Well, I Suppose—If You Look At It That Way

His calves are hairy, scabbed and flaking. His hocks hobbled and hamstrung. His thighs are smooth and as wan as albino anacondas. His knees are the shape and size of cricket balls. He is in the process of sliding his hands along his legs. Black cotton, a darker shade than the host material, bunches the toes and heels of his darned ankle socks. His belly, although not large, protrudes over his white Y-fronts about an inch or so. It pouts. It is the upper lip of a monstrous fish or sea mammal. His bellybutton is a staring eye and his wispy breasts like blind baby birds. His neck is taut with sinew; the sinews themselves seem to point almost futuristically toward the central vortex of an Adam’s apple the size of an orange. Of his face, she can only see the chin, grizzled and haphazardly shaven. She looks at her watch, shakes her head. She punches the minimize box and scans the thumbnails. Click-click. This looks interesting, she thinks. My god! He is huge. Gross. Like a stove with air holes. She chooses another. Click-click. He bends over a chair. The muscles of his legs are bulbous tubers—fibrous knots. His arse spread wide by disembodied hands. It is as if he were playing an ancient musical instrument in a preternatural rite. His elbows jut out spastically—the wings of a disabled pterodactyl. His testicles bulge from between his thighs—leprous pink toads, the eggs of some Martian deity, scrofulous fruit. His anus sucks in the light surrounding it and contains comets, planets, suns and galaxies. His anus is an inverted sea urchin that rules the universe. She is about to slip her hand into her panties when she spots a small cluster of pimples—Pleiades—on the cusp of his right buttock. She changes her mind and looks for another. Click-click. She has been surfing the Internet for three hours now. She has checked her email, looked at images of George Clooney, checked her eBay bids. Click-click. She opens another image at random. Not bad. The man is in his mid-twenties she would say. He is not smiling. That’s good. She doesn’t like it when they smile. He looks inexperienced. He looks good. He is dressed in work boots and denim shorts. Picture by picture she moves but in a different way than she would read words on a page; she finds it easier to look at the pictures boustrophedonly, from left to right and then from right to left. The man poses. The pose is almost classical. Roman or Greek. He is stretching up with his left arm and gripping his cock with his right hand. He is sideways on. His denim shorts cradle his calves; his calves strain to hold them there. His work boots add a touch of menace, danger, but also of know-how, can-do. His arse glistens. A smear of oil like a god’s eyelash tickles his right buttock. He stares into the distance, almost blasé, almost neglecting her. She strokes the canopy of her pubic hair but the rush she first felt has subsided. Slipping her index finger inside she realizes she is moist but the initial excitement is gone and the man looks too smug. She feels a slight repulsion and clicks off the image. Click-click. She has typed in “men porn” and spent the last two-and-a-half hours on the website “dickhunter,” which holds thousands of images, both soft and hard, of naked men. She has chosen the category “mature,” but the selection is of all types: “mature” and “young” seemingly relative terms in the porn thesaurus. She prefers amateurs to the plastic augmentation of real male porn stars. Click-click. She should have called her mother by now. She should have met friends for lunch. She sits hunched in her leather director’s chair, dressed only in her black sheer Perla panties, one hand maneuvering her mouse, the other clicking her clitoris. Click-click. She decides to go for it. This one is rather skinny, rather young. Maybe too young, she thinks. His name is Ivan and she wonders if he is Russian or Ukrainian. His body is like that of a dancer or a swimmer. Muscled, but not overly. Wiry but strong. He is lying on a bed. The bed is covered with gray sheets, disheveled but knowingly so, and the grayness of the sheets is from age and murky water rather than the gray of silver silk or satin badly lit. Click-click. She should have had a bath by now. Earlier, having typed in “muscles,” hooked for a time by the anatomical drawings the search engine uncovered, she was about to exit but then typed in “sexy men” and stared at more thumbnails and then checked a train journey on The Man in Seat 61 website. Click-click. She now moves the mouse to her left hand and feels more at ease using her right hand—her thumb on her clitoris, her index and middle finger deep within her muscular moistness. Click-click. Next to the crumpled bed is a small table and on it is an old Bakelite telephone that serves little use except to judge the size of the young man’s penis. She is not sure that it isn’t all about scale. Maybe she is wrong. Maybe he is a gymnast rather than a dancer or swimmer and his body is small in relation to the size of his cock. His cock is only half erect but looks huge in his hands. His fingernails are large and spade-shaped—grimy plectrums. His cock looks like the platen of a typewriter, rolled and malleable. His balls are correspondingly sized—two obese pink bees filled with pale nectar. He stares into the camera but looks slightly drugged or slightly stupid. Or both. After all this time of imagining, she imagines nothing; it isn’t him she wants. She groans. It isn’t him she wants at all. She moans. Click-click. It’s you.