Your Princess is in Another Castle

by Richard Fore

  “You know, Chris,” says Seth, “there are several characters that all have stretchy powers, too. Do you hate Mr. Fantastic for being a rip-off of Plastic Man and Elastic Man?”

  “No,” says Chris. “Because who gives a damn about Plastic Man or Elastic Man? They’re nowhere near the caliber of character that the Flash is.”

  It’s 1:22pm and we’ve all had our fill of snacks while we watched episodes of Futurama. Seth is enjoying a cigarette again, Jimmy and Chris are sharing a bag of pretzels, and I’m polishing off a bag of donut holes.

  “I wish I was in the twenty-seven club,” says Seth. “I wish there was a certain look that just by seeing it, it could give me the power to seduce any woman who bore it. Most of us have a sexual quirk. Boobaholism, foot fetishism, furriness, different strokes for different folks. Most of us aren’t made conqueringly invincible by them whenever we see them, though.”

  “Boobaholism as you so vulgarly put it isn’t a quirk,” I say. “Every guy is into that to some degree.”

  “Not to the extent that you like it,” says Seth. “You’re squarely into fetish territory. That bowling-ball-bearing stripper even said so.”

  “What’s your sexual quirk, Seth?” asks Chris.

  “Me? I’m one of the few who doesn’t have any. I’m a boring old missionary man. Nothing out of the ordinary excites me. Plain old vanilla ice cream for me all the way.”

  “Bullshit!” says Chris. “But you’ll slip up one day, as I did. Let your guard down. Then we’ll know.”

  “Why don’t you tell us a story about your own fetish, Chris?” asks Jimmy. “You volunteered me to go. Now I’m volunteering you.”

  “What do you wanna know?”

  “Do they know the story of your Awakening?” asks Jimmy.

  “My Awakening? No, I don’t think I’ve told them that. You guys want to hear about the day I realized I was a sole searcher?”

  “Sure. Recount the origin of your foot fetish,” I say.

  “Yeah, pull away another layer,” says Seth.

  “I was twelve years old,” begins Chris. “My older sister Cecile was a sophomore in high school. On New Year’s Eve she was having a big slumber party and invited all her friends. The girls were given the entire run of the downstairs for the evening while my younger brother Caleb and I were banished to our room upstairs. My parents were gone for the night, and by that point my older brothers Calvin and Cedric had already gone away to college, so it was just us kids. And Cecile made it very clear we weren’t to bother her and her friends.”

  “Look, I’m sorry to interrupt,” says Seth. “But do all your siblings have names that start with a C?”

  “Yeah. So what?”

  “Nothing, it’s just a little odd. What are your parents’ names?”

  “Colin and Catherine.”

  “With a K?”

  “With a C.”

  “Weird.”

  “Some people just like consistency I guess,” says Jimmy.

  “It’s somewhat unusual,” I say. “But it happens sometimes. I mean the Highlander writers were pretty much obsessed with making every prominent bad guy have a name that started with a K,” I say.

  “Kurgan in the first film,” says Seth.

  “Katana in the second,” says Jimmy.

  “Kane in the third,” I say.

  “What was the villain in the fourth film called again?” asks Jimmy.

  “It’s not worth remembering,” says Seth.

  “And there’s Kronos, the single best bad buy from The Series,” I say.

  “This immortal roll call has nothing to do with my story,” says Chris. He glares at us. “And Kalas was the best villain from The Series. Anyway, my sister was having this big slumber party. And we lived in a pretty conservative household, so there weren’t going to be any boys coming over, or drinking, or anything like that. My parents trusted my sister, and she earned that trust. Just innocent fun was going to happen. Board games. Movies. Doing each other’s hair. And one more activity common to girls’ slumber parties. One that would change the way I looked at women forever.

  “Now Caleb and I actually more or less respected their privacy. We only spent a couple minutes watching them from the staircase before we got bored with it. But see, we didn’t have much to do that night, because a week earlier we had fried our bedroom TV by hooking up too many plugs into an electrical outlet, so we couldn’t play any of our videogame consoles. So we read comics awhile and played Gameboy. Eventually we decided to play to some board games, but my sister had all of them downstairs except for Mouse Trap, and we couldn’t play that because we’d lost a lot of crucial pieces a long time ago.

