4. S Colin Ampersand

   S. Colin Ampersand lay face down on the examination table, his feet in cold stirrups, as his physician examined his prostate with her finger. It was a humiliation the doctor made him endure every single visit. Colin wanted to ask if such invasive exams were truly necessary, but not today: he was having grave concerns about his plumbing.

   At forty-one years of age, Colin, wasn’t the finest specimen of manhood: whey-faced, balding, short and fat, his dismal figure resembled an old gym sock stuffed with chestnuts.

   “Nothing out of the ordinary down there,” Doctor Randi Manners said, removing her rubber gloves. She then goosed Colin’s sizable buttocks.

   “Ouch!”

   “You can put your clothes back on.”

   Grumbling under his breath, Colin slid off the examination table, and bent over to pick his boxer shorts off of the floor.

   “You’ve really let yourself go,” Manners said, jabbing at a generous fold of skin around Colin’s waist.

   “Tell me about it,” Colin said and pulled his boxers up to around his waist.

   He had tried every imaginable diet out there, but to no effect. Everything he ate ended up going straight his belly and arse.

   The problem with Colin was that, unlike so many of his contemporaries, he had not been a designer, genetically enhanced, and scrupulously scheduled test-tube baby. He was, to the eternal embarrassment of his parents, the product of a frisky roll in the hay after too much wine one evening. His older sister, Guillemet, on the other hand, was everything his parents could have desired: a lithe beauty who was a good fifteen centimeters taller and ten points smarter than her younger brother. And whereas Guillemet was a successful marketing consultant today, munificently paid to bullshit as it were, Colin earned a modest salary pining away in a windowless basement office of the municipal government.

   “Have you had your AQ checked?” the doctor asked.

   “No,” Colin replied, swallowing hard.

   “Well, Colin, you’re no spring cock anymore, and a guy your age really should have these things checked regularly.”

   “I know,” he said. “I know.”

   Colin had been putting off the inevitable for years, hoping against hope that all the medical data and research had been wrong. But that was like hoping the tide wouldn’t recede. It always did. It always did.

   “Oh, Colin, you really shouldn’t let it get you down,” Manners said, softening her tone, and added: “Mascupause isn’t the end of the world, you know. Most men go on to live full and productive lives long after they’ve stopped being reproductive.”

   Colin might have felt heartened by his doctor’s advice, if she had not merely been repeating a line from a commercial for Herculis, a popular line vitamin and mineral supplements marketed at men for whom virility has become a memory.

   “I’ll have Don schedule you for the AQ, okay?”

   Colin sighed heavily, then gave a defeated nod.

   “Atta boy!” she said, and lit up a stogie.

© Aonghas Crowe, 2011-12. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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