Лорен Хендерсон: The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Erotica

How about one of his eyes, which spoke volumes? The eye could rest upon an egg cup and form an image of me. Before going to bed I could perform a striptease for his eye. Yet to be perfectly frank, what could his eye do for me? Also, although I had no intention of ever being unfaithful to my Beloved, a naked eyeball might seem like a spy camera keeping watch. This wasn’t the kind of continuing intimacy I craved.

Really, my choice could only be the penis, especially as the cost was based upon the “normal” size when flaccid rather than erect. In this instance, the money I would be paying in any event for the blood supply, so as to keep the part alive, would provide a special bonus benefit, namely erection when the penis was caressed. You couldn’t say about any other cloned body part that your investment could grow ten-fold, as it were!

“You mightn’t realize,” the cloning salesman said to me, “that a penis becomes stiff not because of blood pumped actively into it by an excited body, but because certain penile muscles relax , which allows the blood to flow in and fill it. Normally the muscles are tense and inhibit the volume of blood – otherwise men would have permanent erections.”

“So if you feel nervous and tense, you never get an erection?”

The salesman flushed, as though I had touched on a sore point. He was a young man with ginger hair and many freckles. The wallpaper of the consultation room was Klimt, so we were surrounded by hybrids of slender women and flowers.

“Madam, it’s simply that you might be expecting too much. We can’t absolutely guarantee erection, for that would be to alter the biology of the penis. In effect we would be providing you with a bio-dildo rather than with a genuine cloned organ – and we don’t supply such things. Prostho-porn isn’t our profession.” This was spoken a shade tartly. The salesman may have been upset by my previous remark, supposing that it reflected upon his own virility.

I was sure that my Beloved’s cloned penis would remember my own particular touch and wouldn’t feel inhibited.

I made like a wide-eyed innocent. “Is ‘prostho-porn’ anyone’s profession?”

“I’ve heard that in China…” The salesman lowered his voice. “Multiple cloned cunts of pop stars in pleasure parlours…” Now he seemed mollified and was all smiles again. “This won’t be the case here! Your commission will be unique to you.”

“I should hope so!”

It goes without saying that I’d arranged for sample cells from all of Oliver’s important organs and limbs to be frozen in liquid nitrogen – which wasn’t too expensive – before the majority of his dear chilled body finally entered the furnace at the crematorium. I’d read that in another few years it might be possible to coax a finger or a penis, say, to diversify and regenerate from itself an entire body, but apparently this was a speculative line of research pursued by only a handful of maverick scientists. Small wonder: it’s much more common for a body to lose a penis than for a penis to lose a body! So I was sceptical of this possibility. In the meantime my dream of recreating the entirety of Oliver, to rejoin his penis, would remain a dream because of the cost.

“So that’s the famous penis!” exclaimed my neighbour Andorra, who was short and who spoke her mind. Andorra and I were best friends even before the sudden death of my Beloved, about which she was very consoling. Currently Andorra was working for the Blood Donor service.

Her parents chose the name Andorra to suggest that she would be adorable. Naming her after the tiniest independent state in Europe did prove prophetic as regards her stature and personality – she was short and assertive. Yet as regards adorability in the eyes of the opposite sex, the ploy failed. Andorra had only had one boyfriend, and he was a disaster. No one else tried to get into bed with her, or courted her. I think Andorra trained as a nurse due to reading too many doctor-nurse romance novels, many of which still littered her apartment next door to mine.

Next door to our apartment, I should say. Oliver’s and mine; mine and that of his penis.

Andorra’s dog Coochie sometimes chewed her romance novels or carried them around her apartment while awaiting her return from work, and a walk, and an emptying. Coochie was a yellowish Labrador.

“Famous?” I replied. “There’s nothing famous about it except in my own eyes.” And in my hand, of course.

“It’s a bit small…” But then she quickly added, “At the moment.” She eyed the apparatus to which the penis was attached by two long connecting tubes. “Will you pump some more blood into it?”

So that she could behold an actual erect penis in the flesh at last?

“That isn’t why a penis stiffens. Don’t you know anatomy? What’s important is the receptive mood of the penis.”

“Well, it would be more impressive…” She tailed off.

Did she hope that I would stimulate the penis of my Beloved for her benefit? I almost succumbed to her implied entreaty, if only to demonstrate Oliver’s penis in full gory, I mean glory, but this was an intimate matter.

“I’m perfectly satisfied,” I told her. Only as I spoke did I realize how this might imply smugly that Andorra herself remained unsatisfied. She had mentioned dissatisfaction with dildos. I might seem to be cock-crowing, lording it over my friend.

Andorra looked thoughtful.

Due to the length of the blood-tubes it was easy to take the penis to bed with me so as to stroke it in just the way my Beloved had liked, then pleasure myself after it stiffened. It remembered me. Because only Oliver’s penis was cloned, not his prostate and other attachments, inevitably there was no ejaculation, yet this was no disadvantage – on the contrary! I would hold the rubber grip-mount, shaped like a small plant pot, in which his penis (as it were) grew, and much prolonged joy was mine. I was blissful. Sometimes after an orgasm I would take the penis out of me and talk to it, or use my mouth for a different purpose. I felt like a little girl: the penis of my Beloved, my lollipop.

But then came a problem with the blood supply – I don’t mean the tubes and pump, but rather my finances. Bodies’r’Us strongly recommended renewing the blood each month to prevent degeneration of the penis. As part of the initial cost, I’d received five vouchers for replacement blood. Now I’d used those vouchers, and I discovered that in the meantime the cost of blood had risen by 25 per cent.

Bodies’r’Us was a significant user and retailer of blood, needing to buy blood, good blood, too, from healthy sellers. Nobody would donate blood charitably so that some rich woman could maintain a clone of her dead poodle, or me a cloned penis. Andorra had complained to me that the Donor Service, which supplied hospitals, was suffering a bit of a blood drain because former donors were choosing to sell rather than donate, but luckily altruism and generosity still prevailed in society, not to mention donations by way of the vampire churches as part of their safe sex campaign.

At this point I consulted Andorra and she made me an offer…

… to smuggle blood from the Donor Service – providing that I let her use the penis of my Beloved privately one evening each week, say every Friday.

I was astonished and disconcerted.

“I’m your best friend,” she pointed out.

“It won’t respond to you,” I said.

She pouted at me, full-lipped. “I’ll find a way.”

I should have refused. Yet if I refused, I might embitter Andorra. It must have cost her dear to make this request, this admission of craving for the real thing – or at least for the cloned and partial thing. Refusal might seem like a slap in the face. But also, of a sudden, I was curious as to whether my Beloved would respond to the touch of a stranger!