© copyright Justin Cumberland, 2008

If I begin by saying that Daniel’s a nice kid, then you won’t misunderstand me. Many people would, I suppose, not knowing anything about castration, and not understanding how it isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a person, even if it’s done accidentally, as happened in my case.

Now, I still see Daniel round the school now and then. I don’t want you to get the idea that just because something happened between this boy and me – some misunderstanding – that I haven’t got the time for him that I might once have done. I can smile at him in the lunch-room, or in the corridors at school, and if I aren’t taking him for gym this year, then that’s just because I aren’t taking gym nowadays, and wouldn’t be taking the grade tens anyway, as they all know what’s happened to me, of course, though I don’t suppose anyone there at Rosemount knows that Daniel ate my testicles, or that I let him do this.

People wouldn’t think that was normal. They couldn’t. And it certainly wasn’t something that I wanted to happen, anyway. I was dazed, and in shock. I didn’t know what the boy meant by it.

Anyways, I saw Daniel again at school today, as I often do, and he smiled his big sheepish grin at me and said, ‘Hey, Coach Reiner, having the sausages today?’

We were in the lunchroom.

It got me to thinking how I should maybe tell this story to someone, as I aren’t too sure that Daniel really has ever told any of the other boys, even though I think he must have, cause they don’t ever seem to catch onto any of Daniel’s little jokes now that I think about it.

Anyway, I’ll tell it to you how it happened, and maybe you can write and tell me that I’ve been done over by this kid if you want to. I know that isn’t the case, and if you want to go writing emails to me saying that it is, then I’ll just have to tell you straight out that it isn’t.

The kid’s a little angel. He always has been.

Now I first saw him, coming into the school yard and holding onto the hand of his elder brother Kevin back in 05, and I suppose he was only eleven or so then, and still had those rosy cheeks that young kids have, flushed with blood and excitement. He might have had a smear of dirt on his face or something, but I don’t know – all I remember thinking was that the kid wasn’t dressed right – not decently to be coming into a school-yard, with big white nylon shorts on that you could have stuck a football into, along with each of his thighs.

Now in Australia, this sort of thing is okay. I’ve been to that country, and I’ve seen these kids getting around in these shorts that they wear for their football over there, and they call them football shorts, though they must have been Daniel’s father’s shorts, or some older person’s, though I never did hear of him having no father, or any older uncle or anything, other than his Kevin (his half-brother) and his mother.

The thing about the shorts, I suppose, and it was the thing that struck me, was that they weren’t only short, as those sort of shorts are, coming half-way up your thigh but they were white-white, with a red stripe on the side.

Now the site of a blond young boy with rosy lips, and short white-white, nylon shorts that are too big for him, with rosy cheeks, and a shy smile as he looks up at you as you’re standing on the steps at the front of the school, is all well and good. It’s the sort of thing you’re privileged to, as a teacher, and I hadn’t ever interfered with any kid, or had any sort of sex with anyone, you understand, and that maybe is the problem, though I’m digressing from the fact of what I’m trying to say about Daniel’s shorts, and that’s that they were see through, and that he had nothing – was stark naked underneath them.

In a morning sun on an eastern horizon, and with a young boy’s member partly erect and bobbling against the fabric, I got a rise in my own shorts, unlooked for, and one that caused me shame. I wasn’t about to start touching little kids, you see, not even if I hadn’t ever made it with any girl or boy myself and was a big strapping gym teacher.

***

Daniel was being enrolled. I came into the office, finding something to do with Janice, and fussing about her as she looked for the paperwork and so on, and asked the mother, rushing in lately, after parking her car, all about Daniel, and where he had lived, and how he had been in Australia, until a few weeks back, with that father, presumably.

I anyway sat there, and sat opposite the boy, who could keep perfectly still when he tried, and I saw up his shorts, his perfect boyhood, bobbling and twitching between his legs, and a strange happened then, because I came in my shorts.

I went to the washroom, and later, an hour or so later, I saw Daniel out on the gym bars in the playground, and he was hanging upside down and had his shirt off and the big shorts flopping all about him were showing off his hairless testicles, and his hooded little penis, flapping about, as though it was the most natural thing in the world for him to be revealing this when it wasn’t a school day proper, I suppose, on which some kid – some stupid kid – would have said something and made him cover himself.

And in my office then, as I had an office then (as coach), I pulled myself over the site of this little boy (and he was maybe only eleven) hanging upside-down on the bars and swinging around, and showing off his perfect little arse and his pretty flushed face, his red lips, his blond hair, and all the rest of it.

***

The time came, I suppose, when it became obvious to everyone at the school that there was something wrong with Daniel – not that there was anything physically wrong of course, though one might have suspected and attention deficit, or wilful disobedient disorder, or some such nonsense, or asperges, or some label, anyway, to describe the fact that the kid wasn’t just going to do what anyone told him, just because they told him, and particularly if they couldn’t hit him, which was a fact he made a big deal of, as though he was daring someone to do it, as though he was wanting it.

