It's Gone

Steve Orlansky, a successful middle-aged professional bachelor,  
picks up a charming and attractive woman named Sally Nordstrom at 
the airport. She has come to town to cut his penis off. 

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It’s Gone

by N. O. Johnson

	He spotted her as she was picking up her luggage at the 
carousels. She had honey-colored hair with bangs in the front and 
two braids that hung down below her breasts. Clad in tan slacks and 
a matching turtleneck sweater, Sally Nordstrom picked up a me-dium-
sized suitcase as it rolled past. Her carry-on bag was a 
traditional black doctor’s bag. Steve Orlansky eagerly stepped 
forward to help her. "Ms. Nordstrom?"
	"Are you Steve?" She had a nice smile, and the beginnings 
of smile lines on her face. Noticing just a hint of gray in her 
hair, he estimated her age as just shy of forty. 
	"Yes, I am. I’ll take the suitcase, and we’ll go to my 
car." 
	"Super." Taking the suitcase, he escorted her through 
Memphis International Air-port and out to one of the parking lots. 
It was a breezy but sunny spring day. Steve was glad this day had 
finally come. His eagerness reminded him, in a weird way, of the 
excite-ment he felt in going off to college for the first time, 
more than three decades ago.
	As they got into his forest green Toyota Tercel, she said, 
"You know, because of the kind of business I’m in, that you’ve got 
to pay me in cash." Her voice was low but feminine. Whose did it 
remind him of? Marlena Dietrich? Just a tad too low. More like 
Suzanne Plachette.
	"Cash is not a problem." He dug for his wallet, and counted 
out her fee. "Three hundred and twenty-five, right?"
	"Right." He handed her the money. 
"Super." 
He started the car and began maneuvering through the lot. 
	"Seventy-five for the hotel," Sally calculated, "one 
hundred seventy for the air fare, and one hundred for the main 
event." She turned to him with a knowing wink. "Also, I get to take 
the specimen with me."
	"What do you do with them?"
	"I burn them before my altar, grind up the ashes to a fine 
powder, and use them in my magic workings. You’d be amazed what a 
white witch can do with penis meat."
	Steve snickered. "I’ll bet you can make something better 
than Viagra out of them."
	"As a matter of fact, yes, you can." Her eyes brightened 
up. He noticed a hint of green in them when the light caught them 
just right. "I have customers that swear by my anti-impotence 
potion. It uses the Principle of Similarity. To make the penis more 
potent, the patient drinks a penis.."
	He steered them out onto Interstate 240 eastbound. Trees, 
warehouses, apart-ments, billboards advertising Graceland and used 
car dealership whizzed past them. "How many penises have you 
removed?"
	"One hundred forty-one."
	He whistled. "That’s more than fourteen thousand dollars, 
not counting the travel expenses."
	"It’s really booming. I had no idea there were so many guys 
that wanted their pe-nises taken off.." 
	"What about balls?"
	"I don’t castrate, but about half of my customers have 
already lost their testicles. Some of the others want to be 
castrated too, after the penectomy, which is the opposite of the 
usual way. About a third are like you. They want to keep their 
testicles, but lose the penis." She looked at him closely. "I like 
to know a few things about my cus-tomers. Are you gay or straight?"
	"Straight by inclination, but I’ve been practically 
celibate for seventeen years."
	"Most of my customers are into some kind of submissive 
scene. Usually they’re gay, but sometimes they serve a dominant 
female."
	"I agree with H. L. Mencken on that. He said, ‘I oppose 
slavery because I dislike slaves.’"
	Sally giggled charmingly. "So you’re not a sub. Are you in 
any kind of relation-ship?"
	"No, I’ve been a bachelor all my life. I have a good 
career. I got a lot of sex in the Seventies, pre-AIDS, you know, 
but I long ago learned to live without sexual inter-course."
	She nodded. "Some of my customers are like you, middle-aged 
guys who just don’t need their male members any more. Last week I 
did one while his wife watched. She was all for it. Once I was 
finished, they settled down with a cooler of beer and watched a 
basketball game." Sally giggled again. "I’ve never been in Memphis 
before, but being here reminds me. I removed the penis of an Elvis 
impersonator last year."
	Steve laughed aloud. "Yeah, that’s really funny. The 
Fifties’ classic symbol of male sexuality, with no penis!" He 
guided the car onto the Mount Moriah exit.
	"I like to do my operations in the patient’s home, with all 
his familiar surroundings. That got kind of weird once. When we got 
there, there were all his friends, decked out in bondage and 
submission gear. They wanted to make a big scene of it. I had never 
done a job before such a big audience, but I went along with them, 
except I refused to wear any of their stuff. My patient offered me 
offered me fifty dollars to do it naked. I turned that down too. In 
my own way, I’m a professional, not a sex entertainer."
	They made their way past car dealerships, small office 
parks, fast food places, and the Platinum Plus strip joint, where 
Steve had sometimes been a customer. He reflected on the irony of 
