Too Close to Home

I held up my hand for Derek to stop. I riffled through the pages quickly. Seven, like he’d said. Double-spaced, medium-sized paragraphs. No title page, nothing in the headers of each page with a title or the author’s name. Just a page number, tucked in the upper right corner.

I sat on the stool by the workbench and held the sheaf of papers in my hands and started to read.

Nicholas Dickless: Chapter One

Nicholas didn’t realize when he first woke up on this Tuesday morning that anything was particularly amiss. He swung his legs out of bed, rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, and padded into the bathroom just as he did every morning. Standing at the toilet to empty his full bladder was the first part of his morning bathroom ritual, and this Tuesday morning was no different than any of the other thousands of mornings that had preceded it, with the possible exception that when Nicholas rooted around through the fly of his pajamas to pull out his penis, he was unable to locate it.

My eyebrows went up. “You see?” Derek said, able to tell where I was in the story.

“It’s kind of different. But go on.”

I went on:

“What the fuck?” Nicholas said, to no one in particular since he was all alone, reaching somewhat frantically through the fly, still unable to locate his member. But it was worse than that. He was unable to find his testicles, as well. His genitalia were not there. He felt his pubic hair-that remained-but what in God’s name had happened to the rest of him?

He told himself that he must be dreaming. He was having a nightmare. In a moment he would wake up. He stepped away from the toilet, looked through the bathroom door back to his own bed, expecting to see himself there, still under the covers, thrashing about perhaps, on the verge of waking.

But Nicholas was not in the bed. The covers were turned back, just as he’d left them a moment ago. He approached the bed, tentatively, fearfully, and pulled the covers further down, expecting to find his cock and balls in a pool of blood, but the sheets were white and clean.

He was afraid to inspect himself, terrified to see what kind of damage had been done to him. Slowly, he pulled down his pajama bottoms. He did not appear to have been wounded in any way. There was no blood, no cuts, no obvious signs of amputation of any kind. He looked untouched and undisturbed, except for the fact that those parts of him that constituted his manhood were missing.

Delicately, he reached down to touch himself, to see if somehow his eyes were deceiving him, that perhaps that which did not appear to be there actually was. And Nicholas discovered something that was even more unimaginable than what had already transpired.

There was an opening.

I looked up from the pages.