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THE FUTURE
By C
PART I
CHAPTER 2
John proceeds down Central Avenue and comes to a group of shops. On an impulse he enters the first shop and suddenly stops in bewildered surprise at the sight of a group of six young men standing together. His surprise is not caused because he has finally observed males in this future society. His surprise comes from the fact that every one of them is naked. He then does a double-take upon seeing that several have full erections. For a few moments he can do nothing but stare in astonishment until he realizes that none of the men have moved. He shakes his head in amusement thinking that they are apparently undressed mannequins. They even have body hair and are certainly the most life-like mannequins that he had ever seen. The purpose for them having genitals leaves him at a loss – to say nothing for some to be in an aroused state.
John walks up to one of the figures for a closer inspection of the remarkable craftsmanship. He begins to study the features closely, and a sudden chill sweeps over him as he realizes that it would be almost impossible to manufacture a mannequin to this degree of perfection. The natural way that the hair is attached to the body and the pours, lines, and creases in the skin are just too realistic to be artificial. He then notices a faint incision down the center of the back running from the nape of the neck to just above the buttocks. It is the same for the others with the incisions being so expertly stitched that they are barely noticeable. But, the evidence is clearly there and all doubts are dispelled. He is actually looking at stuffed bodies of humans.
With a numbed mind John begins to look around the shop, and his next shocking observation is a row of lamps standing on a long table. The base of each lamp is made from the lower portion of a man's body from the waist down and cut off above the knees. The thighs of each one are spread which puts their pubic hair and genitals on full display. Some of the penises are in a flaccid state, some curve out in a partial erection, while others stick out straight and rigid. The bases of the lamps, like the stuffed bodies, are clearly not artificial.
John feels as if he is in some type of wild dream. His mind is swimming with confusion and disbelief. He looks widely around for some type of explanation but is only greeted by another shocking spectacle. On the far wall are three rows of highly varnished wooden plaques. The plaques on the top row, looking like hunting trophies, contain the mounted heads of young men. Under each head is a complete set of mounted human male sex organs sprouting from thick patches of pubic hair. He can only assume that the genitals belonged to the same bodies that the heads had been taken from. Beneath the top row are two rows of smaller plaques that contain pubic hair and mounted male sex organs only. All of the penises, like those on the stuffed bodies and the lamp bases, are in varying conditions. Some of the shafts hang down in a flaccid state. Others stand out rigid in full erections with swollen, flared heads and gaping holes. The remainder curve outward in varying stages of partial erections. The oval shaped outlines of testicles are clearly visible in each bulging scrotum.
A cold chill creeps into John’s loins, and he feels an uneasy crawling sensation in his own genitalia as though trying to draw up and seek protection within his body. A strange, weird sensation passes over him as he looks at the row of mounted human heads. As with everything else, the quality of the workmanship is excellent, and the faces look so natural that they give the appearance of being alive and content to gaze out across the room. There are several vacant gaps in each row indicating that the plaques were not meant to be displays but were there to be sold. Even as he watches a young woman comes up and takes a plaque from the second row, looks at it briefly, and then heads toward the checkout counter.
John is still in a state of disbelief, but he manages to regain a slight semblance of self-control and starts to walk numbly around the shop to see what else he can find. Tacked on the back wall is the tanned hide of a human male. It had been removed from the body starting at the back so that the front is in the center. The sex organs had been stuffed to apparently make them more clearly visible. The small nipples, showing through curly hair on the chest, are erect. Lying on the floor beneath is a stack of similar hides - obviously placed there for purchase.