it. Those lap-dancing naked girls had tried so hard to please his 
penis, but it would be gone in less than an hour. As if taking a 
psychic hint from this, Sally asked, "How long have you wanted to 
lose your penis?"
	"Only about a year, actually, but I’ve never liked it. In 
my twenties and thirties, I used to read everything about sex 
change operations I could get my hands on. The ac-counts of the 
operations made my heart race."
	"You’re obviously NOT a transsexual," she said, firmly 
shaking her head.
	"No, but the idea of penises being cut off turned me on. In 
my forties, I discovered a lot of descriptions of castration and 
penectomy on the Internet, and those made my heart race too. In 
fact, right now I feel the sort of eagerness most guys feel when 
they’re taking a woman home to go to bed with her."
	He glanced sideways and saw her nicest smile again, as she 
said, "You’re definitely fixated." 
	"Well, you know, if I haven’t learned to like my penis in 
fifty years, I probably never will."
They turned into the entrance of Steve’s apartment complex, which 
was set off by brightly-colored banners advertising move-in 
specials. "Well, Steve, it will be gone in about thirty minutes.."
	"Good." He licked his lips.
	"It’s permanent. Once it’s gone, you’ll never see it again."
	"Not a problem." Steve parked the car behind his apartment 
building. 
She leaned toward him and whispered, "Let’s not say another word 
about it until we’re inside your place. Will there by anybody else 
there?"
"No. Will I be well enough to drive you back, or will you need to 
call a taxi later?"
"It’ll depend on how you feel. If you’re not up to it, I can get a 
taxi to my hotel."
He walked her up to his second-floor apartment, with one hand on 
her suitcase and the other placed gently on her waist, steering her 
along like a date. Once they were inside, Sally gazed around the 
living room and said, "Nice place you got here."
"Yes, I have everything I want in life, except one thing."
She giggled again. "Or one thing too many." He put her suitcase on 
the sofa. "Steve, I think we’d better do this in the bathroom. We 
don’t want bloodstains on the car-peting."
"Good idea."
She looked at him seriously with her large green-brown eyes. "Ready 
to do this?"
"Let’s roll."
"Take off your pants and underwear and meet me in the bathroom." As 
he walked to his bedroom, Steve could feel his heartbeat 
quickening. After a moment’s impatient fumbling with the laces, he 
took off his shoes, socks, pants and underwear. Then he wor-ried 
about getting blood on his shirt, so he removed the rest of his 
clothes. As per her in-structions, he had already shaved his pubic 
hair this morning, so no hairs would get in the wound. In the 
bathroom, he found her doctor’s bag sitting by the sink. Sally was 
in the living room getting something out of the suitcase.
She didn’t bat an eye when she came into the bathroom and saw him 
naked. She was wearing surgical scrubs and latex gloves, and 
carrying a cheap red plastic bowl. 
"Because of my quick-and-dirty technique, Steve, there will be a 
stump. How long do you want yours to be?"
"An inch."
She nodded. "So you can pee standing up." 
"Right."
"That’s important to many of my patients, but not all. Now stand on 
your knees," she instructed. He did so. "Knees further apart." He 
moved them. She put the bowl be-tween the knees, right below his 
doomed penis. "This is to catch the blood."
Sally produced a syringe and drew a dose into it from a bottle. All 
so like a doctor, he thought, though he knew she was a former ER 
nurse who now worked for a medical supply company. "This is 
Lidocaine. It’s a local anesthetic. In the last minutes of its 
life, your penis will be numb."
He chuckled easily. "That’s all to the good." He felt the needle 
pricking his mem-ber. Within a minute, he had lost all feeling in 
it.
She began catheterizing his penis. Instinctively, he winced.
"It looks painful," she smiled, "but you won’t feel anything until 
it gets up inside you." She carefully poked the catheter deeper and 
deeper inside him. Sure enough, he felt a twinge of pain, but only 
when it got to the very core of the penis. "You’ll see some urine 
draining out of you every couple of minutes," she said, motioning 
to the plastic urine bot-tle on the floor. "You’ll need the 
catheter to keep your urethra open for three days."
"Will I have to carry a bottle around?"
"No, I’ll put a valve on the end later."
She knelt and tied off the base of his penis with a tourniquet. He 
felt some tight-ness but no real pain. "I never try to make a stump 
shorter than half an inch," she ex-plained. "If I did, this 
tourniquet would come off, and massive hemorrhaging would start." 
She looked up at him. "There will be only a little bit of blood in 
your penis."
 Sally’s next move surprised him. Using a plastic ruler, the kind 
elementary school kids use, she measured off one inch from the base 
of the penis. Then she made a tiny dot on the top of the shaft with 
a felt marking pen. Producing a scalpel from a pocket of her 
surgical scrubs, she held the tip of his penis in one hand and 
poised over it with the scalpel. Once again looked up at him from a 
kneeling position. Of her lovely face, only the brown-green eyes 
were visible between her cap and mask. They focused on him 
