Tremble Read Free

water. A wave of loneliness swept over her. Now she was the only one left, the last of the clan.
    A middle-aged woman dressed flamboyantly in a long silk dress approached her. A ravaged face that must once have boasted a handsome beauty peered out from under an enormous hat. She took Dorothy’s hand and drew it toward her bosom.
    “I knew your great-aunt. She was one of the circle. One of the ancient ones. She’s up there now,” she whispered dramatically, pointing to the contoured disk of the rising moon already visible in the steely sky. “Up there, riding with Arianrhod on a great white mare toward Caer Arianrhod to join her sisters. One day you too shall inherit the mantle.”
    The woman released Dorothy’s hand and, with a studied swish of her skirts, turned and walked across the muddy embankment toward a waiting BMW. Dorothy noticed several of the parishioners crossing themselves as the stranger cut across their path.

    Later that night Dorothy sat on her narrow single bed and watched the shadows cast by the fire dancing across the wooden roof beams. The silence was profound. She reached across and picked up the mandrake root from the cherrywood table beside the bed. She slowly turned it in her hands. What does one do with a mandrake root? Cook it? Eat it? Plant it?
    She held it up to her face. A strong musk radiated from it, strangely animal, even familiar. She tried to think where she knew the scent from, but the memory kept escaping her. She turned it upside down. The root had feathery offshoots that looked as if they belonged in soil.
    She went downstairs and searched around for a flower pot and some potting mix, then planted the root carefully, treating it like a bulb, making sure that the tip showed just above the soil. She left the pot on the kitchen table, went back upstairs, and fell asleep after listening to a debate on the radio on the pros and cons of fox hunting. She dreamed of nothing.
    The next morning she was woken by a tickling under her nose. She sneezed and opened her eyes. An invisible hair kept stroking her cheek. She sat up, glanced at the pillow, and screamed out loud.
    Curled up comfortably in a little indentation in the pillow lay a penis—in repose, one might say. Dorothy was transfixed. Her brain whirled madly, trying to absorb the illogical and surreal sight of an unattached male organ asleep.
    She took a few deep breaths, trying to regain control, and looked away, but her eyes inevitably crept back to the sight. The penis still lay there, curled with an air of conceit. In fact it seemed to be waking up; disbelievingly, Dorothy watched it grow tumescent before her very eyes.
    It was about six and a half inches long, uncircumcised, with long black pubic hair. With a shudder it flipped itself onto its shiny heavy testicles and waddled toward her, now unmistakably erect. Dorothy shrieked, leaped out of bed, and onto a chair. The penis—moving like something between a rabbit and a small dog—also leaped off the bed and onto the carpet where it waited hopefully at the foot of the chair. They had reached an impasse: Dorothy, too terrified to move, and the penis, standing pert before her, a little too eager to please. They stayed like that for a good ten minutes. Until the phone rang.
    “Don’t you dare move!” Dorothy yelled. With a timid shudder the organ waddled a few inches back on its balls. She tentatively climbed off the chair then bolted down the narrow wooden stairs and grabbed the phone. It was her employer, Mr. Carrington, concerned that she hadn’t arrived at work yet.
    “I’m having some difficulty with a small animal…a rodent—no, not a rat exactly…. I’ll be in late.”
    Dorothy put the phone down, her heart still thumping in her throat. Behind her she heard a gentle thudding. She swung around; the penis was hopping down the stairs toward her. There was something pathetically vulnerable about the way it launched itself blindly off the last step, flying through the