Chapter Ninety-Four
Petunia stood watching the fiery cleaning lady spit her venomous tirade against all men. She stood as cold and rigid as a statue, whose paint had weathered away across millennia, but whose undeviating, frozen-souled beauty was eternal. She stood ignoring the only other auditor, the annoying, giggly Brotherus, who was rubbing himself in a corner. She disregarded the woman’s plebeian drone and concentrated on her words, her gesticulation, and her spirit.
“Woman and man were placed in timeless opposition! There can be no rapprochement! There can be no peace! A penis is either stuck where God put it, or cut off—there is no in between! The notion that a woman should be intimidated by, or attracted to, the penis is a ludicrous one! The innate disdain we all hold, man and woman alike, for the penis—this ridiculous, floppy, wrinkly, ugly, repugnant, uncultured eyesore—is evident! It has no dignity, and causes far more trouble than a simple instrument for the excretion of urine and dissemination of sperm calls for! Women would be better off without it, society would be better off without it, and, yes, even men would be better off without it! The testicles too—rip them out and stomp on them till they pop, I say! Till they pop! And when we excise these, so do we excise war, rape, capitalism, competition—in short, all evil! Then, and only then, can we evolve as a species!”
Annette’s face shone, celestially, from the lamplight in her sweat. Her hands sliced the air with moral authority. Underneath her dress, the insides of her thighs were soaked with the thick, gushing syrup of her excitement. This woman, who had never felt a kind hand on her, whose mental palette was too meagre to even imagine love—not for lack of intellect, but for lack of experience of its rays—preached with a fury to drive away her greatest, most secret fear: that she might go to the grave unavenged.
“Aw, go on! Yer just saying that ’cause you really wish you had a penis yourself!” This heckling came courtesy of Curtis/Thaddeus, who had somehow slipped in.
“If I did, I would cut it off!” Annette retorted.
“Aw, you wouldn’t have the balls!”
“Neither do you,” Petunia joined in, “and yet you’re living, splendid testimony of how a man can walk and talk and almost perform his job adequately whilst no longer possessing the phallus with which he was presumably born. Or tell me: did you lose it upon egress from your mother’s womb? In which case, perhaps your microscopic manhood floats still in the belly of your mater, tiny smile across its face for having been so luckily rid of an oaf like you.”
At this, Brotherus giggled, Curtis/Thaddeus scowled and fled, and Annette squinted her eyes at her, as if to say “thanks”. Now that she had her attention, Petunia summoned up the nerve to ask, “What about children?”
“What about children?” echoed Annette. “The earlier a boy’s penis is struck off, the better.”
“No, I mean—how would there be a new generation, if the prior one lacked all penises?”
“Let me ask you, madame: Are you really content for your children to grow up in a world like ours?”
Petunia blinked. “I don’t have children.”
“Well, let me tell you—and I’m convinced of this—we shall invent new ways of making children, new ways, which do not rely on the contagion of the male character! We shall make the world anew, a circumcised world, a castrated world, a penis-free world where children are free to run and play and reap wisdom and help the flowers grow and rivers run! Clean, and peaceful, and feminine, and pure! That’s the world I want my child to be born into! That’s the only world I’ll feel happy in myself!”
Petunia felt herself converted. She half-wished she’d been a man, so she could chop off her manhood this minute and hand it to Annette as a bloody, sacrificial offering—as one would have aeons ago, bearing the burnt flesh of some unlucky creature in a temple, in the time of stillness and silence and shadows which stretched across marble floors, to raise to a mute goddess upon a pedestal—and thus discover what she looked like with a smile.