seriously. "It’s not too late, Steve. You can still back out, and 
I’ll give you the one hundred dollars back."
Harshly rebuked as a child for masturbating, Steve had always felt 
distaste for this penis. He had tried sex with three women, the 
last of them a prostitute seventeen years before. Twelve years 
earlier, he had had a chance for sex with a woman, but backed away 
at the last minute. He had never learned to like this thing, and 
now he would finally be rid of it. His heart was pounding furiously 
against his breastbone. 
"Let’s do this," he said. 
Without another word, Sally sunk the edge of the scalpel into the 
side of the or-gan, and sunk it all the way to the catheter. She 
then deftly rotated it under the penis and back up the other side, 
where it met the start of the incision. A few drop of blood were 
dripping into the bowl, making a soft pat-pat-pat sound. Steve’s 
heart was still pounding. He was breathing rapidly. There was a 
broad grin on his face. Sally slid the penis toward her on the 
catheter, separating it from the stump. She then made another 
incision on the top of the severed organ, from end to end, and 
removed it from the catheter. Her eyes met his again.
She held the penis over the bowl, and let the rest of the blood 
drain out of it. Then she flipped the top off of a Mason jar, the 
kind used for storing preserves, and dropped it inside. Steve 
sniffed formaldehyde. She closed the jar and put it in her doctor’s 
bag. "It’s gone, Steve," she said, with a note of satisfaction. "I 
just cut your penis off." Truly, it was gone. He would never see 
that penis again. "How does it feel to have no penis?" she asked, 
as casually as if talking about the weather.
His heart was still pounding. His breath was so short, he could 
only get out one word. "Great!"
"You look very happy." He thought he could see her smile under the 
surgical mask. His stump was still dripping into the bowl. "Time to 
sew up your stump" A few minutes with a needle and surgical silk 
were sufficient to close the wound. When she was done, the tip of 
his stump had the horizontally flattened look of the back end of a 
tube of toothpaste. The catheter was still poking out of it.
She took off her surgical mask. She was still smiling. "I don’t 
think you’re ever going to regret this. I saw the way your face lit 
up when I took your penis off.". She un-fettered her hair from the 
green surgical cap, and shook those braids free. "The Lidocaine 
will wear off in about an hour. Then you’ll feel phantom pain. It 
will seem like your penis is still there, and it’ll seem to hurt 
down the whole length. Just ignore it. In about a day, your brain 
will figure out you don’t have a penis any more, and it’ll go away."
She took the other end of the catheter out of the urine bottle and 
fixed a small plastic device to it. "This is a valve. You can just 
roll up the catheter in your underwear and open the valve whenever 
you need to urinate. Take the catheter out in about three days. 
Pull it out slowly, and don’t mind the pain. The pain of pulling 
out a catheter goes away in a couple of minutes."
He gathered up the catheter and got up. "I’m gonna go get dressed."
"Fine. Let me know when you’re ready."
Still not feeling any pain, Steve looked down at his stump. It 
seemed more like three quarters of an inch long than an inch. The 
flattened tip didn’t look very pretty, either, but Sally had gotten 
the job done, and for thousands of dollars less money than 
hospitali-zation would have cost him. He returned to his bedroom 
and dressed in the same clothes as before, with the catheter rolled 
up in his boxer shorts. Sally was closing her luggage.
"I’m feeling good enough to drive you back to your hotel," he 
announced.
"Super."
Driving back up Mount Moriah, Steve noticed that his penis was no 
longer resting on his scrotum as he sat. It was a novel feeling, 
but a welcome one.
"One hundred forty two penises harvested," said Sally, thinking 
aloud.
"Can I ask you a personal question?"
"Sure, but if I don’t want to answer, I won’t."
"Are you a Lesbian?"
She laughed, gently. "No. And I don’t hate men either, as if the 
two meant the same thing. Everybody thinks I hate men because I cut 
off penises..To tell the truth, I like everything about men EXCEPT 
their penises." She looked down at dashboard of the car. "I had a 
really horrible experience with a penis when I was, like, ten years 
old."
Steve gasped. "Oh, my God. Sexually molested?"
"You could call it that. My dream is to meet a good man who is 
masculine and has testicles but no penis. Unfortunately, none of my 
past patients would make a suitable hus-band, not by a long shot."
He noticed the qualification: none of her PAST patients. "Well, we 
have each other’s email addresses, and you live in St. Louis which 
isn’t too far away. Is there any reason why I couldn’t come to St. 
Louis on vacation some time? You could show me the sights."
She readily flashed that same smile which had charmed him from the 
beginning. "Yeah, that’s a great idea. Don’t be a stranger."
They drove past the Platinum Plus once again. Inside, Steve 
reflected, naked girls were gyrating and weaving and squirming in 
the laps of half-drunken men, stimulating other men’s penises.

THE END