I was four at the time, right when my parents were killed, the police found me and I became a ward for a young lady, her name had too many katas to remember at the time, so she just said that I could call her Miss Oti. But I'll be dead and in the ground before I EVER forget her face. She was a bit too young, looking about 26 or so. Her eyes were brown and hair a rather strange blonde, with dabs of freckles on her face that made her look older.

Her "orphanage" as she called it was just her house, a small four room flat. There were no other kids there, save for me. I was a bit shy at first. After all, how could I trust someone I never even knew? But, she was nice at first. A little negligent at times, leaving the oven on sometimes, forgetting to turn off the faucet in the bathroom, but she eventually remembered to the smell of burning food and the sound of running water. After a bit of cursing under her breath she would then pick up the phone and order fast food.

She often spoke something that wasn't even Japanese. It all sounded like high-paced gibberish. A usual day was that she'd sit in her room, typing on some kind of keyboard, humming and cursing to herself. Then she'd attempt to make breakfast by cracking eggs in a pan and waited for the goopy clear ooze to turn white, then burn when the phone rang and she'd pick it up in a heartbeat, then yelling and cursing into the receiver, alternating to a hushed tone every now and again.

She had good intentions, bringing home some books from the library and trying to teach me something. But my attention span was rather average, what went in one ear went straight through the other, so the saying goes. The only times when she seemed like a mother, though, were whenever she read to me at bed time, in somewhat broken Japanese at times for more lengthy storybooks. Her voice was rather comforting, a far cry from my mother's aria-like timbre, but all the same, story time was one of the few things I treasured, so much so that sometimes I would disdainfully finish the greasy food she brought home in order to skip straight to story time.

She caught onto this of course, then scolded me saying things like, "Now how are you going to be a big strong boy if you don't eat your food?" which often was a large burger that I could barely fit my mouth over. However, I was willing to force through a childish gag reflex of oily food just to retire to the bed she had for me.

Every night, she'd crack open a new storybook that was never the same thing. Sometimes it was something like Huckleberry Finn, other times it was the story of one thousand cranes. But it wasn't the stories or the merry fairy tale fantasies of things that could never exist, be it goblins who spun gold in exchange for children or godmothers taking pity on orphans. No, what always kept me wanting story time at night as a warm amber lampshade contrasted with the moonbeams drawn in from an open window was the real, tangible moments of not being alone anymore.

Maybe Cinderella did manage to fit her unique foot into that glass slipper, and maybe she did happen to meet her prince, and maybe they did manage to live happily ever after. But if that godmother was all powerful, why the fuck didn't she bring Cinderella's parents back? Well, maybe she was written to fill a greater role than an easy life as a duke's daughter, and maybe I thought myself as Cinderella once: an orphan who's meant for greater things. Maybe, just maybe, a fairy godmother would come to me, whisk me away to a castle and I could find something I could call a family again.

But for now, I had someone to care for me, someone to chide away the loneliness of those nights where I would silently cry myself to sleep wanting of those days back where I could still say "Hello mom," or "Hello dad." I could never ring myself up to call Miss Oti my "mom" because I knew that she wasn't my mom. She wasn't the woman who would sing about the warrior in the woods to me every night. She wasn't the woman who could brew such tantalizing delicacies that brought me up from the depths of despair even on days when the clouds seemed to never ever regain their color. She wasn't the woman who would never scold me for any injustice I did to her, only correct me in that sweet effervescent tone that made my own guilt know that what I did was wrong.

This woman was not my mother, she wasn't by a long shot. But if a woman can have that bit of maternal instinct in order to have the decency to tuck me in at night with a bedtime story, then it couldn't have been all bad. Right?

I turned five and grew a little wiser, reminded her to turn off the burning stove and running faucet, and she smiled and said, "Thank you, Aoi." and that was the first time she had ever said it without it sounding like a burden to her, and that was the first time in a long time that I had felt that giddy, almost happy feeling of helping someone. With the stove less burnt and the water halting its run, she started to cook at home more and more. We ate less greasy food and more of what I remembered of gochiso cooking. After a few constant days of cooking the same thing I asked her why and she said, "Because I don't know how to cook anything else," and laughed strangely at her own incompetence.

It was when I had turned seven when things started to change. She started talking on the phone again, but this time more passionately. Often these phone conversations dragged on long into the night. I would tap her knee sometimes with story book in hand to try and coax her to come to bed, but she waved me off like a fly.

She left the house more often as well, going out with a skip and a step, and coming home with more fast food, but it wasn't the kind she normally brought. They were left overs from what seemed to be fancy restaurants that served to-go sushi in Styrofoam boxes.

I was left alone again, tossed into the background like the scenery of a grade school play. There were times when she would try to redeem herself, bringing home sweets and candies and things like that, but the only candies I ate were the salt water taffies that came in the assorted bunch, not that I hated the other kinds, but it was those candies that I loved the most, always reminding me of what I used to know: that apartment by the sea. At the very least, she noticed that I liked those kinds the most and bought more of the salt water taffy along with some other sparingly present candies.

