by Chris Vola
if i could redesign sexy parts, balls would be on the inside, as would clits, and there would be no vagina, just a little hole, covered by the labia. and nobody would have hair.
it would be like the iOS 11 of genitalia. What do you think, rog?
-isnt that pretty much what a vag is
-no there’s the other shit inside
i don’t know what it’s called
the labia minora!
-idk i kind of like my genitalia
-you’re the only one.
the worst is when guys send dick pics.
like okay, i can tell if someone has a nice dick but i don’t need to see a picture of it.
-note to self do not send dick pics anymore
-i’m not going to get off to a picture of an erect penis
-lol
-you would never send a dick pic
-haha only if asked
-send me one
thats what snapchat was made for
-i dont have an erection tho
-that and me sending pictures of my boobs with animal faces drawn on them
how hard is it to get an erection? pun intended
-very punny
-now i’m inspired to send another boob creature
-do it
-not to you. i would only send it to you in exchange for a dick pic.
i just sent my friend a boob puppy.
-are you going to have me arrested if i send one
-no!
-as long as you don’t screenshot mine
-i dont even know how to do that
He didn’t know how, either, and wouldn’t have done it if he did. He didn’t want to deal with pissing her off again. The reference to a relative state of photographic permanence awoke in him a twinge of memory, an ugliness he tried to shake off while looking for his phone.
While Allison waited, faceless and soundless somewhere in New Jersey.
*
Roger took a second photo – this one blatant, unaltered – and pressed send.
As the image slid through the data channel to Allison’s screen, he felt a sharp pressure on his throat, a sense of suffocation that sped down through his limbs, a putrefying heat. Then a dizziness like when he was a child and would intentionally spin in a circle until falling to the ground, except now he was trying not to move, fighting the downward plummet.
At some point his vision ceased and he was aware of nothing but a feeling of fullness, a widening, a roar of liquid forcing him towards an artery-choking torment. He was swimming in near-darkness, submerged in a milk-thick sludge that, while alternatively burning and sponging his lungs, was buoying him in the direction of a faint light that kept getting closer until he collided with an earthen hardness a few feet beneath the surface where the water was now soup-thin, gleaming. He reached for one of the root-like structures whose ends rippled and flickered from the embankment and it broke loose, rubbering down into the murk.
He reached for another, another until he gripped one that held, pulled himself and emerged into an air that convulsed, engulfing his chest. He crawled onto a sandy outcrop and closed his eyes.
When he opened them he was upright, walking on a path that reminded him of a condo-stunted nature preserve where he and other ambitious young degenerates would share saliva and hastily rolled joints. Except here the sun-doused vegetation pulsed with a velocity that made him giddy, growing denser as he whirled into what became a vortex, a sequence of spirals that disintegrated and regrouped as irregular rows of hulking columns, multi-shaded and huge and formed of a substance that was softer than bark and free of branches.
Giant dicks. Thousands of them.
And tiny ones, lining both sides of the path, a sea-smelling undergrowth of brown and pink mushroom caps. The members implied an entire pulsing diaspora of masculine possibility: erections with varying degrees of height and curvature, throbbing and agitated, drooping, foreskinned willows, boulder-balls jostling the exposed earth, a coarse pubic lichen that could be dense or peach-sparse, leafy dark ringlets curling and twisting past the base of shafts, others manicured to a new-purse sheen.
As he took in the now-sharp environment, he realized that he had seen these dicks before, their context obvious in the memories with which they corresponded. Timmy’s baby carrot dangling in a toilet bowl. His first timid side-glances at adult equipment (including his father’s) in the piss-trough at the old Yankee Stadium. A fraternity brother whose primary career aspiration was to join an off-Broadway troupe of “genital origami” artists and who would practice his craft during chapter meetings. The ex-roommate he found one morning passed out naked on the couch, shit drooling onto the carpet, a sheet of bruised tinfoil splayed across his lap.
The path began to widen and bend, and as he followed its curve, he noticed that while the skin foliage was thinning out and revealing shards of waning sun, the individual dicks were becoming over-rigid and mammoth; redwoods where once had only been saplings. He easily recognized which porn actor each belonged to, remembering the many holes that had contained them. Billy Glide’s barrel-girth, a ring of freckles just below the circumcision scar. The pale English hammer of Danny Dong, thinner at the base and rouge-tipped. And Lexington Steele, an obsidian tower stabbing and combining with the dusk, glossy with lube.
The path ended in another shock of color and vertigo and he found himself in a field at night, standing at the entrance to what looked like a medicine man’s sweat lodge he’d seen set up at a “pow wow” near an Indian casino where his mother bought wolf-claw necklaces and he watched complacent men pound drums and yodel. The structure, under the clamor of frozen stars, bubbled like a marshmallow, hissing from the pressure of whatever resided inside. The entrance was concealed by a curtain of six-foot-long chrome dicks, tips swaying a few inches from the muddy ground. He spread them apart, gently, and walked inside. As he tried to adjust his eyes and to not gag on the corrosive fog that now contained him, a groan flared from somewhere close and the hut expanded, recoiling at his presence. A spurt of flame – a hearth? – throbbed in a far-off distance and he moved toward it, coughing, lifting the crew neck of his tee shirt over his nose.