  “So I went downstairs to get Crossfire. I don’t think any girls really played it, but they had all our games down there. When I got into the living room I saw that all of the girls were circled together. They were all barefoot, legs on each others’ laps, giving each other pedicures. I didn’t think anything of it at first. I just wanted to grab Crossfire, which was sitting in a pile of games in the center of the circle.

  “Cecile saw me and came over and asked me what I wanted. I told her. She didn’t know what I was talking about so she told me to just grab it and go. She leaned against the wall and folded her arms in contempt like every single villain on Dragon Ball Z constantly did. So I moved into the center of the circle to retrieve Crossfire. Nine barefoot women surrounded me.”

  “That was the number of the Fellowship of the Ring,” says Jimmy with great significance.

  “I never thought about that before, but yeah,” says Chris. “So I was standing in the center of this circle. And in a flash, my life changed. I was no longer looking for Crossfire. I was staring at soles and toes with an appreciation I’d never felt before. All the colors of the rainbow were there on those toenails, too. Red. Orange. Yellow. Green. Blue. Violet. And also pink, lots of pink. It was like I was the lone oat piece in a bowl full of Lucky Charms marshmallows. And man, did I ever want to taste the rainbow.

  “It was then I knew that I had a foot fetish. The moments I spent within the circle are burned into my soul forever. No matter how old my memory backup gets, that save file is never going to be erased. I stared at those nine pairs of feet until Cecile’s friends started looking at me weird and my sister told me to get the hell out. So I grabbed Crossfire and started to walk away. But like Orpheus, I turned back. I had to have one last look. And the very moment I looked back, the girl sitting in the twelve o’clock position of the circle moved from sitting Indian-style to lying on her stomach with her legs in the air.”

  A single tear runs down Chris’ cheek, like when Grima Wormtongue first beheld the army of Isenguard in the film version of The Two Towers.

  “The power of such a position overwhelmed me and I dropped the Crossfire box, spilling the ball bearings everywhere. My sister yelled at me to go. But I had to get closer to those now elevated feet. I ran back and grabbed Fireball Island from within the circle, getting an up-close look at the girl lying in the position that I would later dub as the omega before retreating back to my room. That was my Awakening.”

  Jimmy places his hand on Chris’ shoulder. “I was twelve years old when my babysitter took me trick-or-treating as the fox Maid Marian and I was Robin Hood. That was my Awakening.”

  “Yeah, Katie the babysitter,” says Seth. “Chris told us about that when we first busted him for his foot fetish.”

  “I have an Awakening moment myself,” I say. “Sort of. Close, but not really, since it isn’t a fetish thing. There was an episode of Married with Children where Al and the guys go to their local strip club and bring their wives along. They’re trying to convince their wives that they don’t act like pigs when they’re there, so they go on A-cup night. But in typical Bundy fashion, it just so happens that a super-stacked stripper named Rocki Mountains is dancing that night. And she had these breasts that were about the size of watermelons. It was like seeing the bustiest Image Comics babe drawn by her most brea
st-obsessed artist come to life.

  “That was when I realized I was a breast man. I don’t know if I was twelve years old when the episode first aired, but I had to be around that age. At the time Rocki Mountains had the biggest breasts I’d ever seen, and I remember thinking she had to be a natural one in a million anomaly. It wasn’t until a couple of years later I found out she was an adult film star named Letha Weapons with breast implants, and that within the big bust pantheon of the adult industry there existed women that eclipsed even her in size. So seeing Letha Weapons in that episode was my Awakening. Except that large breast admiration isn’t a fetish.”

  “It’s a fetish when it’s taken to that extreme,” says Seth. “I’m familiar with the episode. All the wives were disgusted by Letha Weapons. So was I. I thought she belonged in a freakshow.”

  “I never got to watch the show much when it was originally on because my mom really hated it,” says Chris. “I’ve seen a lot of reruns but don’t think I’ve seen that one.”

  Jimmy holds up his phone. “That’s why there’s YouTube,” he says. “If by chance the clip hasn’t been uploaded, we can at least do a Google image search.”

