Literary Fiction, @60K
In a mid-life crisis, a gay artist’s health concerns provoke fears of failure as he battles to determine his life’s worth.
“Can I move my junk?” I asked, nodding toward my barely paper-covered crotch.
“Your junk?” She laughed and smiled. “Sure.” She pressed a button, and the metal plank where I was prone rose.
I returned the smile, nervously, reaching under the paper to lift and separate my junk away from the dark, unkempt nether region rebelling against me and the cause of my precarious planked position. Later, I realized it didn’t really matter. The radiation spray was gonna get everything within a certain spread. That spread included my manhood. My junk.
I didn’t normally refer to it as my junk, but I felt hipper using the term. Wasn’t that what the kids called male genitalia nowadays? It doesn’t make sense to me, since my manhood is my prized possession. And to have it under the gun – a huge, rotating arm of a gun shooting invisible bullets of radiation – doesn’t endear the term to me.
Junk adjusted and position set, the technician scurried from the room to hide behind the leaded safety walls. Red lights blinked. The colossus swung to life, rotating counterclockwise until the head stopped just beyond my peripheral vision. I felt its arm there, I just couldn’t see it.
I counted every setting. Every click. Every whirl of the machine. Nine total stops. Two whirls at each stop.