Step-Siblings
Matthew’s urge to masturbate was overwhelming given his long period of self-control. But now he immediately closed his phone and tossed it across his bed. The dark undulated before his eyes and he flinched away from his phone, as if the slab of black glass had become cursed and dangerous to touch. On his back, his underwear around his ankles and his eyes fixed on his wall, Matthew’s mind raced with erotic and horrifying thoughts. His step-sister was a porn actor. She’d had sex on camera for money. Matthew closed his eyes, overwhelmed with how everything had suddenly changed.
Matthew’s mother married Alice’s father three years ago. He was a divorcee; she, a single mother, abandoned by Matthew’s father long ago. From the moment their families met Matthew felt a strong sexual passion for Alice. She was stunning—four years older than him, Alice had long brown hair, inviting blue eyes, and an athletic physique. For Matthew, Alice’s body exuded sexuality – or so he thought, not yet understanding that desire was never a property of the object, but something that emanated from him alone. Nothing could happen between them, of course. Their parents married soon after that fateful day and they became step-siblings. Even without that legal and moral barrier, though, Matthew knew he never would have had a chance with Alice. Simply put, he was an ugly, pathetic male with no appeal whatsoever. Or so he, now a boy of just fourteen years of age, had concluded.
In the traditional family, the psychoanalysts say, the incest desire undergoes repression. But perhaps because Matthew had grown up without a father or siblings, or maybe because his mother often cried in the evenings when he was young, her plight remaining wordless but which Matthew nonetheless understood as a symptom of his own existence, leading him to feel unwanted, a feeling he counteracted as a young boy by going to his mother’s side when she cried, stroking her hair and telling her, with his child’s vocabulary, that all would be ok, the repressive injunction said to be universal by Freud never took root in Matthew’s mind. So when he and his mother moved in with Alice and her father, just days after their wedding where Alice had worn a white dress and appeared almost transcendently beautiful, Matthew began to burn with the undying heat of a star isolated in space, yearning for Alice, the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. And instead of dousing this feeling in the cold reality of shame, Matthew entertained his fantasies, feeling restrained only by his inadequate, metaphysically-secured disgustingness, believing that his passions were harmless because Alice would never want him.
Matthew looked at his phone, its dark screen glinting in the dark. Alice—a porn actor? It seemed out of character for her. Taking his phone in hand, Matthew returned to the site to confirm what he had seen. He clicked the video’s thumbnail and, sure enough, there was Alice, naked and supine, filmed from the perspective of a man with his penis in her. Ambivalence surged through Matthew’s body. He hadn’t felt so uncomfortable seeing porn since he discovered it several years ago. He remembered that his first visit to the site—incidentally, just months after his mother’s marriage—had scared him. Never had he seen another’s naked body before. Nor had he seen anything so sexually explicit. He had closed his phone back then, disturbed by what he had seen. But then several weeks later, the boys on his rugby team showed him the site a second time. In the changing rooms after practice one day, their sweaty faces crowded around a single phone showing a young woman getting “Fucked Hardcore” by a “Huge Cock.” Matthew first felt horror. But as he looked around and saw the rapt expressions on the other boys’ faces, Matthew’s discomfort vanished. He soon felt desire surge through his body as he and the other boys watched the violently erotic display.
Later that night, his young mind racing with memories of the video, Matthew furtively opened his phone and returned to the site. Four minutes later he ejaculated while watching a video called “Oral Domination POV,” and he lay back in his bed, feeling satisfied and real for the first time in his eleven years of life. At the time, Alice was in her room next door and Matthew anxiously wondered if she might walk into his room and shame him for his nocturnal activities. Latent within this fearful fantasy was his hope that she would do this, notice his sexuality, and be his. Matthew only wanted to exist.
Matthew scrolled down the video’s page. Despite its title, Matthew knew its title was a lie. That man was not, in fact, himself, Alice’s only step-sibling. But beyond that Matthew found no information about the actors in the video. It was uploaded from an unofficial account that had no other content. Something about this made him uneasy, but only until his attention was diverted by a banner ad suggesting Matthew, of all people, could “Fuck Singles in his Area Tonight.”
Over the last three years, Matthew had visited this site and others like it almost daily. Plunging into the internet’s glowing abyss, he had explored fetishes of all kinds, seen videos where women, choked, spat on, and slapped, by powerful men, screamed like they enjoyed their humiliation. Fantasies that occurred to him he searched, finding almost anything he could think of amongst the millions of videos available online. Step-sibling videos had quickly colonised his time and imagination, for within them he found a manifestation of his long-held desires for Alice. He knew the actors in these videos never were step-siblings; the scenes, though, were as close as Matthew would ever get to Alice, and so he repeatedly, routinely, like a machine, masturbated to them. The video’s title made him wonder, if only for a moment, if Alice had, against all probabilities, shared his fantasy. Quickened by this thrill, Matthew overcame any last resistances to the hesitation he felt when he first glimpsed the video. Matthew pressed play and gripped himself in his left hand.
Three minutes later, Matthew lay on his bed, his eyes focussed on something far beyond the visible world. An emptiness filled his chest, the familiar crushing nothingness that often enveloped him after he masturbated. He imagined his body dissolving into soft, dark marbles of energy that would roll away into the night, leaving a pure and empty space where his body lay. For a moment, he thought of death. Soon his mind returned from these depths, and he reproached himself for breaking his ascetic resolution, knowing that lethargy and foul listlessness would turn him away from life the following day. Matthew had wasted his vital forces. He had corrupted and debased himself. He had fallen short of the masculine ideals he had learned online. At this thought he became disgusted and angry with Alice. How could she do this? Picking up his phone again, his mind free from the tyranny of desire, he began to search the site, coldly and clinically, for other videos featuring her. He found nothing, and Matthew soon fell asleep, trying but failing to grasp what it was in his life that made him feel so bad.
The next day, Matthew paused his first-person shooter game and removed his headphones. He heard something coming from downstairs. His screen frozen mid-gunshot, he realised someone was crying. The sound revived his ancient compulsion to comfort his mother, an urge for him as old as words, so he gently opened his door and descended the stairs.
What Matthew saw surprised him. His mother and step-father stood at the dining table, turning towards him as he paused on the staircase. Alice, sitting in a chair between them with her back to Matthew, sobbed violently. Matthew hadn’t realise she was coming home from college this weekend. Confused, but with a dawning sense that something was terribly wrong, Matthew retreated back upstairs as his mother gestured for him to leave. Soon after, Matthew stood frozen in the centre of his room, lost in a maelstrom of feeling and thought, while Alice and her father got into the car to go to the police station. Matthew could hear her weeping over the car’s engine.