  The four of us watch the clip of Letha’s Married with Children cameo where she briefly dances onstage to Al Bundy’s delight and Peggy’s horror. She wears a patriotic ensemble of a blue skirt and cleavage-bearing top adorned with white stars and red and white striped gloves, topping off the outfit with a cute red bowtie. Letha removes her top in the clip but only her naked back is actually shown onscreen. When the clip is done, Jimmy pauses it on a shot of Letha’s cleavage, studying the image with disgusted awe.

  “Jesus,” says Seth. “I’m glad that aired on network television so they couldn’t actually show her topless from the front. She’s an abomination.” Seth looks as if he were the cop who had been the first to open Jeffrey Dahmer’s refrigerator.

  “That’s a little extreme,” says Chris. “I’d say she’s an aberration.” He remains largely unaffected simply because he long ago chose to walk a different path of female body adoration.

  “So there are actually women bustier than Letha?” asks Jimmy. “She’s not the biggest?”

  “Many,” I say. “But Chelsea Charms is the biggest there is.”

  Jimmy looks at me warily as if he were the protector of Earth who had just defeated a mighty alien invader, but the invader’s last words spoke of an even graver threat en route to the Earth. He reluctantly types Chelsea’s name into the YouTube search bar but stops halfway through and closes his phone.

  “I’ll take your word for it,” he says. “There’s only so much of the abyss I want to actually see for myself. I’m not going to judge you, though. These fetishes, yours, mine, Chris’, all of them, they’re an innate part of us, written into our very genes. We cannot control them. We cannot change them. All we can do is live with them and enjoy them.”

  “What makes you so sure it’s entirely a matter of genetics?” asks Seth. “There’s a pretty compelling argument to be made that your fetish developed entirely due to psychological factors.”

  “You speak of my innumerous viewings of Robin Hood and exclusive selection of Felicia in my gaming, of course,” says Jimmy. “Mere outlets. Nothing but a means of tempering an urge forged when I was but an embryo. Furry fetishism is not a recent phenomenon spawned from anthropomorphic animation and manga. It can be traced back thousands of years to the beginnings of human civilization. The ancient Egyptians were the original furries. Look at their gods. Anubis, a man with the head of a jackal. Set, a man with the head of whatever the hell that animal was supposed to be. Bast, a woman with the head of a cat. Cats were sacred to the ancient Egyptians, so much so that some were even mummified after death.

  “So the reverence and endearment of cats to humans that still exists today goes back millennia. A primitive society like ancient Egypt ruled by dogmatic superstition would naturally attribute religious significance to explain why some of the people were so drawn to cats. A sexualized character like Felicia could not have existed back then so a goddess was constructed for worship instead. So you can clearly see that the eroticism some people find in cats and other animals is as ancient as civilization itself. No doubt my genetic lineage traces back in at least some way to those ancient Egyptians who chose Bast as their primary deity.”

  “You don’t look Egyptian,” says Seth.

  “Neither did Sean Connery,” says Jimmy. “But you’re not looking at the big picture. Human beings came out of Africa. If you go back far enough, all of us share some common genes.”

  “I’m siding with Jimmy on this,” I say. “It is just a part of him. Watching Robin Hood and playing Darkstalkers merely provides him with a way to indulge a desire that already existed long before he first encountered those pieces of media. And there’s no psychological basis to explain away my breast fixation, but there is a genetic one. Going by what Jimmy said, I’m likely a direct descendant of the man who carved the Venus of Willendorf twenty-thousand years ago. It’s a limestone carving of a woman with enormous breasts that was found in 1908 near Krems, Austria.”

  Seth, Chris, and Jimmy all glance at each other and then at me. “I’m familiar with big breasts in the arts from the contemporary all the way back to prehistory,” I say.

  Jimmy brings up a picture of the Venus on his phone. “You’re right, she’s ancient,” he says. “I think only those cave paintings are older than her. Good show, solid evidence of big breast fetishism that was ancient at the time of the groundbreaking ceremony for the Great Pyramid at Giza.”

  “She’s got a quite a belly to go along with that rack,” says Seth. “This particular Venus is definitely a BBW.”

