WHAT DEFINES YOU? A CHARACTER STUDY

                                        WHAT MAKES YOU, YOU?                             
                              EDWARD DUNBAR; A CHARACTER STUDY


A melancholy soul if ever there was one is Edward Dunbar.  Haunted and permanently stained, for 30 years now, by the memory of having awakened from a treacherous dream.  He sought his father’s comfort only to be confronted with the scene of his father rutting like a mare on top of a woman who was not his mother.  It was all Edward could do to ensure his sanity remained intact.

Indifference became his closest, if not only, trusted ally.  He bitterly accepted long ago that he, without a doubt, looked like his father more than his much loved, though weak, mother.  They shared the same rheumy, dove gray eyes, which he, unique unto himself, used like daggers to pierce through women’s souls when he performed his trademark cursory examination.  Displeased, he dismissed them with a peremptory stare.

The firm mouth, Roman nose, non-distinct chin, and jet-black hair, all pitiable and despised clones of his father’s.  To mar their physical resemblance, he made a conscious effort to make those features unique from his father through personalized characteristic use.  His firm mouth he set in permanent disapproval...of, mostly, his father’s unjust, continued existence.  The nose remained a hopeless victim of his father’s genes.  The chin he hid with a painstakingly, well groomed five o’clock shadow.  The hair was kept neatly tousled and women found its neglected, yet presentable quality appealing.  They flushed with disconcerting desire whenever he, by habit or design, raked his right hand through it while gazing candidly and knowingly at them.  His body was very lean and well defined, not bulky with fat deposits like his father’s or excessively muscular.  His face was deceptively ethereal.  In a word, his appearance was...hypnotic.  However, he was two inches shy of his father’s 6’2” stature and subconsciously gave up on his promise to himself to repay his father, in kind, for murdering his mother.  He carried out the plot vicariously in his dreams; stabbing his father in the back at the peak of his pleasure.

He was 12 when his mother died in the accident.  Sure, his father hadn’t been behind the wheel, physically, but he was there in his mother’s mind.  The image of him surrounded by scores of women, fucking them endlessly in their conjugal bed.  Covered by and soiling, no less, his mother’s, and Edward's favorite, hand-made quilt.  This, he was sure, caused her to veer into the oncoming traffic.

His father had told the authorities, who had concluded it was a result of drunk driving (why taint their findings) that his mother had been disturbed for some time and he wasn’t surprised.  "She had threatened suicide before," he’d said.  So, not only a murderer of her physical person, he was her character assassin, as well. 

Edward was cutting potatoes and gripped the knife more firmly, envisioning himself slitting his father’s damning vocal cords, ending his feed of fraudulent drivel to the police.  But, he reasoned, he’ll not claim my life, as well.  Your time will come, he thought ruefully.

Edward was 20 years old when he fell in love for the first time and surrendered his virginity.  Her name...well, hers and every other woman’s, became inconsequential that very day he confessed his feelings and proceeded to consummate what he thought was a promising union.  She could have been any woman, he concluded after the fact.  They’re all the same.  Swearing they love you and asking anxiously, “Do you love me?”  “I want to build a life with you and give birth to little Edwards,” she’d said and he felt good, for a change.  Hopeful.  So he made love to her, he gave himself to her.  He considered her needs and feelings during it all, even though he too was new to this and felt a bit vulnerable.  She’s different, he thought.  Not like those women.  You wanted her to...  And then she said it, debasing and defiling the whole experience.

“Oh, God, fuck me, Ed!“

It threw him ten years back to hear again his father grunting and panting, and that whore echo the one beneath himself now; fuck me.  His face recoiled in horror but was replaced by the threat of bile rising up in his throat.  “Fuck you?” he said.  He yanked her by her lavender scented, silky, filthy, chestnut hair.  She winched.  He could care less.  He proceeded to maniacally drive himself hard and deep inside her.  He was back in his parent’s room, his father’s den of iniquity.  Only, this time, the “man” on top of the nameless, faceless woman was...he himself, a helpless boy and the whore was laughing at him.  He felt cold, more hateful than he’d ever allowed before.  Returning his mind to the present, he thrush himself inside her one last time and found release.  But he was left wanting; it lacked something somehow.  Never mind though.  It ceased to matter with "fuck me."  Yeah, I'll fuck you, you raging cunt, he seethed.

"Get dressed and ready to leave.  I have things to do," he said coldly.  Whores.  All of them.  And weak, like his mother.  Well, they are at least good for one thing.  He eyed her with a sideways glance.  "The cunt can open wide and let me shove my dick down her damning throat next time," he silently mused.

Perhaps his father wasn't far off the mark or so bad after all he allowed.  He’d probably say to me, “Job well done, my boy!”

Yeah.  Job well done.