Ryan Harding - Genital Grinder

Greg was tearing through his pockets in a mad search for his keys. The contraband was slumped on the roof, losing rigidity as blood tapered out and slid down the driver’s side window.

“I can’t find them!” he shouted in panic.

Von felt something uncomfortable digging at his thigh, and remembered he’d last used the keys to open the trunk for Angelique. He dug them out and tossed them over the roof to Greg, who dropped them in his haste. Four attempts later, the key slid in. Greg bounced across the seat to unlock Von’s side. Von was shutting his door as Greg turned the ignition, and Greg didn’t even pause to slam his own door until he was peeling out.

“Slow down!” Von snapped. “People act crazy trying to get in to a titty bar, not out!”

Greg eased up all of five miles per hour, gunning for the exit. He came dangerously close to sideswiping a Civic before hooking a right. The horn of the other car faded, though the driver raised a middle finger for good measure. Greg remained oblivious to the whole sequence, painfully unaware how close he’d come to blowing the whole deal. “We did it!” he whooped. “The most daring tool theft ever!”

“We’ll need to clean that blood off the windows soon as we get to some back roads,” Von said, praying the Civic didn’t chase after them. He glanced backward until he was sure there would be no road rage retaliation, his head almost lighter than air. The millwork of his veins and arteries decided to do their thing again. He exhaled and resumed his train of thought. “We’d never be able to explain to some pig why holy mother of God, what did you do with it, Greg? ” He jumped around in his seat as though stung on the ass, looking behind him, beneath him, below him. “It’s not here! We lost it!”

Greg plowed the brake pedal with both feet, the tires screeching and the body swerving uncertainly. He pulled an illegal U-turn into the thankfully empty oncoming road and punched the accelerator, hanging a left back onto Seymour Street and past a Burger King. The Electra Complex grew bigger, like a mouth about to swallow them.

“It’s by the back door!” Greg reasoned. “We didn’t bring it in after I set it on the roof, and it must’ve fell off.”

“ We didn’t bring it in?” Von echoed. “You mean you didn’t bring it in!”

Greg had no reply for that as he barreled through the parking lot to approximately where they had had been before. “Shit, hang on,” he said as Von reached for the door handle. “There’s no light back here.” He put it back in reverse and flipped on the high beams. The car hitched slightly before it came to a stop.

Greg sprang out of the Nova, searching the lot frantically. Von moved more slowly, as though weighed down by a heavy heart. He immediately walked in front of the car, into the glare of the headlights, and quietly said, “Here.”

Greg followed Von’s gaze and gasped in horror.

“That’s our jillion dollars,” Von said, pointing. “You just made road kill out of our meal ticket, sumbitch.”

Greg dropped to his knees in horror and disbelief. His dramatic collapse afforded him a closer look, which he held as though the organ would regenerate back to its original—and surely pricier—form. The member was curiously white now, all its blood shot through the vessels and glans by the weight of the car; white except for the distinctive treads of Michelin tires. What had been inserted through the suck-hole just minutes ago now resembled something you’d fling on a plate with a spatula and douse with maple syrup.

“We gotta get outta here,” Von announced. “We can’t let him know we got nothing to bargain with. We’ll have to take it with us.”

“Him” was Edward Rochester, the latest addition to the men’s soprano choir. He blew a thousand bucks a night at the Complex, and seemed to arrive in a different luxury car each time. On Saturdays at 9:45, he always visited the Vacuum. Even a destitute man would find five million dollars an agreeable price for his lovewand, so Von and Greg figured Edward would be only too happy to ante up—and right quick at that. Every second counted.

Greg gave Von a doubtful look, but made talons of his fingers and tried to slip them between the flattened organ and the asphalt. Von worked the other side. It was like trying to peel the label off a packaging envelope—getting a sizable piece to come up with no problem and then losing it as it tore from its body. The member was the same way, a smidgen of flesh peeling off like masking tape, then dissolving into a cluster of various strands like bubble-gum stuck to the bottom of a shoe.

They kept an eye out for approaching cars or patrons making an early exit, but their luck held (the setback of the squashed sexual apparatus notwithstanding).

Von forced the silly putty-like chunks into his pockets, thinking this was one time he’d be sure to use the laundromat.

Edward Rochester was in a great deal of pain. He’d pay to have the bastard tortured. The seediness of the Complex appealed to him in ways the higher class “gentlemen’s’ clubs” could not, but he could have done without getting his ass kicked by an uncultured patron. He’d made the apparently ghastly error of knocking somebody’s bottle of beer off their table when trying to negotiate his way from near the stage to the door to the Vacuum. Before he even had a chance to offer to pay for a new one, the bearded patron said, “Watch where the fuck you’re going, dicksucker!” and pushed him into the wall. Edward rebounded from it, lungs whooshing from his lungs, and stepped into a right hook. A few kicks found him as he tasted the floor, and he began to worry that the strobe light effect he was seeing wasn’t part of the stage show this time. It actually was, fortunately, but he and Russell Crowe were separated by interchangeable bald men in black shirts emblazoned with white letters reading SECURITY and dragged out of the club. Hence, he’d missed his 9:45 “appointment” with Angelique . . .

In greater pain was Horace Cromwell, who’d given plasma just to treat himself to a good beejay. And now he was convulsing on the filthy floor of the Vacuum, forty-five dollars and one penis poorer.

No one could hear his screams over the music; not that he wanted anyone to find out what had become of his girth. What he did want was revenge. He’d have it before the night was over . . . if he didn’t bleed to death.

The Bic lighter cost him all of a dollar, but it was reliable. It flamed on, first try. He didn’t want to look at the stump, at the mangled roots of what had given him so much pleasure and disappointed so many girls since high school. It was like looking at a tangle of circuitry spooling from an open wall socket. He could feel his pulse in the mess of severed blood vessels, a renewal of pain with each pounding beat. Blood matted his thighs like he’d just given birth, and he probably didn’t have much more he could waste.

He was telling his hand No! even as it brought the lighter closer. The searing heat was close enough to scald the blood and torn skin, discomforting and nearly agonizing. Horace gritted his teeth and brought the flame home.

If he’d been in pain before, he was in Hell now. An electric current of agony erupted in his groin, his original pain with a whole battalion of reinforcements. He felt every orifice knot up as if to contain the sparks shooting through his nerves. The world became a vision of fire and only a chaotic scream with no beginning or end as the soundtrack. He pierced the veil only in brief flashes of reality, as if he could only bare glimpses without losing his mind. When he could finally align his vision with the grim reality, he saw the ultimate parody of male human reproduction—a blackened, smoking gorge of a stump. He fancied that he still heard the sizzling of the veins as they cauterized and stemmed the flow of blood, a morbid sound and odor he knew he could expect to be waiting for him in dreams, waking him up in the dead of night.