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Greetings! This isn't going to be a long story, a few chapters, less than ten for sure, but I liked the idea and thought maybe someone else would enjoy it too. Let me know what you think and have a great day! Worth A Thousand By: The Unknown Author I “The Box” It took me a good month to work up the ability to start going through my mom’s stuff after she died. Her house became my house and I found myself avoiding anything and everything in it that would trigger another emotional breakdown. I stayed in my childhood bedroom most of the time in that first month, venturing out for food and to shower and use the bathroom, but her room at the end of the hall remained closed off. When I was little the hallway seemed impossibly long, nights when I had a nightmare and sought refuge in her bed were the worst, the fear that the things from my dreams were lurking somewhere in the dark chasm between my room and hers, waiting to grab my leg as I passed by in near full sprint until my feet left the ground to avoid the final pitfall of the space beneath her bed in my journey to her warm and safe embrace. Being back in that house, and my old room in particular, made me feel like that little girl again, nightmares waking me, my still drowsy and sluggish mind recognizing the childish room immediately and putting me right back into my little body, cries for mommy threatening to leap from my mouth just as my spacial awareness kicked in and I slumped back down on the bed, the sheets clinging to my sweaty skin. At least it was sweat at this stage in my life and not the other, far more humiliating reason for dampened sheets that plagued me when I was growing up, the crinkly mattress protector being the first and only thing I’d actually thrown out in the house up to that point. I started the cleaning and purging in my old room, spending the majority of my time there anyway made it easy to get most of it done in short order. I’d sorted everything out into piles, one for donation, one for trash, and one for any little one’s that might want or need old toys or clothes in my extended family. It was more than a little embarrassing to come across so many things from when I was little given that I’d lived in that very room until I graduated high school and went off to college, baby toys in a box on the top shelf of my closet, clothes that seemed ludicrously childish to still be hanging up in a room that a moody teenager had dwelt in last. By the time I’d finished my room, I’d managed to drum up the courage to venture down the hall to my mother’s room, my heart pounding in my chest as my hand curled around the doorknob and turned it, the familiar squeak of the knob protesting its manipulation bringing memories of sneaking in to look for Christmas and birthday presents in her closet when she wasn’t home flooding back into my mind. The room was immaculate, as it always was when I’d lived with her. Her four post bed was made with hospital corners and despite the staleness of the air from being closed off for a month, the lingering scent of her perfume clung to the bedding or the carpet and triggered a fresh breakdown that took more than an hour to recover from. I’d dropped to my knees in anguish, and then onto my side, and lay in more or less a fetal position rocking and sobbing until I was hoarse and exhausted and weakly slunk back to my room in defeat. The following day I’d managed to make it to her dressing table, the oak behemoth had always been of particular fascination to me growing up, lectures after making a mess by playing with her makeup were fairly common until I learned my lesson and watched her doing her makeup rather than sneaking in to try and do my own. Another defeat came when I remembered sitting on her lap while she did my makeup to teach me how things should work so I didn’t look like the four year old I was had drawn on my face with lipstick and blush. Every day for a month I managed to stay in her room for a little longer. The triggers were numerous, landmines of memory that blew up in my face over completely innocuous things to the untrained eye, but deeply personal moments in time preserved like a mosquito in amber waiting for me to come along and find them so I’d destroy what little emotional stability I had and send me scurrying back to my room to hide like a scared rabbit until the next day when I could do it all over again. When I finally managed to stay in her room for a full day with little more than a few tears and a sniffle or two, I set about packing up her things for donation, the closet was first and all the clothes filled a dozen boxes. With the closet devoid of clothes I found only one thing remaining, a wooden box on the highest shelf, the one where the presents would hide when I was little. I thought maybe it was a forgotten present, something she’d misplaced and never recovered, thoughts of some toy meant for toddler me or something for gawky middle school me to fell embarrassed about receiving filling my mind as I pulled it down and took it to the bed. The box was gorgeous, carved from some dark wood with ornate, shiny patterns of some kind of stone or other material adorning the top of it. The front had a small circular silver plate and a little cover that slid aside to reveal a keyhole. My heart sank when I saw the