Anorgasmia

Ministry of Health and Economic Affairs, the glossy white letters lick my eyes with their slithering tongues. A sanitised stench pricks my nose as I enter.

“How can I help you, Miss?” the receptionist rattles.

I poke him to assess if he’s a cyborg. “I’m here to make a complaint.”

“What department?”

“Reproduction.”

The twitch of his upper lip leaves me feeling pitiful. With a skeletal hand, he directs me to the elevator.  

The doors glide open on the first floor and a doctor welcomes me with a dry smile. I register the speculum around his neck as I utter my outrage at the ministry’s Resolution for Reproduction. Can I be expected to fall pregnant without pleasure, I ask, and he gestures at my groin. As usual, I take off my clothes at request and lie down on the couch. He performs an examination of my air cell and chalazae, rolls me through an anamnesis.

“No physical faults,” he asserts, “I diagnose anorgasmia — due to psychological factors.”

I’m handed a bouquet of bruises: past sexual or emotional abuse, poor body image, sexual guilt and shame, cultural or religious beliefs, anxiety, depression.

I scramble back into my shell and spot copper rage in my knickers. I’m not ill, just listless.

“Excuse me, but I am not here to be blamed. Your demeanour is a disgrace, I demand to speak to the minister.”

“Very well,” the doctor’s smile cracks his lips open like desert sand.

The elevator delivers me to the top floor. I exit and am faced with a glaring skyline behind the towering glass wall. I look down and realise that even the tiles are see-through. Dizzied, I feel like sinking into the infinite shelves of files on the floor underneath. Further down, two women are spreading their legs, and hundreds of cyborgs are crammed in square boxes all over the building, typing and dictating into headsets.

“Miss Betty Mason.” A honeyed voice cradles me in security; a smouldering smell wraps me up. A tall and lean figure emerges from a pear-shaped armchair lined with red velvet. First all I see is grey: suit, hair, skin. Only the eyes are of such a light blue that I’m dazzled.

The minister puts his scoops on me. Undresses me. Checks my body the way I do in front of the mirror. The egg cosy around my ribs is two thumbs wide. The omelettes sticking to my hips suck at his fingertips. His hand slaps the albumen of my inner thigh and causes an eggquake of 6.9. My buttocks sit in his palms like ostrich ova. He feels my yolk with his cinder-finger.

I moan: “I wish I was slimmer.”

“Flawless lubrication,” he mumbles and makes a note, “perfectly marketable.”

It occurs to me that slimmer sounds like schlimmer.

The sex is perfunctory. He slides in and out of me with ease and leaves a trail of ashen flakes on my mons pubis.

After, he membranes me in a tight grey suit which fits like a second shell. I’m thinner and more erect. My skin prickles as I move my legs. I feel fixed and feverish.

“How did you know my size?” I ask before I’m sucked into the elevator.

He chuckles. “I knew you would come.”

My cheeks burn. Between my legs a quivering begins. The doors fold and I know he has won.  

♡

November 21, 2024.