Tremble

by Tobsha Learner

  A middle-aged woman dressed flamboyantly in a long silk dress approached her. A ravaged face that must once have boasted a handsome beauty peered out from under an enormous hat. She took Dorothy’s hand and drew it toward her bosom.

  “I knew your great-aunt. She was one of the circle. One of the ancient ones. She’s up there now,” she whispered dramatically, pointing to the contoured disk of the rising moon already visible in the steely sky. “Up there, riding with Arianrhod on a great white mare toward Caer Arianrhod to join her sisters. One day you too shall inherit the mantle.”

  The woman released Dorothy’s hand and, with a studied swish of her skirts, turned and walked across the muddy embankment toward a waiting BMW. Dorothy noticed several of the parishioners crossing themselves as the stranger cut across their path.

  Later that night Dorothy sat on her narrow single bed and watched the shadows cast by the fire dancing across the wooden roof beams. The silence was profound. She reached across and picked up the mandrake root from the cherrywood table beside the bed. She slowly turned it in her hands. What does one do with a mandrake root? Cook it? Eat it? Plant it?

  She held it up to her face. A strong musk radiated from it, strangely animal, even familiar. She tried to think where she knew the scent from, but the memory kept escaping her. She turned it upside down. The root had feathery offshoots that looked as if they belonged in soil.

  She went downstairs and searched around for a flower pot and some potting mix, then planted the root carefully, treating it like a bulb, making sure that the tip showed just above the soil. She left the pot on the kitchen table, went back upstairs, and fell asleep after listening to a debate on the radio on the pros and cons of fox hunting. She dreamed of nothing.

  The next morning she was woken by a tickling under her nose. She sneezed and opened her eyes. An invisible hair kept stroking her cheek. She sat up, glanced at the pillow, and screamed out loud.

  Curled up comfortably in a little indentation in the pillow lay a penis—in repose, one might say. Dorothy was transfixed. Her brain whirled madly, trying to absorb the illogical and surreal sight of an unattached male organ asleep.

  She took a few deep breaths, trying to regain control, and looked away, but her eyes inevitably crept back to the sight. The penis still lay there, curled with an air of conceit. In fact it seemed to be waking up; disbelievingly, Dorothy watched it grow tumescent before her very eyes.

  It was about six and a half inches long, uncircumcised, with long black pubic hair. With a shudder it flipped itself onto its shiny heavy testicles and waddled toward her, now unmistakably erect. Dorothy shrieked, leaped out of bed, and onto a chair. The penis—moving like something between a rabbit and a small dog—also leaped off the bed and onto the carpet where it waited hopefully at the foot of the chair. They had reached an impasse: Dorothy, too terrified to move, and the penis, standing pert before her, a little too eager to please. They stayed like that for a good ten minutes. Until the phone rang.

  “Don’t you dare move!” Dorothy yelled. With a timid shudder the organ waddled a few inches back on its balls. She tentatively climbed off the chair then bolted down the narrow wooden stairs and grabbed the phone. It was her employer, Mr. Carrington, concerned that she hadn’t arrived at work yet.

  “I’m having some difficulty with a small animal…a rodent—no, not a rat exactly…. I’ll be in late.”

  Dorothy put the phone down, her heart still thumping in her throat. Behind her she heard a gentle thudding. She swung around; the penis was hopping down the stairs toward her. There was something pathetically vulnerable about the way it launched itself blindly off the last step, flying through the air to land with a painful bounce on the Persian rug she’d inherited from her aunt. Her aunt! So this was what had been twitching in the knitting bag. Now she understood why Winifred was known as the Merry Spinster.

  The penis inched forward and rubbed itself against Dorothy’s bare foot. She pulled back immediately, but then a perverse curiosity made her stretch her foot back toward the expectant organ again. It felt silky, the touch of that velvet skin deliciously familiar. She was reminded of those stolen afternoons, lying back in the motel bed, stroking her lover into submission. She closed her eyes and allowed herself to be caressed.