The smoke pulled and ebbed and spewed a montage of images, each featuring the same expanding and contracting protagonist. He saw himself in an earth-toned bathroom he barely recognized, his tiny pink nub sud-shielded and bobbing alongside rubber Sesame Street toys; slouching in a ski resort’s communal shower, peach-fuzzed and shy-shrunken; adjusting to the unwelcome rawness of his first jock strap; cautiously assessing the welcome friction that resulted in his first unexpected dollop of salty release. An assortment of time-lapsed close-ups, varying levels of pubic hair, razor stubble, the sores last year that were only a harmless reaction to defective latex. And then, the twinge that had gnawed earlier when he’d sent the Snapchat to Allison: pictures he’d taken with a primitive digital camera and sent over AIM a decade ago – some full-body, others side-posed, spread-eagled – to someone named peachez00100 who never sent anything back, and who, he found out much later at a reunion from snickering classmates who had seen the pictures, turned out to be a guy he’d gone to high school with.
He let the old embarrassment rise and blind his brain with a shattering percussion that, when it subsided, left him cold and feverish, tongue swollen with thirst.
He was a few yards from the source of the hut’s light, a tube of fire that loomed phallic and enormous, though it emitted no discernable heat. The flames in his direct line of vision parted and realigned as a projector screen that appeared to be operating at an archaically low definition. The video was a point-of-view shot, missionary position, the first girl he’d slept with – whose name he couldn’t remember – her pleasure-stunned stares at him while he surveyed her neck, breasts, belly button, plunging in callow, arrhythmic excitement. Then a flicker and she changed, her body’s outline blurring. Lighter hair and lips, a thickening of thighs, paler skin, still familiar.
His dick remained.
> The screen wasn’t deficient, he realized. There were many screens layered against each another, a living composite of everyone he’d ever fucked. The length of time that each body would rise and dominate the surface appeared to correspond to how many times he’d been with that person and the duration of the encounter(s). The college-era girls cycled through at a brisk rate, the end results of mostly un-remembered brownouts or casualties of his prematurity. As the bodies beneath him aged and held their focus longer, it grew harder to look at them, though he had no choice but to absorb the emotions that manifested the same way every time: the pleading for something greater, a future not predicated on his dick, a future he would never give them.
After several minutes, he watched himself pull out and deposit a belly-smearing load, but instead of the relief and fade-to-black he expected, the girl/girls remained and he was still inside, though not in any way he’d felt before. He was the negative space that his dick had created, a shadow that nevertheless had the ability to bore beyond any untested womb, to inflict a greater pain that he now shared, the pain of never transcending a definition, of once-harmless ideas destroyed in a searing of flesh.
He knew what he was.
He tried to run from the flames and the screens that had separated and surrounded him in every direction, the lives he could no longer thwart, a white light and sparks and the stars were above and whirling and he leapt into it, screaming, and the light snuffed out and he was alone in a dim halogen glow and silence. Something soft in his hand and he knew without looking down that he was in the old recurring dream, the one where his dick had come off and he couldn’t figure out why there was no blood and he forced himself to wake up but when he reached down he touched a smoothness, a nothing of skin, and he heard a humming laughter receding with the light, a joy from which he would forever be sundered unless he could reattach himself, if he could find a way to avert the stars’ dissecting gaze, if he could convince his feet to move, if he could only…
Allison’s message blinked at the bottom of the screen: nice, roger!! followed by a sequence of emojis that included various salutatory hand gestures and what looked like a frog with a potentially hazardous goiter. He reached for his phone, opened Snapchat to view the response picture she’d sent. One visible breast – large, pale, mostly unremarkable except for a nipple that was pinker than he’d imagined and possibly larger, if it hadn’t been obstructed by the nostrils of a monochromatic alligator head. Ten seconds later it was gone.
Outside, on the adjacent rooftop, a hooting. Construction workers on their break, smoking, chugging Powerades. Most of them were lined up near the ledge, tossing junk from the vacant apartments they’d been renovating. Whenever one of them found something worthwhile – a scarred Blu-ray player, a pack of Parliament Lights – they would take turns aiming and dropping garbage bundles into the commercial dumpster positioned near the front of the building.
Whoever’s bundle landed closest to the dumpster’s center, Roger assumed, would win the prize.
One of the workers was cradling a filthy doll, clothed in the shreds of a baby blue dress and stockings. The head was missing an eye and most of its orange curls, and those that remained looked like they’d been burned. Each time someone hovered over the ledge, ready to toss, the man with the doll would move behind him and pretend to hump it, hold its arms and make it dance, simulate oral sex. The other workers would crack up and the tosser, also laughing, would turn around and smack the doll across the face or stomach, as if blaming it for his poor aim.
