Quiet Mountain Essays

Copyright © 2009

Four
by
Imee Cuison

I have seen desire.  The kind of desire that you may not want to witness.  Obsessive desire.  Through
my four year old eyes.  Obsessive desire consuming men six and seven times my age.  My four years
of age.  It will not be the last time.  I will bear this lust again later in life as a 12 year old girl.  Child.  I
bore witness to the despicable filthy side of desire.  A lust that you cannot look at in the eyes because
it is so undeniably revolting, unless you are forced to.  Unless you are vulnerable.  A child.

It is not until this hideous monster has bore its weight on your chest are you faced to look at yourself
through his eyes.  Your reflection.  You will see what he sees.  What it is he so desires.  As a child, you
are forced to see the dimensions of this desire in all its glorious grotesque heaving form.  You are not
permitted to look away because this monster has taken you, held you, coveted you before you even
knew what coveting was.  

The rest of your life will be spent observing subtle human emotion.  You can sense the intricacies of
human interaction.  You watch through those same eyes.  You wait.  You scrutinize for a sign that he
will be back in an unsuspectingly different form.  You wait.

Years later, now you know the monster.  You can recognize it from across the room.  You can smell
its fluids.  You can sense its engorgement.  Years of quiet observation has made you astute.  You will
know now, as a woman, the embrace of passionate desire and the strangle of violent lust.

I saw what they saw.  I have seen it again.  My sexuality, that I cannot fully understand even now
and was too naïve to grasp as a little girl, clings to me, forcing the unsolicited attention of others upon
me.  I am not the prettiest.  I am not the thinnest.  I am not the tallest.  What is it then?

What is it that drives you to covet me?

“You’re dripping with sex,” he said.  I was quiet.  I didn’t know.  I never knew.  

It’s been years since I’ve seen the seething of crude violent lust.  I have smelled rage.  I’ve fucked
rage.  I was captive in one man’s relentless rage and desire to smite my sexuality.

This sexuality.  This attraction that hangs on me like a loose negligee.  I did not put it on.  I do not
know how it got there, but these men want to feel the silk between their fingertips and brush the lace
against their lips.  Some want to tear it off me just to feel the cloth tatter.  All of you are different in
needs and smothering obsessions, but I can recognize you anywhere.

I remember the heave of the monster crushing me.  His caustic breath on my face.  His ghastly
ghoulish eyes peering into mine.  I have faced the worst of you.  

I know you.  I know what it is to be desired despite protest and detest.  It is only in living with this
disgusting sweltering atrocity can I understand an ordinary man’s benign consuming need and
obsession to seize my sex.  I know you, the ordinary everyday man. You aren’t a monster, but I know
you all the same.  I know what will make you rigid and simultaneously yielding to me.  I know all of
you.  I am peering into you and can see all the things that you beat to in your solitude. It was the
monsters that showed me, taught me how to dissect you. You are all exposed.

The monster indulging in his sweetest fantasy revealed the most revolting dimensions of desire.  Too
preoccupied, too arrogant to hide it from a child.  Just a child.  Just me.  It takes a child’s eyes to see
things for how vile they truly are.  With my four year old eyes, I peered into a being that grown
women have never even seen.  

I know sex.  I know desire.  I know lust.  I know obsession.  I know fornication.  And I have known it
for all but three years of my life.

Contributor's Notes...

Imee Cuison has been writing most of her life, but has only recently been brave enough to share her work with
others. Ms. Cuison works as a registered nurse in Charleston, South Carolina. This piece is her one and only
attempt, so far, to describe her childhood sentinel events.

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