  It was not an entirely unpleasant sensation. The penis rubbed itself backward and forward like a cat; Dorothy could practically hear it purring. The clock in the hallway chimed ten. She’d promised to be at work in half an hour. The organ flopped itself seductively over her foot and appeared to look up at her. What was she going to do? She couldn’t leave it alone in the house.

  She reached down but the penis slipped out of her hand and darted behind the sofa. Dorothy spent a good fifteen minutes catching it. She wrapped the wriggling member up in a sock and hid it in her underwear drawer. As she drove off she prayed that it wouldn’t leap out and give the cleaner a heart attack.

  Walking along the High Street, Dorothy got wolf-whistled at fourteen times. Astonished, she gazed at herself in the reflection of a shop window. She was wearing jeans and a threadbare sweater with holes in it. She looked like she always did; what had changed that was causing this sudden male attention?

  Even her boss, Mr. Carrington, who must have been at least seventy-five, commented on how good she was looking. Another colleague dropped two Georgian swords onto his toes when Dorothy bent down to do up her shoelaces. At lunchtime, when she walked into the bank, every male set of eyes swung around and stared.

  Dorothy was bewildered. For a woman who was used to being invisible to the male sex, it was incredibly disorienting to be suddenly not just visible but apparently extremely desirable. Then a frightening thought occurred to her. Maybe, in some perverse way, this male attention was connected to the penis. As if its manifestation had suddenly imbued her with a powerful pheromone.

  That afternoon, convinced she was being betrayed by some terrible scent, Dorothy spent forty minutes scrubbing her armpits in the women’s toilets. When she finally emerged, flushed and stinking of tar soap, water still staining her armpits, Mr. Carrington, worried about her mental state, sent her home early.

  On the way back she was followed by a police car. The inanely grinning policeman pulled up beside her and complimented her on the originality of her car. Dorothy gazed at him in disbelief; she drove a blue Honda sedan. A moment later a cyclist fell off his bike because he was staring so hard at her. Then, at the petrol station, the attendant lost concentration and dribbled petrol all down the side of his trousers.

  For the first time in her life Dorothy began to consider the advantages of being plain. Relieved to reach the sanctuary of the cottage, where a solitary cow grazed in the field next door, she checked the horizon for any visible male, then bolted to the front door. Inside, she exhaled. At last she was alone—well, almost.

  The only way Dorothy could describe how she lived with the penis for the next couple of weeks was…well, like dog and mistress. It followed her everywhere like a love-struck puppy, hopping up beside her on the couch to watch television, getting tangled in the wool when she was knitting, perched precariously on the soap dish while she bathed.

  At first Dorothy barely tolerated the intrusion, then, slowly, she started to appreciate its steady vigil. She even found herself listening out for the pitter-patter of those heavy balls thudding gently on the carpet.

  “You’ve always wanted a pet,” she said to herself, in a futile attempt to banish the thought of any possible sexual exploitation on her behalf. Not to mention the idea of her aunt ever having used the poor creature in that manner.

  Poor creature? She peered across the room. The penis was lying on its side in front of the fire, trying to look as innocent as a sex organ could. What kind of sorcery had conjured such an organism? Dorothy was fairly well read on such matters: investigating myth and legend had been part of her training as a historian. She knew of the Golem of Prague, but never had she come across anything like this. For one hideous moment
she entertained the thought that perhaps it had been cut off a dead man. She kneeled on the carpet and took a good long look. The penis didn’t display any scars. She sat back in relief. She dreaded to think what other skeletons lay in her great-aunt’s cupboard.

  The next day at work she consulted an archaic dictionary of definitions entitled, Esau’s Book of Devilry, Everything the Mere Mortal Should Know About Magick. She looked up mandrake root.

  The mandrake root is a curious plant that is found growing at the foot of the gallows. It is said to spring from the seed of the ejaculation of the condemned man at the moment of death. It hath been harvested bounteously by both witches and sorcerers in their spells….

  The alchemist Esau went on to describe the bulbous and forked appearance of the mandrake and to summarize the inherent evil the root personified. There was even an illustration beside the floral calligraphy: it showed a curious twisted bulb that resembled a crucified figure.

