, sexual feelings for my son. It just happened.

After Ray died, we appreciated and needed one another more and consequently we did a lot of hugging and touching. As if the weather was cleansing away what was old and bad with pure, white snow and with us starting a new life, that first winter without Ray was an unusually bad winter and we received twice the snow we usually received. Two snowstorms a week was typical. Just as we shoveled out one, another storm hit us. We had so much snow, there was no room left to put the new snow. With the snow higher than our waist, and the snowdrifts even higher, we'd shovel a path, wide enough for us to walk through, so that we could get out to the barn to care for the mule and the other animals, and to woodshed to get wood for the fire.

Now, snowbound and unable to go out, until the storms subsided, with us being alone so much of the wintertime, I feared our relationship was developing into something more forbidden. To be honest, especially on those days I was horny and hungry for a man's touch, I was hoping our relationship would develop more into a sexual relationship than a friendship. I was having impulsive desires and wicked thoughts that I never had before towards my son and that I never had for any man, but my husband. After losing Ray, with my son the only man in my proximity, I can't imagine myself without Jim in my life. He was my reason to continue.

I take all the responsibility for what happened that Christmas Day so long ago. I'm not saying it was an excuse, but I was still grieving the loss of my husband and I was so very lonely and depressed that my bones ached and my mind wasn't right. Except for the bottle, Jim was the only comfort that I had, which I found myself needing a drink and a hug more then, than I ever did before. Just as the alcohol warmed me inside, it felt good to feel Jim's strong arms wrapped around me, holding me, and hoping by never letting go, he'd extinguish my pain. With my beasts flattened against his muscular chest, I could feel his stiffening cock pressed and pulsating against my soft belly and feeling his desire for me made me want him.

Yet, I don't blame what I did on my grief and/or my drunkenness. I knew what I was doing, just as I knew what I had done was wrong. Because of the uncontrollable desire I had for my son, I only hoped that I didn't damage him against women. He's a trusting soul and he'd never suspect that his Mama was trying to seduce him, but I was. I was so lonely. I was so horny. On some days, just to feel the comfort of a warm, naked body, I would have had any man have their way with me, had there been one here, other than my son, yet, there was no one around for miles.

I know it was wrong, but the sexual excitement of thinking about my son naked and inside of me got the better of my commonsense. I was exhausted and a basket case after the funeral and I asked Jim to sleep with me from that first night that I was alone with him. I know it was wrong but it was a temporary sleeping arrangement, I figured, that somehow became a permanent one. We slept in our clothes, at first, that is, until the months that passed warmed the weather and it was too hot during those humid, summer nights to sleep in much more than a bit of cotton.

We didn't have air conditioning. I didn't have the money for that. I kept the windows open for the cross breeze and put the screens down to keep out the bugs. I slept in my nightgown and nothing else, and Jim slept in his underwear.

Jim made money when there was work but, where we were living, a lot of folk were out of work and it was hard times for everyone. Luckily, we had plenty of food stored in the pantry to eat and enough firewood cut to heat the house come winter, again. Jim could split, cut, and stack a cord without breaking a sweat. He was just as strong as his Daddy. We'd make it through another winter, no doubt, without too much discomfort.

I still had money left over from Ray's life insurance. Ray spent extra every week for a larger insurance policy, as did many of the miners, to make sure that their families were taken care of, should anything happen to them. He knew it was a dangerous job and chances are, he'd never make it out of the mine and mining alive. For sure, he knew he'd never make it to retirement age, too many don't. If it's not the mines that kill them, it's the drinking and the depression from never seeing the light of day. It's a miserable life being a miner and a miner's wife.

It helped me just to know that Jim was there with me, protecting me, and making me feel safe. After Ray died, I couldn't bear to sleep in a bed alone. It was when I was sleeping alone that I really felt the loss of Ray. I was okay during the day but it was the night time, cold and lonely, that I felt the most pain.

I thought about dating, but it was too soon and I couldn't even hold the thought of another man touching me and cumming in my pussy and/or in my mouth, other than my son. For sure, I'd let me son cum in me, if only he'd take me. Paralyzed with excitement by the thought of having sex with Jim, I was unable to make the first move. I had too much at stake to lose, being his Mama. He'd never trust or respect me knowing that I wanted him.

I was still afraid those miners would come for me and take from me what they wanted, my body and/or my life, before leaving. Then, on those cold nights that we spooned and, with his arm wrapped around me and my ass pressed tight against his erection, it felt so comforting to feel his warm body pressed up against mine. I knew the inevitable would happen. I wanted it to happen. A starving woman hungry for a man's touch, I wanted him bad enough. Only, I needed for him to make the first move.

I'd lay there, my back turned from him with my eyes open. My heart was filled with the lust that I haven't felt for any man, but Ray, that I now felt for his son. It was a forbidden lust that a mother should never feel for her son, even for her stepson, but I couldn't help the way that I felt. I was still suffering from the pain of losing my man and here was another in his image, only younger and stronger. I didn't possess the will to resist him, if only he'd take me. I'd willingly give myself to him, if only he'd make me.