***

When he was thirteen, Daniel was in my class for gym, as he seemed to find a great deal of amusement in it, often laughing loudly, and pushing roughly with the other boys for a ball, or shouting in the pool if it was polo, and running, as usual, only partly dressed in the locker room, afterwards, flicking towels, and so on, and being generally, a very naughty boy, which he was obviously thought by everyone but me, and perhaps his mother Carol, who I had met on that first day of enrolment, and by 07, knew quite well.

***

And now there came this day, this day when I was castrated, and it was an accident, as you will see, and came about quite by chance.

If I have a paedophile tendency, and am given to fantasizing about little boys, then I suppose there might be some god in heaven, who devised a punishment for me, though I hadn’t ever touched any little boys, and never went to the trouble of looking at them either, overmuch, or as much as I could help it.

I hadn’t ever, as a teenager, had the type of interaction with other boys, which I now learn is quite normal. It somehow passed me by, perhaps because Aunt Em was such a very strict keeper of my times of comings ins and goings outs, or because I was shy, or because of a whole lot of other reasons I could think of, though I don’t think shyness is ever going to explain it as I was once the very type of boy that I came to so admire, and so very loud and vociferous myself, that if no one ever asked me to tug on their cock, it was probably because they were afraid of me.

‘I can’t get in there till seven, or seven-thirty,’ Constance said. And she had asked for me, and I answered the phone in the Principal’s office. Daniel was sitting outside.

Kevin, Daniel’s older brother, had had some type of accident, and she was at the hospital in Michigan, of all places, and I suppose she must have thought me some type of saren’t of a teacher, who could take her angelic son home, and not touch him, and keep him for her, if not till the morning, which I said was impossible, then till eight, or eight-thirty, by which time she could reasonably, she supposed, leave Kevin after the surgery, and return, coming to my house to collect Daniel, rather than leaving him with me for the night, as she had wished to do.

And so Kevin came with me in my Jeep, and he was, for the first time, and that very day, wearing those same football short I had seen him in two years or so beforehand, and again with nothing underneath them.

Things like this happen in life, and you can’t explain them. The kid wasn’t naughty. If he spent half his time in the principal’s office, it was because Dick didn’t know how to manage a kid like Daniel, while I, I told myself did.

‘You didn’t make gym today,’ I said, as I was clicking his belt into the clapper.

‘I was not allowed.’ This was a joke of Daniel’s – a way he had of speaking, of doing it precisely, as though he was robotic or something, and then smiling afterwards, loosening. ‘I got caught out in math, cause I hadn’t done my homework,’ he said.

***

Now I have this house. It’s a little way out of town, and a little way out in the woods, and there isn’t anyone there that’s likely to worry me, or likely to be able to say that I did or didn’t do something to some boy who I had quite rightfully in my care.

All the same, I had no thought of doing anything to Daniel, and if he ended up sucking my dick on that October night, then that wasn’t any of my own doing but his.

‘Do you want to play the guitar,’ I said. I couldn’t think of anything for him to do, and I have a routine, you see, on coming home, of chopping some wood, and lighting the range, as the hot water runs from that (even in Summer) – and then when I’ve chopped the wood, and lit the range, I work out, or I used to do, because I have a home gym set up in the only spare room.

It’s a wooden house, and surrounded by shadows, and it’s quite, and if I was out in the shed, and chopping the wood, when I heard the guitar string snap, then that was only natural.

It made me think of Chekhov, and the fact that I had an orchard, if not any cherries, or any hope of any blossoms.

***

‘I broke it,’ Daniel said, as I came back in.

I lifted my head, and said it didn’t matter.

He went back to strumming as I lit the range, and I went to do some weights.

***

‘What you doing?’ Daniel then said, standing at the door, and I suppose he was bored, as a kid would be, without a net connection, a game, a television, a remote to toy with, or even an ipod, though he might have put on a CD.

‘I’m doing a set,’ I said, gritting my teeth, and I was wondering (of course) what sort of effect the sight of my shirtless abs might be having on Daniel, who at thirteen (and he had demonstrated this at school) was certainly of an age to find another man attractive. ‘I’ll do one more.’

I did so, and coming out into the living room, I found Daniel with the broken guitar string, and it wound like a garrotte in his hand, and held around my cactus.

‘Do you think I can?’

I smiled a bit, I suppose – it was only a cactus. The kid pulled on the coil of the guitar string and chopped the cactus, sliced it through.

‘Ha!’ he said.

***

I got him some carrots, and some other fruits from the fridge, and told him how he had to clean up any mess he was going to make, and wasn’t supposed to throw this fruit away, if he was going to go slicing it up, but was meant to eat it.

He did so, I’m sure.

Now anyway, I went to have a shower, and I’m sorry if I’m making a song and dance about this whole thing but I want you to understand how it happened. It wasn’t like the kid came to my place on purpose, with the idea of a garrotte (which he had learned in history) and decided to slice of his gym teacher’s balls off. That isn’t how it happened. It’s my fault as much as his, and I’m stupid to have done what I did next, which was to let him take off his shirt, and stand there in my house in his runners and his gossamer shorts, with his bum crack showing, while I went off to have a shower and left the bathroom door open.