By now John has passed the point of being so stunned by each new discovery that he can only gape in astonished disbelief. This time he merely shakes his head in wonder and continues to look around. He walks up to a shelf and sees a pile of coin purses that are clearly made from human scrotums. Next to these are a pile of paperweights made from the skin of men's genitals filled with shot so that the penises and scrotums bulge. John continues looking and sees penises mounted in an erect state being used for handles on such things as carving knives, hair brushes, and umbrellas. He continues his search and sees numerous other items that he either recognizes or suspects being made from men's bodies. It soon became obvious that the body of the human male was the primary source of raw material for the majority of items in the shop. It was also obvious that the primary theme appeared to be ridiculing the male sex with a special emphasis being placed on openly displaying the sex organs in a wide variety of degrading and humiliating ways.
Up to this point, John's only emotions have been those of stunned disbelief and wonder. Now he begins to feel a sense of outrage as he realized all of these humiliating trophies and items had once belonged to living bodies of members from his own sex. The only living bodies in the shop now however, besides his invisible form, are female. Up to now, he had been so stunned and astounded that he paid only scant attention to others in the shop. He finally calms down enough to become aware of their presence and notices that the shop is quite crowded. He starts to pay special attention to their activity and once again experiences a sense of disbelief and wonder at seeing women shoppers of varying age casually browsing through this astonishing merchandise. Their unruffled manner appears no different to women shoppers from his own time, and none show the slightest degree of hesitation or embarrassment - even when purchasing the more explicit trophies or items. Once again he can only stare in bewildered dismay. Most women of his era tend to become embarrassed by any type of display that is explicitly sexual in nature. But, of far grater importance, the vast majority are gentle and caring - especially when it comes to what would be considered inhumane treatment. These women, on the other hand, seem totally indifferent to the fact that men had to die before the items that they are casually browsing through could be made.
John slowly walks out of the shop and starts down the street searching his mind in an effort to find a rational explanation for the astounding scene that he had just witnessed. It comes to him that he has no evidence that the men whose bodies had contributed to the merchandise in the shop had been deliberately killed for that purpose. It is possible that they could have died from accidents or natural causes. There is one troubling thing that bothers him with this theory. The bodies that had been stuffed whole had all belonged to young men with large, extremely impressive, physiques and appeared to have been in excellent health at the time of death. With the exception of the incision down their backs there were no other marks that would indicate that they had died in an accident. But, they could have possibly drowned or died in some other accidental manner that would have left no outward marks.
Another thing that strikes John as being unusual is the impressive size of all of the genitals that he had seen. Very few men, if any, from his time could equal them, and they put his own, in which he placed such immense pride, to shame. He had been so stunned in the shop that he had not put much thought in this direction and had assumed that the men had been specifically selected because of their generous endowment. John remembers the remarkable change in the physical appearance in the women that he has seen. If women have changed so dramatically then it stands to reason that men would also have undergone significant changes in physical development. The size of the genitals that he had observed might well be commonplace on men in this era.
A plausible explanation comes to John which makes him begin to feel slightly better. Perhaps this society does not place the same amount of reverence and respect toward the deceased as in his own time. They could also be much more tolerant of weird groups and just let them do their own thing as long as it did not interfere with others. That had to be the answer. He had, by chance, selected a shop whose clientele was some type of radical feminist group that was obsessed with degrading and humiliating the male sex. These women were allowed to achieve their bizarre goal by letting them purchase and utilize bodies of men that died from natural or accidental causes. There is one thing, however, about this theory that disturbs John. It is hard to imagine the male population, wherever they are, allowing a group of radical women to so blatantly ridicule their manhood in public regardless of how tolerant this society might try to be. John then remembers that he is over two hundred years in the future, and there is no reason to assume that men still thought or reacted in the same manner as that to which he is accustomed.
John feels satisfied that he has found a logical explanation to what he had witnessed even if it does border on the bizarre. One thing is for sure. This society is totally unlike any that he would ever have imagined, and it is going to take a major effort on his part to find a rational explanation as to how it had come to exist. Certainly, one of his primary tasks will be to locate the male population and try to gain some insight as to what they are like. They have to be somewhere, and he is confident that it will only be a matter of time before he finds them. He feels a renewed sense of determination and intrigue to find an answer to this baffling mystery.
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