To Be Proud

The daylight was stark enough to scatter any spectators. Most people were inside recoiling from the heat, doing nothing in their pathetic ignorance or willful impotency. The brother and sister lumbered down the main street, sweat adhering their clothes to their skin, the relief offered by spontaneous breezes unwelcomed because they jolted the body just as it accepted and mobilized itself against the fervor of the environment. They were walking because their destination was not far; their red Volkswagen was parked in the nearest free parking lot. The same place they always park. The car was outdated but they had bought it because it reminded them of their childhood, when their parents were still alive.They were also rich enough to pay for a spot but found redemption in the consistency of the lot and in their opportunity to spend time on the walk together.

The lot was a square whose perimeter was filled and whose center was left empty like a hollowed orifice. Their car was parked in the top right vertex from where they entered, leaving a trail of perspiration like a deer leaves its prints. The siblings were skinny, glistening, and young, having experienced just enough life to lay the foundation of humility that comes with wisdom. They were no taller than 5’ 10” each and were of a naturally dark complexion or one made dark by long-term exposure to sunlight. They wore expensive linen that promised to but did little against the solar oppression. The older brother draped his arm around his sister’s shoulder and beamed love, “I’m proud of you.”

“You are drenching me. It’s too hot to talk. Praise me if you want after we start driving with the AC.” She teased.

He whisked his hand through his sweaty hair and armpit and patted her playfully on the cheek. She was too used to his brotherly jests to react in fury. Instead she winced hard enough to close her eyes and mouth and curved her lip upwards “Are you done? Now my face smells like your body odor and my eye stings from your salt.”

“It’s an unforgiving world. If I don’t hurt you to make you stronger, who will?” He laughed. She stuck her tongue out.

They were within footsteps of their car when another car pulled into the parking lot. After a quick survey, the two men in the car realized there were no spots available. The brother was a man who was desperate to help people. Putting others in his debt, he thought, could always be used if he needed later. Besides, it was the right thing to do. Because the space was tight and because it would take too long to wait for his sister to get in as well, he waved to the men from the other side of the lot, signalling them to wait. The driver gave a thumbs up out through the window and inched forward. The sister, in her annoyed but mature acquiescence to her brother’s officiousness, had long noticed the other car was red and a Volkswagen too, quite like their own.

Within 30 seconds, the brother backed out and to the right, signalling the men to pull in. The sister was enchanted by the uncanny resemblance of their car to the men’s. They seemed to mutter thank you through the window and offer a smile. It was hard to make our any features. As they rolled in, there was one moment when the driver aligned with the sister who was still standing behind the car to the left of the empty space. In that moment the naked sun glared upon the lot. The driver braked, shifted to park, and opened his door prematurely. He got out along with his friend. The sun continued to blind the brother to particularities of their appearance but he could see, by comparing them to the car which he noticed too was quite similar to his own, that they were probably large, burly men. They wore loose-fitting clothes and making eye contact with the passenger-side man for a second, the brother judged his character to be kind.

The heat blunted the sister’s senses, like it did to everyone else’s, so she comically stepped forward, hardly realizing her wet blouse was stuck to her body quite clearly delineating her breasts, her waist, her vagina, and her butt “You guys realize you stopped too early right?” She joked. 

The men laughed. The brother ran around, more obsequious than suspicious to the strangers. “Did you guys need some help?” The men looked at one another, then at the sister, then seemed to nod to each other. The brother continued, some vague familiarity striking him as he eyed their blurry, haloed faces through furrowed eyebrows: “Do we know you from somewhere?”

Ignoring the question, the driver approached the sister; the passenger the brother. The siblings were still smiling. In a deep, hushed voice, the driver demanded “Come into our car.” Only then the brother began to understand.

“No.” He went to grab his sister’s hand but the passenger stopped him with a stiff, muscular arm. The sister scoffed a little. The driver continued, “We will pay triple what she makes for each of you.”

“What? No? She’s tired. We just finished the night shift. Come back tomorrow and we can do it right with the paperwork.” The brother tried to force through the arm but the man was too strong. He was working his way around when the driver upped the offer.

“Ten times the normal rate.” The brother paused his weak efforts to rescue his sister. He eyed her, who was deadpan, and dropped the rescue attempts altogether. 

“Fine but you will have to do it in my car because I can’t risk you taking her away. And you have only 30 minutes.”

“Deal.” The driver gently guided the sister to the siblings’ car. She did not resist but muttered aimlessly “Fuck you.”

The brother rolled his eyes. “It’ll be quick. Let’s just take the free money.” They entered the car into the backseats and the brother saw them stripping and looked away in disgust. Before the brother fully noticed his presence again, the passenger-seat man took the his arm and began pulling him to the same car: “You’re getting paid too.” 

“What? What do you mean?”

“Don’t worry. We will be done before them.” He winked.

“The brother laughed nervously but he was too weak to resist the man’s strength. He was almost too tall to make out his face but the brother saw that he was bald and pale with a wife-beater and joggers. Between muscular and obese, his breasts perched stop his belly, the sun driving out the sweat from his pores like termites from their mound, the shape of his nipples were freely seen beneath his shirt.

“No. What? Stop.” He began to scream and fight. But the grip of the passenger was too strong. His force was inevitable. “No! I don’t want to see them doing it. Stop dragging me!”

“We aren’t just looking.”