  “Yeah,” says Chris. “She’s all natural for sure. I don’t think her sculptor had oversized implants in mind when he carved her.”

  “How could he possibly have had the vision to foresee breast implants?” I ask. “The wheel would have been condemned as sorcery back in this guy’s time.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not buying it,” says Chris. “I’ve played enough Metal Gear Solid to know there’s more to us than our genes. I think psychological factors can explain both of your fetishes. Many psychoses can be traced back to traumatic childhood experiences. Jimmy, perhaps like Romulus and Remus before you, you were abandoned in the wilderness as a babe and nursed for awhile by a wolf or something. You were adopted, right? We really don’t know what you may have gone through before your adoption. Maybe that’s why you’re so fixated on furry animals, because you nursed at the teat of a wolf.”

  “That’s vaguely insulting,” says Jimmy. “But the brothers went on to found Rome, so they were nothing if not high achievers.”

  “I didn’t say it didn’t work out well for them,” says Chris. He looks at me. “Childhood nursing difficulties can also explain your boob thing. You must have almost starved to death as an infant. For whatever reason, there was a considerable period of time you weren’t able to suckle at your mother’s breast or even be given the areola simulacra that is the bottle. Being deprived for so long caused you to not see breasts merely as a means of sustenance but rather as the very sustainers of life.

  “That’s why you crave them so unnaturally large now. Because you have this deeply rooted fear in your subconscious of being totally deprived of a resource as necessary to you as water or oxygen you fixate on huge breasts as a form of milk hoarding. Might I add that when we’ve gotten breakfast at the dining hall I’ve noticed you’re unusually generous when it comes to dispersing milk into your cereal bowl.”

  “Chris, you’re like Sigmund Freud and Sherlock Holmes rolled into one sleuthing psychologist,” I say. “But I’m sticking with the genetic base.”

  “I have a sane theory to explain the boob fetish,” says Seth. “Your breast obsession is simply a natural response to your fear of the vagina.”

  “I don’t have a fear of that,” I say.

  “You couldn’t even say the word,” says Seth. �
�You fear the vagina and its role in sexual intercourse therefore you fixate on the second most sexualized aspect of the female anatomy.” He looks at me poignantly before turning to Chris. “And I’d guess you developed your foot fetish by happenstance. You basically became sexually self aware at the moment you were encircled by girls giving each other pedicures and focused on their feet because that’s what was there. Had you gone downstairs when the girls happened to be practicing their kissing skills on one another you’d have come to be fixated with girl-on-girl action.”

  “No,” says Chris, his voice defiant. “Because the beauty of the foot is there for everyone to see, it’s just that so few look. The breast thing and the furry thing, those are fetishes because Letha Weapons and Felicia are both unnatural. Women have two feet and ten toes. That’s normal. The fact that most people don’t see them as sexual objects does not mean that they shouldn’t be seen that way. So really there’s no such thing as a foot fetish, just enlightened men and unenlightened men.

  “Every guy in the world needs to clear his head of all the bullshit he’s been taught since birth about how you have to either be a breast, butt, or leg man and stop and realize that there’s a fourth option out there. That if they just sucked on a woman’s toes with an open mind and allowed themselves the opportunity to enjoy it, they’d find out that they would and they’d have a whole new avenue of foreplay opened up to them. I mean why is it considered so ill-erotic? Show me one passage in the Bible, Torah, Koran, or Vedas that forbids toe sucking or even frowns on it!”

  “I can’t really embrace it because the claws on Felicia’s paws would probably cut my lips,” says Jimmy.

  “And I’m content with the breast option,” I say.

  “To be honest,” says Seth, “I think the level of depravity goes foot, furry, and boob, at least in accordance to how likely a girl’s going to be willing to accommodate them. A typical girl might be willing to let her toes be sucked on occasion. Comic-Cons aside, she might even be up for an occasional costume wearing during sex. But you’re just screwed with the boob thing. If you were dating someone like Sabrina and she caught you looking at Letha Weapons porn she’d start crying hysterically because she’d feel like she could never possibly measure up to Letha and then she’d break up with you. Chris and Jimmy might be able to get a girl to accommodate them long-term. You, you’re just screwed in that regard.”