Whenever she wasn't yammering on the phone or off somewhere, she stayed at home talking to me about her day, which involved her describing someone, hugging my pillow and rolling around on my bed with a dreamy look in her eyes as I stared out the window, sucking on my salty sweet delicacies.

Little by little, I started to trust her, more and more. We talked about nonsensical things, like if Cinderella was ever real.

"If I was Cinderella," she mused, "Then I've already found my Prince Charming. All I need is for him to bend down and offer me a ring and I would say yes in a heartbeat."

"Do you think I have a fairy godmother?" I asked her.

"Well, I may not be a fairy godmother, but at least I'm not the evil stepmother."

"Promise?" I asked. She had recited that story so many times that it had become a favorite of mine, and I half believed it to be real more often than not.

"I promise." She looked at me with a rather new expression. "You know, you've got very cute eyes, almost like a little doll. I know you'll grow up one day to be just like a prince."

For a while, I thought she was my fairy godmother, sent to me by whoever to lead me to a new life, someone to help me forget all my longings and help me find a little shimmer of heaven.

One day, when I had finally ran out of salt water taffy, Miss Oti came home, eyes tearing up, angry. She slammed the door and looked at me with complete hatred. It wasn't just hatred though, it was bitterness, sadness, and a dram of insanity.

And I made the mistake of asking her what was wrong.

"YOU'RE THE ONE WHO'S WHAT'S WRONG, YOU LITTLE SHIT!" She yelled, "It had been going SO FUCKING WELL until I mentioned you, and you know what he said to me? 'I DON'T DO MOTHERS!'"

Then she had this glint in her eye, blotted mascara running down her face, and her tone changed to one of predatory malice.

"You know, I haven't been teaching you much, have I?" She took my arm and dragged me to my bedroom, locking the door. "I should probably teach you how to be a man!"

She stripped off my clothes, pinned me to the bed, beat me, scarred me, and...

... and...

...please... don't make me say it...

I won't...

She kept on hissing through clenched teeth, "This is your fault. You have no one to blame but yourself." Not once did she show remorse, did she hold back. All I could do was cry and feel it as it happened, feeling her bearing down on me. I broke down, felt shame beyond any crime I had ever committed, felt guilt that haunts me every time I picture her face in my memory. I trusted her, and even now, when I know what she did was beyond all sense of redemption. I... I...

I couldn't help but feel the guilt of what she did... feel that deep inside, somehow it was MY FAULT.

When she was finished, she dared to ask me, "Do you feel like a fucking prince yet?" All I could do was sob face down on my bed and shake my head no.

"Then we'll just have to try again tomorrow," she cackled before walking out and slamming the door. I felt emotion far worse than loneliness bearing down on me that night, and the only story that was told, that I would carry for the rest of my fucking life, was that I had lost my innocence that day, and from that story came its twisted moral:

The world is too Goddamn cruel to let things like fairy godmothers exist.

Hours I stayed up, my violated form laying bare on my mattress. With all pretense of purity gone, wrathful sin could take precedence. I would not let this happen a second time. I picked up what semblance of my own self I could, redid my clothes, and crept out to the kitchen, and grabbed a cleaver...

She had become the evil stepmother. But unlike the book, I wasn't about to become her slave. She had slept soundly in the luxury of pleasure. I decided to let her keep that one delicacy of her crime straight to hell. One drop of my arm and she breathed no more.

I knew I didn't have long, a criminal now, I stole away into the night, carrying the evidence with me. I ran through the shadowed streets in the rain, leaving a trail of blood from the scars she had left on me. I didn't dare stop, chocking back tears that came with the rain, seething through my clenched teeth like a dam holding back millions of gallons of tumultuous floodwaters, carrying that lasting guilt like a soldier carries his pack of supplies through unforgiving weather...

...All the way to a dilapidated shrine in Asakusa.

I've tried to forget, tried to get over it like so many hurdles in a race that I can never finish until I finally drop dead at the finish line. Tried to brush it off, belittle it with a weak facade of puns whenever the issue comes up, but it still comes up just the same. Every time, I see a happy couple like Gilda and Griffin I can no longer think of what is instinctive to all animals as NATURAL anymore. In fact, it sickens me to think that they do that behind locked doors and under linen sheets, that every single act of procreation I can only see as some immoral sin and that NEVER GOES AWAY!!!

... It never goes away.

At times when social sense keeps my tongue still part of me wants to ring it as loud as church bells and ask HOW THE FUCK CAN THEY LIVE WITH THEMSELVES LIKE THAT?! When I walk into every brothel it takes every single discipline I've learned to not blow every single "clients'" brains out.

I vowed NEVER to subject myself to that ever again, nor to subject it to anyone else. I almost broke that vow due to this Estrus, when I almost lost myself to desire. If it weren't for that last bit of decency reminding me that I was not in my right mind, I would have cause you to lose what I had lost all those years ago. And for that...

... I'm sorry...

Author's Notes:

Decide to reign in the backstory a bit to PG-13 because just making it NSFW would only cloud the issue.

Also, brace yourselves....

... d'aaw is coming...

Gochiso Cooking - Taken from the Japanese term meaning "to rush" its a type of cooking that leans more towards simple pleasures of home cooked meals, like rice with fried fish or miso soup.