  “Not a bit like my mandrake root,” Dorothy concluded. “I mean, how can a thing imbued with that kind of self-parody be evil?” She closed the book angrily. “Witches be damned.”

  Perhaps Great-Aunt Winifred the sorceress had got it wrong. Maybe Dorothy’s penis hadn’t sprung from a mandrake root at all, but was a twisted manifestation of her own sexual frustration. Or even an extreme form of penis envy. Dorothy sank into a deep reverie, depressed by the possibility of looming psychosis.

  “Ms. Owen?”

  Dorothy found herself gazing into the remarkably handsome face of a tall blond man. His eyes were green and blue, seeming to change with the light like those of a knowing cat. He had strong eyebrows and straw-colored hair that framed a long face cut diagonally by curiously strong cheekbones, as if an exotic gene had found its way into what was otherwise a classically Anglo-Saxon countenance. The nose was diminutive and neat, almost feminine, while the mouth spoke of obstinacy (a thin upper lip) offset by the sensuality of a ridiculously full lower lip.

  Each stared at the other for an interminable time, both sensing a kindred attraction.

  “I…I…er hope I’m not disturbing you,” he finally stammered, awestruck by the sexual luminosity that surrounded this rather plain woman.

  “No, not at all. I was just researching a family heirloom.” Before Dorothy had a chance to cover the book he glanced down. “Damned strange heirloom,” he said, reading the title upside down.

  She pulled the book away from him and drew herself up to her full height. “You are?” she asked formally.

  He extended a deliciously delicate hand; both smooth and strong and promising in its size. “Stanley Huntington. I’m here to research my ancestor Lord Cedric Huntington.” Stanley, allowing his fingers to linger a little longer than was necessary, was pleasantly surprised by the ripple of electricity that ran between them.

  Stanley Huntington had come down from London to begin research on a book he’d been promising to write for years. An intense man of thirty-nine, Stanley had the air of the perpetual student; nevertheless he was ambitious. Now that he had finally finished his doctorate, an utterly useless thesis on the methods of medieval roof-thatching, Stanley had decided to pursue his great passion: to write the definitive biography of his famous ancestor.

  Lord Cedric Huntington was sent by the king to destroy the notorious Welsh lord Llewelyn the Fierce. Llewelyn, from all accounts, was four foot eleven and ferocious, with a great mane of black hair. Determined to win Shropshire from the English, he was hated and feared by the local nobility and had already enjoyed several victories by the time Lord Huntington was commissioned to despatch him.

  His aristocratic ancestor was, as Stanley described to Dorothy, a modern thinker trapped by the historical restraints of his time. A less generous description might have involved the word fascist. Whatever the true nature of Lord Cedric Huntington, Stanley was a man in need of a hero and a hero he had found.

  Dorothy spent the rest of the afternoon helping Stanley go through tomes of medieval battle accounts. The two of them worked together in the office where the archives were stored. It was hard not to bump into each other in that confined space, and again Stanley found himself strangely drawn to this dumpy awkward woman who kept apologizing for the dusty chaos. She wasn’t his usual type at all.

  Whatever his failings as an academic, Stanley had never had a problem attracting women. His good looks and faint air of helplessness endeared him immediately to the opposite sex. Promiscuous in a dispassionate way, he preferred to conduct three or four liaisons at once. His air of innocence was a powerful alibi and the women never guessed his duplicity, happy to believe him when he used his scholastic studies as an excuse for his absence. Consequently, his affairs had as much emotional impact on Stanley as the weather. But then Stanley had never been in love.

  He cast a furtive look at Dorothy, who was bending over a yellowed map of the castle. Aesthetics were important to him and the librarian was anything but beautiful. Nevertheless, there was something extraordinarily compelling about her. Something he couldn’t apply logic to, but it had been affecting his groin all afternoon.

  “I’ve found it!”

  Her voice jolted him back. He’d been deep in thought, wondering what she’d look like naked and spread-eagled across the small library steps folded away in the corner.

  “Found what?”

  “The record! Here!” She slipped on her thick National Health glasses and read aloud.

