Detachable

I feel like I should preface this with an excuse, except that I don't really have one. Apparently this is where my brain goes when I'm supposed to be thinking about how the Army Corps of Engineers has screwed up the environment. Also, it's been a really long time since I've written dialogue, so I've probably messed up the formatting. If you see something, say something!

Detachable


“It’s just that, well, I woke up and couldn’t find my penis,” Ben says and looks expectantly at Claire.

“Hmm.” She says and doesn’t bother looking up from the newspaper.

“No, really. I mean, it’s not, like, a huge deal. I’m sure it will turn up and all, but I can’t help missing the little guy.”

“I always find people anthropomorphizing portions of their bodies to be really creepy.” She flips to the funnies and says “mentally distancing yourself from your reproductive organs can’t be healthy. It’s like you’re giving up control of them, basically saying: this isn’t really part of my body and so in a way I’m not really responsible for what it makes me do. Creepy.”

“Yeah, well, I always find detachable body parts really creepy, but apparently I have one. So, there you go, sometimes you just have to deal.” Ben shifts from one foot to the other, then back again. “So you really haven’t, like, seen it or anything?”

Claire looks at where Ben is standing in the doorway, one large hand cupped protectively around his groin, eyes wide and worried. She looks back down at the paper, where Brenda Starr has managed to get thrown from a moving vehicle and come out of it with her manicure miraculously unharmed. She considers just ignoring Ben until he goes away because, honestly, it’s not like she has a vested interest in the whereabouts of his dick, and it is eight o’clock in the morning. Ben makes a little whining sound in the back of his throat, the same sound he made when Denny died on Gray’s, and Claire thinks shit before tossing down the paper.

“Jesus Christ. Ben, are you serious?”

“Yes,” he hisses, “what? Don’t believe me? Want to see it?”

“Yes! No! What the Fuck!” She takes a moment to breathe, eyes closed, count of seven in, hold for three, count of seven out. When she opens her eyes Ben is still in the doorway, hand still at his crotch like he thinks something else is going to walk away. For a hysterical moment she considers asking him if he still has his balls or if the whole package is gone, but that probably wouldn’t help matters much. She takes a moment to eye his crotch, wonders how he came unstuck, wonders if she really wants to know, before she notices the tightness of the muscles in his arm and the way his eyes are still a little too wide. Her examining his naughty bits (or lack thereof) is probably more trauma than he needs right now.

“No. No I don’t want to see it,” she says and watches him relax again.

“So, you’re gonna, like, help me look for it, right?”

“And risk willingly catching a glimpse of your junk?”

“Or you could not, and deal with a perpetually sexually frustrated me.”

“I could move out.”

“I lost my penis.”

“We don’t know that.”

“What!?”

“Maybe it left you. Maybe you weren’t showing it enough love and so it went to find someone who would fulfill its needs. Maybe it decided to try its luck as a traveling dildo, spreading joy and orgasms and STDs the world over. Maybe you listened to Don Quixote one too many times and it became inspired and is even now wandering the big wide world in search of a damsel in distress to save.”

“What the fuck!” Ben flails expansively. “Maybe you are fucking insane and it just fell off and rolled under the bed or some shit like that. Also, did you just call me diseased?”

Claire grins at him and he plants both fists on his hips and frowns.

“Yes, I do feel better. Now get off your ass and help me look.”

“Fine. You start in your room and I’ll start in the kitchen.”

“I seriously doubt that you’ll find it in the kitchen.”

“That’s kind of the point.”

She’s moved from hesitantly peering behind the good china to gingerly poking under the couch cushions when Ben yells from his room that he’s found it. There are another five minutes of panic while Ben flails around trying to put it back on, and then a further ten minutes of contemplative silence while he figures out how to take it off again. Claire wants to know why the fuck he wants to know that, when it's what caused the trouble to begin with. Ben thinks it would probably be a good trick for in the, you know, bedroom. Claire calls him a sick and twisted fuck.

Turns out Ben is right.