When everyone else had tossed, the man with the doll snatched one of the plastic bags that were swirling around the roof and placed his projectile inside. He gripped the bag by its handles, swung it in a series of circular arcs, and released. As the bundle flew upwards, doll and bag separated, terminating on the horizon, a black rift in the sun. A flutter of garments and for a second it looked like she might float down, saved by a parachute of fabric and air.
She fell no slower than the rest of the trash, made the same echoing crunch against the dumpster’s metal.
The unencumbered bag drifted and landed where it had been thrown, where the workers stomped out butts, jostling and grinning, shuffling into the building through the fire exit.
Roger sat down and waited for whatever Allison was typing.
The Shelf
Rachel says she thinks there’s a spider living on the underside of the shelf Patrick screwed into the wall above their bed. She says if she lies at just the right angle and looks up at the shelf she can see the spider hiding in one of the unpainted wood’s darker knots, balled-up and plotting. She tells Patrick to come over from the futon where he’s messing around on his laptop. She tells him to lie next to her at the same angle and look at the shelf.
“The shelf looks like a shelf,” Patrick tells her.
Since the afternoon he went and bought the right size board and screws, he’s noticed a rift between them, a rift that’s become a tradition. Mornings, Rachel will say that the shelf and the books he’s placed on it create too many crevices for arachnid romance, hives from which a brood will emerge with the intention of descending upon them in their sleep. He’ll come home from work, greeted by the sounds of Rachel’s sister’s face talking to her through a tablet, something about “never acknowledging that coldness hurts,” and, “Hon, you try too hard not to make a difference.” Nights, he’ll watch her as she straddles him, tits heaving like giant pale egg sacs ready to spill on his forehead as she scans the shelf for movement. They’ll be out drinking with friends she’s made at various points in her adolescent and professional lives and she’ll make the same joke about not being able to finish a proposal by tomorrow due to arachnid-related organ failure and they’ll laugh and look at him like a bruised thing that can’t defend itself.
“I’ve never seen anything,” Patrick always says, shrugging to make the laughter die.
Luckily, he always says to himself, everything dies.
He rolls over in bed next to Rachel, who’s on her back, still looking up. She asks if he has an antidote for the venom and he tells her to go to sleep. He looks up at the shelf that looks like a shelf. He gets up and goes to the futon and opens his laptop to resume a game, to make sure his character avatar has enough experience points to join a rogue army that has embraced the demonic bloodlust of corrupt orcs.
“Babe,” Rachel says.
“Go to sleep.”
“Can you make me a glass of warm milk?”
“What are you, like eighty-five years old?”
“I read somewhere or saw on a movie or TV that if you get a spider bite you’re supposed to drink a glass of warm milk or maybe pour it over the bite. Either way, make enough.”
“I think that’s for a snake bite.”
“Can you please just make me a big glass?”
Patrick goes into the kitchen and pours some milk into a pan after checking the expiration date on the bottle. When he comes back into their room, holding the steamy glass with an oven mitt, Rachel is snoring.
He gets into bed, waits. The spider’s legs splay as it web-bungees from its perch, closer to the bed than he can remember. He holds the glass above Rachel’s head like it’s a landing pad.
“You’re not small and worthless,” he tells it, encouraging, praying for some new violence.
Golden Age
Close to hyperventilation, you can mouth a few of the mantras you’ve developed until you find one that seems to work. “All of my electronic devices have abnormally long battery lives,” you might repeat, lips scraping the pillow. Other lapses in composure require variations on the theme. “I’m a white man with a Nordic complexion living in a state with harsher than average gun laws. I have better medical coverage than the majority of nightlife industry workers. My frequent customer card at the local deli is one hole-punch away from a sandwich valued at up to $10. In the event of any significant hair loss, I’ve been told my head is nicely shaped and conducive to shaving.” The talismans that, wit
h varying degrees of success, hold back the dreams that are always about running.
At twenty-eight, you tell yourself in another black moment, your world is failing.
You’re fucked.
But you’ve got to remember, you’ve always been a headcase. There were the night terrors that started at age four or five. The time when you puked Raisin Bran before school and for the next three months, automatic reflex, you woke up around dawn and started dry heaving, sometimes making it to the toilet but usually not, bile stains on the hallway rug, a routine that was squelched by a prescription for what you later found out, years later, was high-end Pepto-Bismol that tasted like red velvet cake. And relatives you see every three years still remind you about the time when you watched a news story about a girl who underwent a tracheotomy to remove a nickel she’d swallowed. You spent the next week choking yourself because you had just upgraded your piggy bank and something could have slipped and who knows?
You had to be sure.
Now it’s summer and you’ve just gone on a fishing trip back in Connecticut because your old man’s retiring and he wants to see you more. Late afternoon, you’re sitting in the garage, shins covered in lake grime, cleaning the fish you caught and swatting flies away from your beers. You watch your old man examine your subpar work, the messy fillets that are plentiful of bones and skin fragments, the perfectly good chunks of flesh you accidentally flung into the blood-crusted bucket reserved for organ gunk and skeletal remains. You brace for another lecture about technique, but your old man stays quiet and places a fillet knife on the cutting board.