keyhole and tried with no success to open the box, but as I lifted it to see if there was some kind of button or switch that might be the real means of opening it, I saw a white envelope taped to the bottom of the box with my name written in my mother’s lovely, fluid cursive. I pulled the envelope off and opened it to find a letter and a small key within, my heart beginning to race as I opened the letter. “My darling Madeline, If you’re reading this, then I’m sadly gone. I wanted so desperately to share the contents of this box with you over the years, but never found the courage to do so. Many people in my life, friends and family included, think they knew who I was, but the evidence of the woman I truly was lies within this box. I know that nothing will make sense at first when you open it, which I hope you will, but, if you’re anything like me, the intrigue and adventure of an honest to goodness mystery to piece together will be too much to resist. Should you decide to open the box, I urge you to keep an open mind and remember that despite being your mother for however long I lived, I was a woman before you were born and I had a life and many truly wonderful experiences, but you became my life and I put myself aside to give you the best life I could and nothing in the world would ever compare to the joy I felt at being your mother. All my love, forever and always, Mom P.S. I truly am sorry I’m not around to provide context, but I hope you’ll understand that I see more than a little of myself in you and I have a gut feeling that you’ll see it too when all is said and done.” It was another month before I managed to venture back into her room to pick up the box, the rest of the house had been cleaned up and boxed up and thrown out where appropriate, and with nothing else to focus my attention on, the box became my obsession. On the one hand, I was terrified that I’d find out my mother was a serial killer or something, the box full of trophies from her victims that she was bequeathing to me because I too was a killer, but on the other hand I was curious to learn more about the woman she’d been before I was born. She had a photo album in the living room, pictures of her as a little girl and up to high school, but then it bled into photos of her holding me in the hospital when I was born and then nothing but me at the various stages of my life. By my rudimentary math, the box could have as many as fifteen years worth of information about her that I had no knowledge of, and that was the carrot that drove me to pick the box back up and take it back to my room. I slid the small metal cove aside and inserted the key, twisting it until the lock clicked and then I sat and stared at the still closed but now unlocked box for the better part of an hour before I finally lifted the lid. A photograph on top of a small stack of Manila envelopes greeted me, my mother, freshly graduated from high school judging by how young she looked, stood in front of a Volkswagen van holding up two fingers and smiling like someone had just told her the funniest joke, her eyes were closed and her mouth was partly open in a wide grin. She was wearing a peasant top, thin enough to reveal she wasn’t a fan of bras and skin tight jeans. Her hair was held out of her face by a hairband of some sort that looked like a wreath of white flowers had been slipped onto her head and I realized with great embarrassment for both of us that my mother had been a hippy. Each Manila envelope beneath the photo was thin, not containing anything more than a document, and each with a date written on the front, a half dozen in total ranging from the year she’d graduated high school to just before I was born. Atop the stack was a yellow sticky note that simply read “Keep an open mind”. I peeled the sticky note off and set it aside, my mouth dry as I picked up the envelope marked in my mother’s handwriting “James 1/17/71, Oakland, CA” and opened the folded metal arms on the back of the envelope to allow me to open it, pulling out a few piece of paper and a small collection of photographs. Setting the photos down on the bed, I read the first paper, finding it to be a diary or journal entry of some kind. “Stopped into a furniture store to take a break from walking all day and met James. Thinking I was in the market for the bed I’d flopped down on, he approached me with all the charm and charisma you’d expect from a young man working on commission. I could tell he wasn’t a total square though, despite the ugly tie and cheap suit he was wearing. I took his picture and he was curious why “anyone as beautiful as me would want a picture of him” and I told him that he was very handsome and that pictures showed us as we truly were, not as we or anyone else perceives us. We talked for longer than his boss deemed acceptable and James was told to escort me out, which he did, but said if I was interested, I could come back after the store closed that night so we could continue talking.” I sat in stunned silence as I read my mother’s diary page, wondering how the woman that taught me everything I knew about life and stranger danger could even consider taking “James” up on his offer, then I remembered her insistence that I keep an open mind and I pressed on with the next page. “Went back to meet James when the furniture store closed, he’d ditched