“Those who are born, those who are made, and the kind who choose”

Revelations © Jill Greenberg

“The image of that girl has me completely fucked up. Everywhere I look, there she is. I am racked by the little blur of her arm. It lifts, but there’s nothing she can do to stop what will happen. Innocence is on that face, as well as knowledge of what’s to come. And the arm lifts. The past, the present and the future all exist at once. And the most fucked-up and wrong and horrible part is that I activate. It kills me to masturbate, to stand there at the bathroom sink and jerk off into the basin—when I close my eyes, I see her; when I open them, there in the mirror is myself—but it’s the only thing that will make it stop.
I start crying while I do it, I really do, because she knows what’s going to happen, she knows it can’t be stopped, and even though you know what’s ahead, it still comes as a surprise when, after a day of sailing, after the Skipper has doled out performance ribbons to your Sea Scouts troop, and you’ve been having fun and there’s a sense of wonder and achievement after rounding the tip of Catalina Island, and despite all the times it has happened before, it takes you by surprise when the Skipper comes for you in the dark and you’re taken down to the storage cabin, with the musty smell of sail canvas and the petroleum bite of foul-weather gear. Atop a mound of the other boys’ dirty laundry is where he forces you facedown. The anchor chain pulls taut against the hull, and there is no light beyond the pale glow of the bilge-pump sensor, no sound beyond the scratch of his razor stubble against the back of your neck and the cinch of his hands as he grips the straps of your life vest.”

“And there is nothing beautiful about a pearl of semen tumbling toward a rose in the moonlight. It’s just a duty. While the innocents sleep, it’s just a thing that must be done.”

(Dark Meadow)

Adam Johnson - Fortune smiles, stories (Random House-2015)