Minimalist Free-writing Exercise

         
Mom is drunk. She's on the couch with her mouth hanging open and eyes half-closed. I stopped checking to see if she is breathing. The TV is on. Televangelists are trading prayers for money by way of 800 numbers and smoke from a nearly snuffed cigarette butt is waving against the screen. It isn't even dinner time, but I'm hungry.

George is coming over but I never let him in. Mom doesn't wear pants. We'll go to the local playground and smoke weed and check out moms. Sometimes we'll flirt with the moms and they get uncomfortable and grab their kids who cry because they don't want to leave. George laughs every time. I don't.
A mom flirted back once and George kept it going. She invited us to her house. We got into the van with her toddler named Sam. We got to the house and George kept snickering. The neighborhood was upscale. At least compared to ours. She didn't want to know our names and didn't tell us hers. She put her toddler in a room and went into another. We stood around waiting. George snickered and whispered, "I think we are about to get laid, dude." Pictures of a family was on the walls. A husband and wife with a kid. Happy. Normal.
The mom came back down the hallway and offered us a drink. She changed and was wearing a red satin robe. A peacock was on the front, blue and yellow and green, and the feathers stretched around her shoulders. Her nipples were hard.
Sam said, "Sure!"
I said, "Yes, please."
"Whiskey okay?"
Sam laughed and said yes. I asked for water with ice. The mom made a comment I didn't pay attention to and I looked back at the wall-family.
"Your friend doesn't talk much does he?"
George said it depends and the mom poured whisky over ice in a plastic Disney cup while looking at me and smiling, but like she wasn't sure about me.
"What do you boys do for fun?"
"I write," I told her, but unintentionally.
"Oh! What do you write?"
I asked if the man in the picture was her husband and she said yes. Then she asked if it bothered me and I said no.
She walked slowly over to George with the whiskey in her hand, smirking, then taking a sip before handing it to him and not letting go.
"What about you? Does it bother you?"
George almost answered when the mom slid her tongue in his mouth and he appeared to nearly gag from the force of it.

I'd had sex before. This was the first time I had sex with a much older woman who was also having sex with my friend. She told us to do what we wanted to her, so I did. When we left, she had streaks of wet mascara scaling down her cheeks. We walked home.

Mom was still on the couch, but in a slightly different position. The TV was colored bars, and I covered her up with a blanket my grandma knitted for me as a kid.