the tie and jacket and had some cold beers waiting for me when I arrived. We sat at one of the dining room tables on the show floor, it was funny because the rest of the lights in the store were off except for a few lamps here and there, and if I focused on him, it felt like I was in his home rather than a store. We talked a lot about his job and my trip and then he turned the music on on the store speakers and we danced and it was so much fun.” I smiled as I read, imagining my mother having an admittedly very sweet encounter, possibly even date, with this James guy and moved on to the next page of her diary. “We danced for a while and drank some more, and James started to dance a little closer and touch me a little more and-” I sighed and closed my eyes as I pointed my head to my ceiling, mentally shutting off the urges to discontinue reading this saga and shut the box forever at the thought of reading about my mother having sex with a random furniture salesman in Oakland. I opened my eyes slowly and looked down at the papers in my hand and swallowed hard as I kept reading. “we ended up dancing near a bedroom display. There was a queen bed and a lemon yellow crib, and as we danced we neared the little yellow crib until I had nowhere else to move and sat down on the mattress of it as he kissed me. When our kiss ended he asked me if “I was a good little girl” and the question made me blush and gave me this weird tingle up my back, the beer we’d been drinking making me giggly before I corrected him that I wasn’t a little girl.” I shuddered involuntarily as I read. “He pointed out that I was sitting on a crib and that it was night time and those things couldn’t be a coincidence, so I must be a little girl, or maybe a baby. I blushed more at his insistence and of the quick demotion from little girl to baby, but looking up at him from my seat on the edge of the crib made me reluctant to argue a second time, making me chew my bottom lip as the tingle I’d felt earlier went lower in my body and built to a persistent hum between my thighs.” I was reading my mother’s erotic fan fiction, I suddenly realized, hating that I was doing so but despising my inability to stop reading despite all the alarm bells going off in my head about how expensive the therapy bill for continuing to do so would be. “His strong hand took mine and he gently curled my fingers into a fist and extended my thumb outward before her guided it to my lips, his smile when my lips parted and allowed my thumb to enter making the hum stronger. He stood before me looking down and I felt so small sitting on the mattress of that baby’s crib sucking my thumb, but he knelt down and placed his hands on my thighs, “Daddy thinks it’s time for baby to get ready for bed.” he said, enhancing my blush and the hum between my thighs to heights I’d never experienced before.” “Why am I still reading this?” my brain screamed at me, but something else was far more concerning to me, the tingling I was feeling running up my own back, the soft hum that was building between my own thighs, this was disgusting and kind of incestuous, but it was turning me on for some insane reason and I didn’t want to stop reading it. “I was surprised when he left me sitting there, thumb in my mouth, wanting him to come back and fix the feelings I was having for him, to take me to the adult bed and do adult things with me, but as I sucked my thumb and gently rubbed myself through my jeans, I also felt like I was right where I should be, obediently waiting for “Daddy” to come back to his baby. When he finally did return he set the things he was carrying down on the big bed and came to me and picked me up as though I weighed nothing to him, my legs wrapped around his waist on instinct and I hugged him tightly with my free arm as I continued sucking my thumb with the other so I didn’t upset him for removing what he’d so gently put into my mouth.” I wasn’t completely ignorant to what was seemingly about to happen to my mother, I grew up when the internet was a wild west landscape of everything under the sun being available at the click of a mouse without parental controls or paywalls being in place, and while I couldn’t remember specifically where or when or how I’d come across it, adult’s playing baby wasn’t something that was unheard of to me. “He lay me down so gently on the big bed, putting me on my back to look up at him as he knelt and slipped my shoes and socks off, peeking at me over my stomach as he reached up and unbuttoned my jeans, slowly peeling them off of me, his face looking like he was waiting for me to stop him, but also proud that I was still sucking my thumb and allowing him to continue. Once my panties were gone, he slipped my shirt off and left me naked on the bed, admiring my body for a moment before he picked up the stack of towels beside me and lifted my legs to slide them beneath me, bringing them up between my legs before he pinned them into place with the safety pins he’d been holding in his mouth when he picked up the towels.” I had to stop reading and take a minute to compose myself, the notion that my mother, the woman that enforced bedtimes and curfews and groundings over the course of my life, had allowed herself to be diapered by a total stranger in a very public place was mind boggling to me, and my intense arousal was more than