The Tenth Testicle by S.A. Greene
When a third testicle dropped, he asked her to enlarge his trousers so he could house everything more comfortably and she said which century do you think we’re living in? He said sorry, but I can’t sew and you can. She reminded him of his outrage that time her male PhD supervisor asked her to sew a button onto his shirt before addressing a conference and he replied that it wasn’t the same thing at all. She did alter the trousers in the end because, well, she could sew and he couldn’t.
The fourth testicle dropped around the time the Domestic Obedience Law was passed. She was probably breaking this law when she said she wouldn’t alter his trousers this time. He didn’t press her because there was enough room for two on either side, but his heart was as heavy as his scrotum because he loved her, he really did, but her old-fashioned views on equality were beginning to affect his self-esteem.
In the year women were prohibited from working, reading and congregating, his fifth, sixth and seventh testicles materialised. He discovered it was happening to his friends too. They discussed it sometimes, quietly. They neither celebrated their new testicles nor wished they would go away. It was just how things were.
He joined the local Men’s Club when the eighth testicle dropped (shortly after women were forbidden access to medicine). One evening she asked him what they did there and he said he couldn’t tell her. He was no longer able to look her in the eye without feeling sad, so he kissed the tip of her glove and slunk out of the compound, reminding her—gently of course—that the kitchen floor needed mopping.
Around the time wombs became controlled by AI the ninth testicle sprouted and he stopped undressing in front of her. She had no interest in engaging with his new testicles or, for that matter, with his old ones, but she was curious to know what he was hiding so she walked in on him in the shower. His testicles had shrunk quite considerably. She wondered if it was better to have nine little ones or two medium-sized ones, but she didn’t ask. Although he was nothing like the Leaders of Men, he’d changed in many ways and she no longer spoke to him with candour or humour.
After the first Women’s Detention Facility was built on Mars, his tenth testicle burst into being. What a whopper! To accommodate it the testicles rearranged themselves into an inverted pyramid.
Occasionally, she recalled with longing her grandmother’s antique silver grape-scissors.
He spent much time exfoliating and moisturising his testicles as it was the fashion now for men to display them outside their trousers in the public realm. She couldn’t help mocking him for these vanities.
He was at the billiard-table when they came for her. He didn’t look up.
S.A. Greene’s short fiction has appeared in NFFR before, as well as in trampset, Mslexia, Blink-Ink, Fictive Dream, The Phare, Flash Flood, Maudlin House, and other lovely places. Her work features wombats, homesick capybaras, a musical vagina, duplicitous eels, a blue sponge, a foetus with dodgy political views, and—now—some testicles.
