I passed the two missionaries on my way home. They were easy to identify: Well groomed youths nicely dressed in suits and with freshly shined shoes. The type of boys that any grandmother would be proud to call her own. They were riding ten-speeds and each wore a small backpack that contained the missals they were distributing. Later, I watched from my living room as they parked their bikes and started down the street, one on each side, on a mission to spread the Good Word and to advance themselves within the hierarchy of their church. I couldn’t help but notice how different they were from the typical saggy-panted, tattooed, pierced, backward hat wearing, trash talking youths their age and I wondered what kind of hold their church had on them to compel them to demean themselves this way in front of their peers.

The boy coming up my walk looked like he was right out of high school. He was probably eighteen years old and was most likely doing his missionary work before setting out for college. He was a tall and good-looking youth with a clear complexion not yet marred by the daily scraping of a razor. I was waiting at the door and as soon as the bell sounded I jerked the door open. “High. I’m Bob,” I said, extending my hand before he could start in on his spiel.

“Uh, high,” he replied, caught off guard, “I’m, uh, Chris.” He finally recovered and remembered that he was a gentleman, and that gentlemen shook hands when greeting each other. “Pleased to meet you, sir.”

I grabbed his hand and gave him a full, one hundred percent dose of The Touch. For those of you who aren’t familiar with The Touch, it is something that I developed over the last few years. All I have to do is touch a guy and he starts to see things my way. A slight brush from my fingers sways his opinion, and a firm grasp from my hand, such as I’d just administered to the missionary, will make him do anything I tell him, and will even let him inflict his will on others for a short time and to a limited extent. I’m still perfecting The Touch and eventually I hope to reach a point where my commands can become silent and subliminal, but for now I have to speak to be obeyed. “Go get your partner,” I told the boy. “Touch him anywhere first, then ask him to follow you. Put your bikes in my garage, close the door, and come on into the house. I’ll be waiting in the back bedroom.” He nodded his assent and hurried off down the street while I spread an old sleeping bag on the bed and got a few old towels just in case things got too sloppy.

Naked, Chris looked more like a sixteen-year-old boy than an eighteen-year-old adult. Downy hair covered his thighs and calves, but his chest was bare with only the hunt of a treasure trail adorning his belly. A fat, closely circumcised dick resided over smallish, low hanging testicles. His partner, Brian, was the polar opposite. He was shorter and huskier than Chris and much hairier. He obviously shaved every day and his crotch, thighs and belly were covered with a mat of coarse dark curls, more of which were scattered across his chest. His penis was thinner and shorter than Chris’s, but his balls were much bigger. Neither had tattoos or piercings. Anywhere.

I gently rolled each boy’s testicles around between my fingers, gauging their size and firmness. “Are you chaste?” I asked, although I already knew the answer. Their religion requires all males to be chaste. Married men must remain true to their wives and unmarried men must not engage in premarital sex. Additionally, masturbation is forbidden. Masturbation is accompanied by impure thoughts, which leads to all sorts of evil doings and generally increases the level of horniness. Teenagers thinking about sex? Heaven forbid. No injunction short of restraint will stop young boys from playing with themselves, but by the time they get to be eighteen they’re expected to be able to suppress unhealthy thoughts and stay focused.

“Uh, no sir,” Brian said, blushing. He probably lies to his superiors when asked the same question, but The Touch compels truth. Besides that, I know a few things about human anatomy. Celibate males’ balls usually shrink, provided, of course, that they are not over stimulated to the point where the blue ball syndrome sets in. Brian’s nuts were large and soft, indicating that he was having sex or jacking off regularly.

“Girlfriend?” I asked.

“No sir. Uh, by myself.” The poor guy was so repressed that he couldn’t even bring himself to say ‘Jerking Off.’

“How about you Chris, are you chaste?” He squirmed uncomfortably as I fingered his balls.

“Yes sir.” I believed him. His balls were hard and shrunken, indicating no recent sexual activity, a situation that will soon change. The sight of my and his partner’s naked bodies was apparent cause for celebration, and he was rapidly becoming erect, as was I. What could possibly be better than having a virile virgin disease free boy to play with for a couple of hours? Two of them. Most guys never even get one, and here in front of me naked was a twofer.

They left two hours later, squirming uncomfortably on the hard seats of their bicycles. I had Touched them deeply but the effects would wear off in an hour and they’d have no recollection of where they’d been or exactly what they had been doing. The pleasant fullness that they feel in their balls and the rank taste in their mouths, as well as the sore slickness of their assholes may give them some clue, but they probably won’t be sure until they see the traces of shit and blood on their dicks and also discover that they’re wearing each other’s shorts. I wished them no permanent harm; I only wanted them to peddle their message in some other neighborhood.

The local newspaper reports mostly on the immediate community and the university, so the news was several weeks old when I first heard about two young men from the other side of the State who had been assaulted. The small article didn’t go into the extent of their injuries, but claimed that the young men’s’ church had been implicated in the attack. The church is powerful in this State and to a certain extent is a law unto itself, but this attack couldn’t be swept under the rug. Follow up news stories upgraded the ‘assault’ to ‘mutilation’, and finally ‘genital mutilation’.

I still didn’t pay a lot of attention to what was a rather minor news story until the night I turned on the late TV news and saw Chris’s familiar face. He was being interviewed by a network muckraker obsessed with exposing the inner workings of the church. Chris hesitantly told the story about how he and a fellow missionary had confessed to being unchaste to the maximum degree, and about how the church had banished both of them to locations far apart. They had apparently felt a need for each other that the church couldn’t satisfy and had hooked back up and subsequently told the old boys in the church to pound sand and had then started openly cohabitating with each other.

They had been happily going at it one evening when a Dodge extended van, just like many that the church owned, pulled up outside their apartment. Eight hooded men emerged, broke down their door, overpowered them, and then banded and slit open their scrotums and left with their jewels. Even though their scriptures advocated castration for certain cases of sexual deviancy, the church denied any involvement in their former missionaries’ emasculation.

“I intend to leave no stone unturned in the search for the person or persons responsible for this outrage,” the muckraker stated before signing off. I went to bed right after that and tossed and turned all night, afraid of going to sleep and wishing like Hell that I’d never acquired The Touch.