Jenny Imagines Her Mom

I'm not sure where this story is going. I started writing it with a definite direction in mind, but that is now out the window! I never wanted this to be a dark tale, but try as I might to turn it, this story popped out. I am now learning about Jenny's past and her secret at the same time as you. Maybe Jenny is writing her own story? Could be.

Jenny lived now with her mother, Ruth, in a small house on the outskirts of Brisbane. At 18, Jenny was full of energy, vivacious, and naturally curious about all things. The world, panties, sex, travel, panties, sex, how things worked. Panties, sex...especially panties and sex. You get the feeling there's a pattern developing here? It seemed that nothing filled her mind as much as sex did these days. Well, panties and sex. And Sex And The City, which was airing again on television. Wonderful! Jenny had the biggest crush on all the cast members, and fantasised daily about one or all of them, clad in panties and playing with themselves in their Victoria's Secret panties as they sat around and drank Manhattans. And wasn't the red-head such a sexy mom?! And! And it was rumored that she was a real-life lesbian. Mmmmm, just imagine what she and her lover got up to in her panties... "Oh gosh!" Jenny thought smirking to herself, "I'd better not let my imagination run away or there could be serious consequences!"

Jenny thought again about her own mother, Ruth. Since her tenth year, after she had got her imagination, Jenny had always thought her mom to be a short Rene Russo look-a-like with an engaging smile and fantastic body with the same sense of grace that actress always moved on-screen with. In her imagination, Jenny could see how her own genes had mimicked all Ruths' traits, her short but lithe form, her panty-model hips, her green green eyes, and her full sensuous lips that were always cocked ready for a quirky mischevious grin. Her talent for art, her success in all her subjects, her quirky sense of humour. All but Ruths red/blond hair. Jenny's hair was dark. That must have been her fathers legacy. "So nice to have something from him", she sneeringly thought, "considering its about the only nice thing I'll ever get from the drugged-out loser!" She had thought this before, and would think it again. Always a hard-edged thought, bitter, angry. It was a thought that snaked its way up from deep down in her psyche, tapped from a river of rage that ran silent and deep. Another legacy from her father, one she was determined to control, determined to direct. The consequences of failing that were too disturbing to contemplate.

Jenny hadn't seen her father for eight years. The last time she had looked at his ugly face it was twisted with fury as he repeatedly hit her during a drunken fugue. Jenny had learned to shut out the world by then, shut out the meanness and the hurt, and as the blows landed she hurried there again, regressing deep into her mind, down, down, down to the river, so she could shut out the pain and horror of the beating. By the river in her mind she could be safe for a while, safe in her forest glade with the river and the shuddering ground. Her body would hurt, but it would heal. Her mind was far more fragile. Here the river ran, red and fast, chattering over rocks and churning through deep pools.

*Too much!* it seemed to gurgle, *Too many times you have suffered this! Too many times he has beaten you, for trivial imagined misconducts. Too many times he has raised his hand to you and let it fall with all his strength and bitterness!*

*Yes,* she said, *but I can't stop him. I hate him but I can't stop him from hurting me, I'd need help.*

*You can,* said the river, fury in its breathy rush. The ground shuddered again as if being hit by a giant miles away, which in essence it was. *You can stop him if you imagine you can. Your imagination has created this place, has given me form. Let it be a tool. Use your imagination, use the very thing you can control! Otherwise he will beat you again and again and again, too many times again!*

Jenny sat and thought about that, sat on the shuddering ground that shuddered too many times. She sat and thought about the angry river, and what it could do to the world. Sat and thought about her daddy and his bitterness and his too many drugs and his too much booze and his too many threats. Too much and too many. With him it was always too much and too many times.

And finally, too many times became enough.

So on a stormy suburban night eight years earlier, as rain beat down on the house roof and her fathers blows beat down on her, lightening flared brilliantly across the southern skies as a frightened 10 year old girls imagination finally woke.

But what she imagined wasn't more anger, for she would have to unleash the power of the river to overcome her daddy's anger. Instead, what she imagined was her mother. Jenny had always thought about her mother. She thought about her now, strong and silent. She thought about how she would have loved to watch cartoons with her, sharing her musical laugh as Sylvester or Bugs did something outrageous – instead of knowing that daddy had beaten Ruth senseless not long after Jenny's fifth birthday and left her in a shallow grave. In Jenny's mind, this didn't happen. Ruth was that person she loved, was her mother, was that person she wanted. And her love for her mother overflowed and mixed with the river's power, mixed and grew.

And in the kitchen, Ruth stepped up behind the enraged man and hit him up side the head with a black cast-iron frying pan. It was a move that would have made Bugs Bunny or Sylvester proud, and producing a startlingly similar sound as if that cartoon frypan had actually been there.

Jenny ran the dark trail back to the world and the kitchen, waking to a bleeding and battered face, black eyes filling with tears of pain, and then tears of joy as Ruth bent down and took her hand. It was as if the past had not happened, only altered where it was necessary to create the here and now.

After calling the police, Jenny's daddy was dragged away to jail where he'd gratefully stayed. Ruth signed documents and made statements, at every second becoming more real, like she had always been there. The courts threw the books at Jenny's daddy, sending him down the road for 10 years. Word was he was crazy, babbling about his dead wife come back to haunt him, and what plans he had for his little girl who called her back. Crazy talk indeed, but it didn't get him any time off. Instead he raved at his cellmates, at the officers, at the walls. Having heard it for the hundredth time, a fellow inmate took it into his mind one night to give her daddy the Shawshank version of a vasectomy – tying his hands behind his back and nailing his scrotum to the floor before setting his pants on fire. Crude but effective. Justice had been served. Jenny knew how it had happened, even though she hadn't been told. Knew the way it happened, the words that were shouted. She was the reason, more so than anyone could fully appreciate. She wasn't just the reason, she was the application of that reason. Jenny didn't harbour many bad thoughts, but in her imagination she was omnipotent. In her imagination, she could make anyone do anything she wanted. The inmate never knew the thought to extract justice sprang from a different river than his own thoughts.

(to be continued)