a little shameful and concerning. I went to the bathroom, noticed the quarter sized damp spot in the center of my gray panties and felt disgusted with myself for having already decided to go back and finish the story, pretending that I wasn’t going to pleasure myself to what I was reading, that my mother wasn’t going to change into myself as I imagined some boy I had a crush on doing those things to me. “Once the diapers were pinned in place, James checked the fit and picked me up once more to take me back to the crib, setting me down and then guiding me to lay on my back, legs pulled up to my chest but parted before he raised the side and hurried away, returning with my camera and snapping a photo of me.” My cheeks burned at the knowledge that somewhere in the envelope these pages had come from there quite probably was a photo of my barely legal mother in a baby’s crib and some form of a cloth diaper as she sucked her thumb and my hands trembled as I began the final page of her diary. “It only took a few gentle “make a pee pee for Daddy” and “good baby’s wet their diapers” for me to let go and flood the towels pinned around my waist, my inebriated bladder more than willing to let go, James’ fingers gently rubbing the warm, wet padding when I’d finished, bringing squeals of pleasure and bliss in little bursts around my thumb as I sucked on it with my eyes closed until another wetness filled the diaper. He snapped a final picture before he lowered the side of the crib and knelt beside it, stroking my hair and praising me before he removed my thumb from my mouth and stood to unzip his pants and pull out his manhood, teasing it against my lips as he’d done with my thumb, the final results much the same.” I set the last page down beside me in the neat, orderly stack with the others and picked up James’ envelope with trembling hands, sliding the black and white photo’s out in a neat stack in my hand, looking at James for the first time, was clean cut and clean shaven, barely older than my mother, his tie was ugly, looking like a cheap motel rug, the kind of thing that someone with zero taste would assume would brighten an area simply by existing, not noticing the off putting patterns lack of cohesiveness. He was stronger looking than I imagined, maybe a football player or a wrestler in school given his thick forearms and the obvious biceps trapped beneath the long sleeves of his button up collared shirt. The next photo was of my mother, naked save for the thick towels pinned around her waist. She had a gorgeous body, fit and slender, curving in all the right places, her thumb in her mouth, that arm covering one bare breast while the other lay at her side. The sides of the crib were narrow, leaving barely enough room for her to lay on her back within it, but her legs were pulled up so her knees were near her stomach, and true to her description, her legs were partially spread to allow clear visibility of the diaper she was wearing. It was thicker than I’d imagined it would be based on her description, images of bath towels I’d conjured banished away by something more akin to the thickness of a bath towel folded up on a shelf, the pins securing it seeming to shimmer in whatever light source they’d been picking up. Setting that picture aside I came to the next, my mother in the same position as the previous photo, but with a wet diaper, though the photo didn’t clearly illustrate that thanks to the black and white medium, but based on her description I found myself studying her crotch intently for a moment to check, blushing when I remembered who the woman in the photo was and setting it aside. The last picture made me smile involuntarily, my mother curled up on James’ lap on the queen sized bed, her head rested against his chest, eyes closed and thumb still in her mouth, but the faintest curl of a smile in the corner of her mouth. James was smiling, his strong arm holding her to him behind her back, his hand resting on the seat of her diaper while his other hand rested on her knee. They looked incredibly happy together, beyond the happiness of having an orgasm, and I found it incredibly sweet that he hadn’t just used her for his kinky game and booted her from the store one he’d gotten what he wanted, but that he’d held her and spent time with her, going so far as to take a photo of the two of them together for her to keep as a reminder of the Daddy she’d had for a night whenever she happened to look back at her old photos. I put the diary pages and photos back in the envelope and set it back in the box, closing and locking it before I took it over to the dresser across the room and put it in the top drawer before returning to the bed. I thought about my mom’s note on the bottom of the box, how it had said that she saw more than a little of herself in me and that she felt I’d see it too. Was she talking about the diapers? The willingness to play baby for someone? I dismissed those thoughts and settled on simply her adventurous nature and desire to meet people and make memories with them. The ache of neglect in my intimate areas made it harder to accept those notions however, the thought that not long ago I too was in a diaper in this very bed making my fingers disappear beneath the blankets to explore the other possibility, however unlikely I hoped it would prove. To Be Continued…