By Lowell Weber

Simon Goshawk, forty years old last week, medium height, a bit overweight, woke this morning to find he had no testicles. He yawned and reached down to scratch them and they weren’t there. No gaping wound, no ice pack with a note telling him they’d been harvested, no Frankensteinesque suture job, just a smooth stretch of skin where his scrotum used to be. Only half awake, he thought that odd. He checked again and began to panic.

Simon didn’t remember them being there when he went to bed. He hadn’t noticed his scrotum one way or the other. He tried to remember the last time he’d seen or felt them. Maybe they had just been reabsorbed as part of the aging process. Were they supposed to disappear when you turned forty? Why hadn’t anyone told him about it?

He jumped out of bed and pulled down the sheets to see if they had fallen off overnight. Nothing. He went to the bathroom, nothing. He still had his penis so peeing wasn’t a problem. Did he flush his noogies down the toilet last night? He checked the shower drain and then started the water. Soaping up, he accidentally knocked himself between the legs with the back brush. It didn’t hurt. Surprised, he calmed down and thought about it. His prune sack pits hadn’t been much use to him. His several adventures with girlfriends and spouses had never resulted in a pregnancy. He’d lost two wives because they wanted kids. When his second wife divorced him, she had tried to claim his testicles as marital property and wanted half. The judge had said no, since she’d had nothing to do with their creation she had no claim to them. If she wanted to own testicles she’d have to give birth to a son like everyone else. Simon was glad the judge was a woman, he’d have never thought of that.

Shaking his head at the memory, he went into the kitchen and started the coffee. Switching on the television he found the early news. Another deadly this, another shocking that. Why did people do things like that? All that anger. Where did the hate come from? Being bullied as a kid? From parents? He wasn’t feeling it.

The next story was perplexing in another way. Heman Shirtless, the trillionaire, had launched himself into space on a rocket he’d built in the backyard of his mansion in New Jersey. He went up, he came down and that was that. Money to feed thousands spent on a joke. Simon couldn’t understand why some people needed to have too much of everything except common sense. Maybe Heman’s balls had drifted off in weightlessness. Could the world be that lucky?

All of the news was confusing. Even human interest stories lacked a warm fuzzy. He realized he couldn’t understand any kind of hormonal driven behavior this morning, not when missing his low hanging fruit. He finished his toast and got dressed.

Today was Saturday, so Simon decided to visit all the places he’d been yesterday to see if someone had found his family jewels and set them aside in case he returned. They were probably under his desk at the office. Darryl, his boss, had called him into his cubicle yesterday, maybe they’d slipped off in there. Would Daryl keep them? Would getting them back be his next raise? He thought about that. He’d rather have a bonus.

He’d taken a stroll through the park after work yesterday. If he’d dropped them out there they were gone for good, he reckoned. Dumped in a dumpster tied up in a doggie poop bag sounded plausible. Should he check with the cops in case they’d been turned in? What if they’d scared a kid? Better leave the cops out of this.

Lots of people were out and about on this gorgeous day. He kept his eyes on the ground, scanning for a small bundle of flesh. Most days he kept his eyes on the ground. Eye contact made people crazy. Women thought he was hitting on them and men thought he was asking for trouble. Looking for his lost bogeys was safe. He stole a quick peek at the people around him. All the men were looking at the ground. Women stared at nothing. Strange.

He decided not to go to the office. If the cleaning crew had found his cargo, they’d be sitting on his desk Monday morning. If not, then he’d have to rethink the situation. Could he get replacements? If so, could he afford them? If so, did he really want them? Gonads were an awful lot of trouble. He sat on a park bench and thought it through.

He concluded that every problematic or plain ugly situation he’d ever put himself through was in one way or another a response to the impulses of his pubes. Road rage. One night stands. Marriage. Dumb stuff like that. So maybe he was better off without them. He hadn’t deliberately lost them. No one had stolen them from him at gunpoint. Instead his nuts had taken care of themselves. Testicular suicide? Would the rest of him be eligible for the happy ever after life? Who could he ask about that?

He couldn’t be a dad now. Too many people anyway. He’d never make Vice President at work, he was sure. Didn’t really want to be a sleazy ass kisser. Greed, dominance, ruthless ambition were beyond him without his low down dudes. He wouldn’t be violent, sexually insatiable or capable of malicious competition, he knew. Would he still need to buy razor blades?

He supposed he was supposed to miss them. Should he? Couldn’t someone have just put something in the water so everyone would be able to chill? A testosterone antigen? 

Maybe that’s what had happened to his junk. Maybe he wasn’t alone. What if everyone was free? What a wonderful world that would be.

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Lowell Weber lives in a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota with his wife and dog. He has a BA in English Literature from the University of Minnesota. He enjoys hiking, biking and camping during the all too brief Minnesota summer.