Daniel didn’t come in. He wouldn’t, of course. He’s not that sort of kid – not the sort that forces himself on another person.

I left the shower, and walked past him in the kitchen, where he was wiping the bench, his short barely hanging on his hips, and the hairlessness of his groin showing, the only thing holding them up, perhaps, being the protrusion of his dick.

I walked to my bedroom, and again didn’t close the door, and I was drying my head, when I pulled the towel down and got a shock to see Daniel standing there in front of me, and looking at my dick.

‘That’s pretty big, Reiner,’ he said. ‘That’s a big one.’

It was, and it was getting bigger. The kid was covered in sweat (it was a hot October), and he had (I think it was the juice of an orange) running down his hairless chest, like nectar.

‘You see mine,’ he said, pulling his shorts open.

I looked down and saw his hairless penis, while he smiled. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘close your eyes.’

He was holding something behind is back with his other hand, and he smiled up at me sheepishly – ‘close them!’ he said.

I closed them.

Now it wasn’t that I felt or thought. I wouldn’t have let him. There’s no way I connected the idea of the guitar string, and of the garrotted fruit, with the touch of his hands round my balls.

‘Ready?’ he said, and he said it so suddenly, and with a such a childish glee, that it made me wonder for a moment, if something wasn’t wrong. Ready for what, I suppose I must have thought, though I looked down just as I thought this, if I thought it at all, and I saw him with everything set up, with the fine metal string looped around my sack, and with his two fists either side of it and ready (indeed, perhaps, starting) to pull.

I think, somehow – indeed I’m sure I did – I put my hands forward and grabbed his hips. It was the first time I had ever touched him, and at the same time, he was pulling with all his might, as hard and fast as a clever and strong thirteen-year-old was able, and I was looking down, and I watched it happen.

The wire twanged. There was no cherry orchard. He cut the insides of his fingers, though I didn’t realise this until later. There was a slow falling below me, a sliding between my thighs – my scrotum, and its weighty balls, of which I had always been rather proud. They plopped between my feet, and there was a modicum of blood. I gripped Daniel’s hips, and felt myself falter at the surprise of it.

There wasn’t any pain.

What had he done? – I suppose if I was capable of forming words, I might have said that – to myself, you understand, in my head. As it was, I could only look from the mess between my feet, to the boy’s face, who looked up suddenly, in excitement, and said,

‘Oh fuck, it worked. It really fucking worked!’

He was excited, I suppose, that he had accomplished something, but I fell backwards, and because I was gripping his hips, I pulled him with me, so that he was on top of me as I landed on the ground. Our faces were together. He kissed me on the lips; and I felt him move his hips over, pressing down and moving his body over me, though I understood, only later, when he had helped me up, that he had come in his excitement, and stained his shorts.

***

‘Oh, man. Oh, wow. Oh fucking, wow! I fucking nutted you, Reiner! I FUCKING NUTTED MY GYM TEACHER!’ he suddenly screamed to the birds beyond the window. ‘That felt so fucking good,’ he might have muttered to himself, as he was starting to help me up, and touching his penis at the same, adjusting it in his shorts, and wiping the jism on his thigh, and some of it from my stomach, I believe.

***

He helped me onto the bed. And then got on top of me – and it was then, if not before, that everything took on the appearance of a dream. I might have been asleep. I might have been awake.

Perhaps I was.

Perhaps I wasn’t.

***

‘I could sew it up for you if you like.’

***

‘You don’t want em put back on there, do you Reiner?’

***

Was this Daniel, or was it some other person, some demon. I’ll never know, though there was someone on top of me, and kissing me about the head, and brushing my hair back away from my face as I turned my head from side to side.

‘You don’t want them, do you, Sir?’

Sir? Was he calling me Sir? As though he was some boy from a nineteen-fifties sitcom in some back woods, where a son might call a father Sir.

He was ever polite.

‘Can I eat your balls, Sir?’

I tossed my head to and fro.

‘Can I eat your balls, Sir? You said everything had to be swallowed that had got cut up, and I’ve cut them up, haven’t I? I’ve cut up you balls, Sir?’

Had he had cut them up, or had he cut them off. He had cut them off, and they were still onto the ground, and it was now, I think, that the pain started to set in.

My face spasmed. I winced perhaps.

‘I’ll get you some Tylenol.’

And he got not only this, but a small wash-cloth, and he pressed this between my legs – and the bottle of Tylenol wasn’t Tylenol as I well knew, but mostly, codeine, and he gave me seventeen, I think, or some number that rhymed, in a spell he was weaving me into time.

‘Have you ever listened to eminem properly, Sir? Do you know what it’s about? Do you know how I can spell you, and make this never come about?

What?

I was shaking my head from side to side and pressing my thighs together, and remembering everything, which is where he tells me, I went wrong, for he might have cut off my balls, Daniel, and eaten them, and done all manner of else the other things he did to me that night, as the darkness falls, and I would never have known, if I wasn’t so strong willed and hadn’t been weaving my way into his seeming so that I would know, and hold on, not wanting a dream, but reality.