Sex and Sour Milk

    When I was growing up there was a door at the end of the hall which was utterly off limits to me.  "You musn't wonder about it," my father would tell me, " more importantly, you must never, never open that door."

    As you might imagine, his warnings only served to deepen the mystery for me and I would wonder so much about the door that it bordered on obsession.  As I got a little older, I pressed him for more info.  He didn't like to talk about it.  He was happier when a simple, stern warning had sufficed.

    One day when I was seven or eight, he cracked just a little.

    "You must never open that door because that's where the Slaugh Faeries live."

    Wide-eyed, I absorbed it all.

    "They are summoned by parents whose kids are misbehaving," he continued.  "I need only place a...bowl of sour milk outside the front door and they will come to take you away."

    As if the tale weren't deterrent enough, he adopted the habit of buying pints of milk and leaving them unrefrigerated so as to have some spoiled on hand.  Occasionally he bought buttermilk instead.  "They don't know the difference," he would declare.

    It worked for a few more years until one fateful day, I was just mad enough at him (and he was just absorbed enough in the game on TV) that I marched to that door and just jerked it open.

    It was a closet--and it was filled with porn.  Stacks and stacks of magazines filled with all imaginable kinds of porn.  It boggled my young mind.  I stole away many times following my discovery to delve into the treasures contained in my father's great trove.

    Not once did those faeries come for me.  Not once.





Word Count: 300