The passenger entered from the other side of the back of the same car that the driver and sister were in. When he opened the door, the sister’s moans emanated. Both were spraying sweat as they fucked naked and uninhibited. And as if being considerate, the driver held the sister’s legs only so far apart as he penetrated her from the front, leaving enough room for two others to share the backseats. They stopped ferociously kissing and looked at the brother and passenger. The brother’s shock momentarily stalled his own panic as his sister looked at him with an emotion he could not place and as the driver continued to thrust into her. He was a strong man. Attractive even with a good physique and sanguine pallor. He was well groomed and had hints of a beard shaved only a few days ago. The sister’s lipstick was erotically smeared over her face as her breasts bounced in a synchronous rhythm and as her eyes rolled back. The perspiration made the car seem misty inside. He became lightheaded and the moans receded into the background of a ringing noise. He smelled semen, body odor, perfume, and lust. He became lightheaded and leaned on his very perpetrator to stop from falling. But when the passenger tugged at him again, the brother’s panic returned. 

“STOP! No. Please! I can’t see this!” The passenger manhandled him inside and splayed him prone as best as the seats would allow. Sitting on him to restrict movement, he closed and locked the door, removed his shirt, and ripped open the brother’s. “I told you. We aren’t only here to watch my love.” The brother screamed ferally without end and squirmed in vain. But his entire chest was less than half the size of the passenger’s. He moved his body weight upward and pinned the brother’s hands under his legs in an inverted mount. This allowed the passenger to grope around and unbutton the brother’s pants and remove his undergarments. Then the passenger went back-to-back with the brother using his upper body weight to immobilize him and inverted himself to remove his own pants and underwear until he was naked too, like everyone else. The brother threw some punches, but he had no power striking backwards. The passenger chortled and huffed, expanding his belly to exert more pressure until the brother’s scream was starved of enough air to resound. He turned back around with his massive gut resting on the scraggly brother’s back and found a condom in the back pocket of his pants. As he put it on, the brother tried to grab and hurt the passenger’s penis but it worked against him. The passenger smiled, “I love the foreplay honey”, and inserted himself into his anus in one powerful swoop. The brother’s head rammed into the back of the car, his own eyes rolled back and he began to cry in vain and in pain. From his phone, the driver played sweeping orchestral music. The whole time the sister and the driver continued to fuck in various positions at varying rates but without infringing beyond their space.

The passenger pinned the brother’s arms with own and thrust hard and fast, moaning with great pleasure. It was a typhoon of perspiration flinging onto all four bodies and forming brief puddles  in indents of the bodies during the moments of slower intercourse and changing positions. The air was especially briny with the brother’s tears. His anus began to bleed but the passenger only rocked faster. Spots of his blood began to scatter but that fueled the dual coitus spectacle even more.The brother was no longer crushed by the passenger’s weight but had little fight left. Like so they continued for what seemed like hours. The sister moaning, the driver gently and violently thrusting, the passenger flexing his glutes more with each iteration, the brother becoming more limp and silent with more blood leaking. Eventually, the driver checked his watch and patted the passenger on the shoulder. The passenger turned the brother’s head towards his sister and the driver. Through defeated and tearless eyes he looked at his sibling. She stared right back at him as the driver pulled out since he had no condom and ejaculated an avalanche over her ending in a long, disciplined, and relieved sigh. The brother saw her holding his hand. 

The passenger then began the percussion of his own climax, pumping to the beat of the song’s ending. He moaned and groaned and gruffed and huffed. His breasts clapped against his belly faster and faster, the brother’s eyes helplessly bulging out farther and farther, until he let out one final howl. He lay down on top of the brother. He closed his eyes smiling, and hugged the brother: “That was amazing. I love you.” And he placed $1000 in the brother’s flaccid hand. The passenger and driver casually sorted their clothes, turned off the music from their phone, and exited the car.

They took their time to don themselves again, entered their own half parked car, and seemed to drive away as seamlessly as they came. The brother and sister lay naked staring at each other. He tried to say something like “rape” but nothing came out. She replied quietly “How did it feel?”

The brother’s eyes became wider than they already were. After some seconds, he croaked without moving, “What do you mean?”

She whispered “I just wanted to show you what I’ve been doing for us for the past decade. I wanted to show you the labor behind our fruit.” She began to speak faster and louder. “You never once took it upon yourself to see what the men did to me. So I was kind enough to show you.”

“I’m- I’m sorry.”

“No it’s okay sweet brother. I’m glad my boyfriend and his friend gave you the opportunity to be in my shoes. And look! We earned one thousand dollars! Just from your first job! We had nothing when they died. Only each other. And I trusted everything you did because I had no one else to trust. Remember when you promised me we would do something else once we had enough money to move away? Remember when you promised me you would use our savings to start a new life? Remember when you instead used months of my salary to buy this red car, waxing some sentimentality about our parents? How you used my money and my body and my labor to live a happy life, while I sucked dicked and was fucked by men fat, ugly, perverted, and old? How my vagina was mutilated until it bled dry by the scum of society while you worked so hard as my manager and accountant? How my own dreams and hopes were shattered like my uterus and murdered like countless miscarriages and self-administered abortions until God Himself would not deign to inseminate me? While the lust of ogres defecated on my dignity, forcing myself to stone my soul while you did not even have the conscience to deceive yourself that you were in the moral right, but simply accepted and lived in a psychopathic ethically convenient, fairy-tale fantasy?”

“I-I…”

“Don’t worry. I’ll keep this money safe and use it to build myself a better life. Thank you for finally following through on your promise, sweet brother.”

The sister greedily put on her expensive clothing and opened her door. Her brother was still immobile, bleeding, prone, naked, pale, and broken. Before she left and slammed the door, she kissed him on the cheek and said “I’m proud of you too.”

The brother’s head turned. He saw in the corner of the back window his sister get into the other red Volkswagen, waiting by the exit, and drive away. Some minutes after she left, his eyes found themselves looking not through the window but directly at it. And beneath the haze of sweat, semen, tears, blood, and solar glare he saw for the first time his own reflection.