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I was born with a short tail, which my parents decided not to have removed when I was a baby, since I seemed to take so much pleasure in it, curling it around my own wrist, whipping it on my buttocks when I was itchy or testy, and dragging small objects into my crib with it. When I was old enough to realize none of the other kids had a tail, though, I became furiously ashamed of it. I said nothing to my parents, who had gotten quite used to it, but when I went to school I pulled it forward and squeezed it between my thighs to stop its waggish commentary. At home I subjected it to horrors: sat on it, hung weights from it, clamped clothespins on it. |
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I tied it to the doorknob and tried to run away from it. I failed, but I did manage, in time, to subdue its temperament, and to keep it coiled, barely twitching, in the seat of my pants. It even shrank a little, atrophied from lack of use. When I finally got it out and had a look at it for the first time in years at the end of high school, it lay limp and slightly damp across the palm of my hand like a part of someone else's body. I had to coax it to move, a nerve-wracking process like learning to wiggle one eyebrow, writing, or practising scales, after which I had to slouch into my bedroom to masturbate. In time, though, it came back to life. |
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It thickened and grew lithe. At night in bed it explored, violating me shamelessly. Every morning I had to perch on the sink and wash my dirty tail. My freshman year of college I fell asleep after a late night of study in my best friend's room. Sometime in the night we shoved the books off the bed, turned off the light and climbed under the sheets. I remember her hard back against mine. In the morning I woke up with a yellow highlighter marker under my right shoulder blade and an uneasy feeling. I slid my hand down and felt my tail; it was slightly tacky, and the longer hairs at the tip were stuck together. My friend rolled over and looked at me. I started explaining: my tail wandered in its sleep, I had no knowledge or control, it had happened to me many times, it should have occurred to me that something like this might happen one day, I should have kept my jeans on, I didn't mean it. I stopped. She gave me a long, strange look, her brows knit. What? I said. She plunged her arm under me, closed her fist firmly around my tail, rolled me onto my side, my back to her. Then she guided me inside her. I lay there staring perplexedly at the wall while she panted and strained behind me, sketching out a new world for me.
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