A Second Chance

Full dick or get the fuck out.

He stared at the screen and absorbed Rita’s message, the acknowledgment of his cop-out deflating Roger’s confidence faster than the flushed, un-full dick that was still drooped sadly across his knuckles like an ulcer-prone salamander.

Drawing the blue alien thing/palm tree over it in the photo he’d sent her had been a stupid gamble, stupid enough for her to forgo an acronym and use proper punctuation in her response. He’d remembered her telling him about how she, before sending a pic, would sometimes doodle Pac-Man ghosts skirting across her cleavage, how she and her friends would turn their nipples into cute rabbit noses or penguin eyes or a “titmouse,” her favorite pun.

When he couldn’t find adequately flattering lighting in his bedroom or seated on the toilet, when he’d only managed to achieve the thin-blooded hard-on of a gun-shy high schooler, when he’d found it impossible, given the length of his arm, to get a proper dick selfie angle that wasn’t an anatomy-book close-up but didn’t provide too much unnecessary perspective, he’d decided to compromise. Life was compromise. A breast partially obscured by a stick-figure rendition of a woodland creature was still a breast. He could live with that.

He’d positioned himself at his computer desk, scrolled through a few of Rita’s newer college-age Facebook photos, worked himself to a state of slightly less embarrassing semi-stiffness, gripped the base, extended his phone-wielding arm and snapped. The image had been fuzzy, the lack of contrast between skin and white tee making for an indefinite, less than enthusiastic representation of an appendage that had been deemed above average – either tacitly or explicitly – by roughly half of those who’d seen it in its engorged majesty.

He’d used the app’s drawing tool to make a cobalt blue outline around the vital area, liberally expanding its parameters, then shading it in. He’d added green palm leaves or antennae on top of the head, and two eyes or coconuts about halfway down the shaft. Not bad, he’d thought. Whimsical even.

But there would be no reciprocation.

Doesn’t count since I can’t even see it.

are you racist against blue dicks?

No. a little. come on roger. Full dick or get the fuck out.

fine, fine.

Roger listened for noises beyond his locked door, hoping one of his roommates might need to borrow his laundry detergent or ask why the bottle of Lubriderm was missing from the bathroom. He glanced out his curtain-less window to see if any of the ambiguously Asian? guys doing construction on the (much shorter) adjacent building were having one of their frequent smoke breaks-slash-gawking sessions but the rooftop was empty except for a pair of plastic bags doing battle in the breeze. He remembered a movie from a while back where a weird dude filmed a similar scene and later told his equally weird girlfriend that it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever witnessed. To Roger, the twirling sacks reminded him of a vague sadness he couldn’t quite place, of hiding from something under the guise of total freedom.

More importantly, he had no excuses for Rita, whose ubiquitous emoticons had gone from tongue-flicking and joyous to now something that looked like a crying/barfing zombie.

Roger took a breath, removed his boxers for a second time.