One day I noticed this small crack in my bedroom ceiling was growing larger and more pronounced, as if something up there wanted in and kept chipping away at the barrier between us with calm determination. Even while my lover nibbled upon my neck I stared up at that menacing black line, daring the unseen presence to make itself known, to leap down upon us in all its appalling horror, since my lover was big and strong, like a father, and would allow no harm to come to us. When my lover went away on various errands, or to sleep in his own bed for a night, all my bravado would vanish and I would tiptoe into the bedroom where I would stand transfixed, head thrown back in a mockery of abandon, fists clenched, wishing for a voice to scream with, with which to demand some vestige of privacy. It grew so bad I couldn't sleep alone, not without nightmares, the sort that startle you awake panting and choking, sweat-soaked in what you're sure are bloody sheets or, if not, soon to be.
All this time he never knew, my young lover. He hid himself inside my moist cunt, suckling at my breasts as if he were the first to do so (and I liked to imagine this was indeed the case). Oh how we lied to one another there in our openness, spreading out our secrets like jewels to be exclaimed over, so proud of ourselves, when all the while locked vaults contained the truly bad things, yet we could fool ourselves this way and were quite happy doing so. The black line had no place in this scenario; I'm sure that's obvious.
I moved my bed, pushing and pulling it across the room until the ceiling above it was white and spotless, and then I draped its canopy top in yards of filmy black fabric. For a while things got better. The night- mares went away, and when my lover was with me we writhed across that bed with all the agility and elegance of snakes, mating our bodies together in rituals of lust and orgiastic ecstasy which left us too exhausted to move or speak or anything else for long periods of time, knowing ourselves loved beyond all reason. He could have been my own son, my one true love, though of course that would have made our liaison incestuous. Maybe it was, the way I always knew what he was thinking, and how he climbed inside my womb as if returning home after a long absence. I learned to chant his name like a mantra, knowing it to be powerful protection. I'd all but forgotten the black line, how it divided into two, granting entry to unspeakable things.
One night as my lover lay across me, his mat of furry hair crushed against my breasts, I drew the curtain aside to view a yawning black chasm. An ugly man dangled there, pencil-slash lips drawn back in a caricature of a smile, swollen genitals swaying from side to side like those of some freak in a X-rated circus sideshow. A scream escaped my lips as he held out his knives to me - my lover rose in alarm, his own genitalia swinging, and we clung to one another there in our bed of doubts, sinking fast into a grave of lies.
Fathers can't save us from the ugly man. Nor can our sons or lovers; he comes from a secret place and he knows ours, how we hide behind curtains and in our lovers' arms, imagining ourselves safe, dreaming we might somehow escape his terrifying clutches. Then one day he comes, through whatever means - a crack in the ceiling or a crack in our psyches, it doesn't much matter which - and the fears he holds forth resonate with the fears we hold back, our deepest ones: these, then, are what finally doom us.