  “The hanging of the traitor Llewelyn the Fierce was conducted by Lord Cedric Huntington, who took particular pleasure in prolonging the execution by partially reviving the Welshman before hanging him again. When the news of Llewelyn’s final demise spread there was great mourning all over Wales.”

  Dorothy, suddenly aware of ancient enmity between their two races, frowned. “Lord Huntington sounds like a real sadist,” she volunteered.

  Stanley edged a little closer then thrust a hand into his trouser pocket; the way she had lisped over the word sadist had given him an instant erection. “Sadism does not exclude greatness,” he announced grandly, the perfume of her hair driving him crazy. He tilted his face forward at an angle he knew was flattering. “Say, what are you doing later?”

  They went for scones at Dorothy’s favorite tearoom. The seventeen-year-old waitress with orange dreadlocks and a nose ring, who normally made a point of ignoring Dorothy, was at the table in a flash. She simpered all over Stanley but Dorothy noted that he had eyes only for her. His attention was immensely flattering but she couldn’t help feeling slightly guilty. She actually toyed with the idea of warning him that he might be attracted to her under a false premise. But as he leaned toward her, a blond lock of hair falling over those heavy-lashed eyes, she realized that she was far too fascinated to disillusion him, even when he embarked on an extraordinarily detailed and boring thirty-minute soliloquy about the beauties of medieval roof-thatching. In short, Dorothy was hooked.

  Afterward Stanley wanted her to take him back to her village, to sample “the border culture” as he put it. Dorothy hesitated, which only encouraged Stanley further, his wide eyes wandering across her bosom as if he were caressing her already. Dorothy had been celibate for months and she was finding the way his fingers made love to the sugar container more than a little distracting. Prudence won in the end. She promised to meet him for lunch the next day.

  Stanley walked her to her car. There was a slight sullenness in his step. He wasn’t used to not getting his way immediately and he couldn’t remember a time when a woman had interested him so profoundly. Perhaps it was her very ordinariness that attracted him. He pondered over the absurdities of lust—desire certainly fell where it wanted, yet, try as he might, he could not banish the vision of her lying naked beneath him, preferably still wearing those rather old-fashioned glasses. That fantasy was enough to bring him to orgasm later that afternoon and keep him going most of the night.

  Dorothy returned home in a state of considerable excitement. Was this love? Her racing heart, th
e dryness of her throat, and the way she kept glancing at herself in the mirror, as if searching there for the mystery that he so obviously perceived in her, indicated the prerequisite emotional turmoil. Even the penis, trailing her around forlornly, seemed to sense a transformation it didn’t particularly care for, as if somehow it realized in its blunt primordial head that perhaps it was no longer the center of her attention.

  Before going to bed, Dorothy sat at the walnut dresser she’d inherited from her mother and examined her reflection. She loosed her thick black hair and leaned forward to study her blue eyes and high forehead. She did possess a certain charm, but considered herself a little overweight. Pulling back the skin of her face, she noted with harsh objectivity the sagging of her cheeks and the thin wrinkle that ran down between her eyebrows. She reached for a tube of makeup.

  The penis, perched between a black-and-white photo of Dorothy’s mother in her Girl Scout uniform and a miniature plastic statue of the Virgin Mary, watched her with a slightly critical droop. She ignored it and smeared the pale liquid over her cheeks, then peered tentatively into the mirror. She looked like an amateur Noh actor. Was there any hope for a woman incompetent in the arts of feminine beauty, clumsy in her movements, with a second-rate degree in military history? There had to be something she could improve on.

  Her eyes wandered back to the penis. It had inched its way across the dresser and was busy dipping itself into a pot of lip gloss. It toppled forward and got stuck, its tip in the pot while its balls dangled uselessly in midair. Dorothy laughed out loud. It resembled a bizarre Japanese erotic print she remembered seeing. Just then the obvious occurred to her: perhaps she could become a wonderful lover. She had something to practice with, even if it lacked the dimensions of a full-size man.

  The penis fell over with a crash. It waddled blindly toward her, now wearing the lip-gloss pot like a ridiculous helmet. Dorothy’s mind was made up.