aici<\/a><\/strong><\/em> <\/em><\/p>\n\u2018Whatever may be said to the contrary, such cases do occur \u2013 rarely\u2026\u2019 (Gogol)<\/p>\n
Monday morning Alex woke up without a penis. It had happened before that his cock had shrunk from wearing leather trousers or from taking a dip in icy mountain water, so that it was hard to find it to piss; but this? He wasn\u2019t ready for such a moment. He went to put the coffee on, trying to remember if he had somehow changed his lifestyle. How else to explain this shock? Had he done something wrong, radically wrong? On his second cigarette, he looked more carefully at himself in the bedroom mirror. Under the pubic hair, not a trace of manhood. Not even a line or a scar, nothing. He had indeed lost his penis. After he\u2019d shaved, he got dressed without paying much attention and hurried to catch the trolleybus that took him to work. In a pensive mood, he cast his eyes over the newspaper and stopped at the ad with Cristiano Ronaldo modelling underpants. The bulge in those underpants took away all his drive. At work, his colleagues didn\u2019t pay much attention to him so Alex focused as well as he could on his routine activity: data operating. At the lunch break, he snatched a smoke with his colleagues, as usual. He was downcast but his workmates said how well he was looking. A closer acquaintance noticed he hadn\u2019t shaved properly, pointing out that his moustache was still slightly visible. Alex listened absent-mindedly. What annoyed him most were remarks like \u2018What the fuck\u2019, which had become an interjection just like \u2018Damn\u2019.<\/p>\n
After work, Alex went to the posh bookstore downtown to do a little research. He didn\u2019t know what to look for: was he interested in medicine, Sci-Fi, alchemy or theology? Should he read Origen? That was about a voluntary act, whereas there was something almost chemical about this, as if all his manhood had flowed inwards and dissolved; as if some kind of acid had wiped his genitals off his body map. Alex didn\u2019t feel a psychological change to match the anatomical one. He felt very macho, as usual, and noticed how the saleslady from the bookstore kept smiling in a sly and suggestive way when she tried to help him with books on art and treatises on biology. \u2018What the fuck?\u2019 he said to himself. \u2018Manhood is a state of mind; the success of a general doesn\u2019t depend on an army, but on a brilliant mind – like the mind of a Hannibal or a Napoleon!\u2019 In a comparative study of heresies, he found a painting of Jesus with an erection, which completely demoralised him. \u2018Even you\u2019 Alex gulped and left the bookstore.
\nThe shadows of the evening were penetrating the sky when our superhunk entered his apartment. He prepared a TV dinner. He decided to continue his research on Google, which proved to be incredibly lavish with information: people who cut off their penises, people born without a penis, transsexuals, castrati, men with several penises\u2026 But what was the cause? What was the trigger? Vague memories from his time at the Faculty of Philosophy made him uneasy. What was the purpose? The motive? Punishment for a sin? He didn\u2019t believe in guilt, not even in responsibility. \u2018Life without a penis is like life without myself\u2019 he thought, plagiarizing the title of a depressing film. \u2018Could we still say \u201cMen is who we are\u201d? Is there life after penis?\u2019<\/p>\n
He looked at himself obsessively in the mirror, thinking what this practical joke of fate’s might mean. \u2018Should I learn to be more tolerant to women, stop being so sexist? Have more respect for passive homosexuals who ejaculate even while they submit? Should I make friends with my anus? Neither a man nor a woman. I\u2019m not even androgynous\u2026 some sort of a fourth sex.\u2019 He was surprised to find that Google had known about this concept for a long time, but not even this fitted the case. \u2018What should I do to get my penis back? Pray maybe? I don’t want to, it\u2019s shaming.\u2019 He looked at the empty space underneath his pubic hair which with inexorable starkness told him he would never get his dick back. Paradoxically, his consciousness of the missing part and his concern lessened as the evening wore on and he decided to watch some porn before going to bed. He needed to fall asleep soon, he had to go to work next day. He picked Rocco and the transsexuals. Rocco was his ideal man, as charismatic as an off-duty gangster and as strong and reliable as the friend you call after an accident. \u2018I need a bit of smut to get off tonight!\u2019 Even though the movie gave him plenty of stimulus and in his neurotically eager mind he was on the brink of coming he didn\u2019t have the wherewithal to masturbate. His body was like a TV without a remote or a computer without a monitor. He could ejaculate copious tears – which was a turn-off. And because he was once more overcome with self-pity, he went to bed after he had brushed his teeth. The next day he didn\u2019t wake up at all. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u015etefan Bolea (Romania) Translation from Romanian by A C Clarke and Mircea Filimon, MTTLC student pentru versiunea rom\u00e2n\u0103 click aici \u2018Whatever may be said to the contrary, such cases do occur \u2013 rarely\u2026\u2019 (Gogol) Monday morning Alex woke up without a penis. It had happened before that his cock had shrunk from wearing leather trousers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[704,22],"tags":[665,1151,520,403,1116,39,312],"class_list":["post-6120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-egophobia-29-30","category-short-story","tag-a-c-clarke","tag-egophobia-29-30","tag-mircea-filimon","tag-mttlc","tag-short-story","tag-stefan-bolea","tag-translation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DakB-1AI","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6120"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6327,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6120\/revisions\/6327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}