Pandora's Box excerpt

yes it's a real condition and no i dont have it...although the media makes me feel like i do sometimes.

 

 My two hours of sleep totally elude me. For those two hours I am not asleep. I am naked.

            I am walking down that red carpet runway from hell again. I am naked so I know this is a dream but I can’t wake myself up, just like last time. Even though I know where I’m going this time the dream still sucks.

 I walk down that aisle of taunting flesh. The laughter echoes through the inner sanctum of the library and I ache to be among the books.

            My robotic legs take me to the end of the walk of shame and here is where the dream is different. On my right I see my mother. She is not laughing. She is clasping a kerchief in her hands. Her eyes are wet and she’s smiling. She looks so young, and then I realize this is my mother from nearly six years ago, at my high school graduation. She is crying in pride and admiration.

            I follow her with my sight as I walk by. Then my eyes catch someone on beside my mom. It is Chelsea. She is looking at me and her eyes tear at my heart. They are filled with pain and terror and longing. I try to talk, try to reach for her, but I have stopped moving and she doesn’t seem to notice my reaching anyway.

            On my left is my father. He has his head down, the bridge of his nose clasped between his thumb and forefinger. He is shaking his head, the same way he did after that b*****d Gym teacher, Mr. Edmunds, told him about his freak of a son.

            And right then I want to kill him.

            I want to grab him by his aging throat and watch the life leave his eyes.

            Beside my father is the man from the Library today. He is wearing his dirty had and trench coat, smiling at me with false and malignant friendship, jeering me on, mocking me slyly.

             I turn to look ahead and before me is the locker, one-twenty, with “Pandora’s Box” scrawled upon the front. It rises out of the floor as if it’s a part of the stone.

            The lettering along the side still waivers and shimmers before me. The heat still gusts through the slates and into my face. It still grows hotter when I touch the lock, almost hot enough to burn me when I open the door. The light from behind the slatted door blinds me. I can’t see but I know that I’m reaching my right hand into that inferno. I know that when I take it out my hand will be burned beyond recognition if not gone entirely. I know these things but I reach right in anyway.

            Just like last time the laughter has stopped and all is silent. Just like last time an air of fear saturates the emptiness above us. When I reach my hand inside the locker there is a collective inhalation as if this is a long awaited occasion. I feel no pain and I figure that I must not have my hand in the right place; that soon I will feel the pain and scream, but then the whiteness behind my eyes fades and I open them.

            The glow from the Pandora’s Box is fading, but there is still a light. It is coming from my hand. I look down. My hand seems to glow from within. It reminds me of when I was little, putting flashlights up to my hands and watching them glow. This is much, much brighter.

            As I watch the glow as it begins to pulsate. With each pulse my body feels warmer. With each pulse I become more excited. I look down and, to my dismay, the thing between my legs is slowly, but surely, erecting.

            I try to hide myself, my freakish body, but I can’t move. All the people watch. There is no laughter, no sound.

            I feel an anger rise within me. How dare they? They judge and they judge and they tease and they hate but they don’t know a f*****g thing about me. Who are they to judge? Micropenis or not, I am a bigger man, more human than all of them and they have no right making me feel this way with their fake plastic bodies and their breast augmentations and their Botox injections. They don’t deserve to look at me, deserve to think of me; they deserve-

-to die.

            I raise my hand, pointing my fist toward the lofty expanse of ceiling above me. The feeling goes from my hand and I close my eyes. I hear a scream well up within that room, rising and rising, and then I realize it’s mine.  

 

 

            My massive arm is caught underneath my massive chest. I have been laying on it for the past eight hours. How do I know this? I lift my head to look at my clock through bleary eyes. It says that the time I’m stuck in is moving toward over three hours later than the time that I am supposed to be at work; five hours later than I am supposed to get up every morning. I roll awkwardly off the bed and stumble to my feet. My arm screams in pain, stuck with millions of shivering needles; hundreds of thousands of insects with sharp, tiny legs crawling all over my skin from tip of my pinky to the base of my huge deltoid.

            I mutter a nice little string of expletives, graphic enough in combination and context to make even the toughest sailor blush, and get ready for work.

           

            The walk home from the library after work is a lonely one. I have no Chelsea. I will see her tomorrow, but it seems so far away.

            I consider going to see her. I’ve had such a s****y day; seeing her would be just the thing to make me feel better.

            I can’t. I would be too creepy. Too awkward.

            No. Instead I walk my tired sorry-a*s self to the grocery store. Then to the gym. I didn’t work out yesterday and I am in desperate need of some serious lactic acid.

            The gym is dead today. Only about six other people use the equipment besides me and there are never more than four of us in one room at the same time. I am the only regular tonight; everyone else half-asses their workouts and heads home. After all, it is a Saturday.

            I work hard. I watch the muscles of my body that most people don’t have ripple and contract with the slightest movement. I admire myself in the mirror. I pretend that I am not ashamed of myself and that I am one badass dude who may star in pornos. Hey, you never know. You just never know with someone like me. Maybe I’m a skin-head Neo-Nazi who attends regular hate-crime sessions and wears a wife-beater and sleeps beneath the confederate flag. Maybe I’m an axe-murderer, using not axes to hack people to bits but my massive muscles to smother and eviscerate my victims. Maybe I’m a flaming homosexual. Maybe I’m rich. Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe I’m a b*****d. Maybe I’m a terrorist. Maybe I’m a woman.

            Or maybe, just maybe, I am a homosexual transgender Neo-Nazi terrorist who is the clinically insane murderer who just won the lottery and stars in black-market illegal porn films on the side, the contents of which are too taboo and disgusting for more than a select cultist few to be able to comprehend let alone watch. 

            You never know. You just never know.

            I wonder what everyone else thinks of me. I wonder what everyone else thinks I think of them. Do people think about me thinking about them? Do they think about me thinking about them thinking about me? Do they even care?

            You never know. You never know whose what or where’s when or what’s where or why.

            The locker room is dark and dank, as always. The smell of rotting cotton and questionably stained gym shorts lingers in the air waiting to invade my untainted nostrils. I walk slowly, deliberately. The sounds of my sneakers against the tiled floor aren’t even close in comparison to the size of the feet that inhabit them. I am a surprisingly quiet giant.

            Locker one-nineteen lies as it always has: beside one-twenty, the infamous Pandora’s Box. I open one-nineteen and exchange things. I look around nervously, as always. I see no one, hear no one, as always, and I do the thing that, as always, I hate to do.

            When I’m done I go to the store. I still have the willies from the silly thing that Dr. Ashley makes me wear. I hate it. I have to convince her to let me get rid of it.

            I wonder if she’ll let me.

           

Author's Note

critique please