Counting to Twenty
Jonan Pilet
His penis fell off inside of me.
It could have happened in my mouth. It nearly had.
I noticed before he did. His movements had stayed in rhythm, but the sensation had changed. The motion became blunt, our hips hitting with thuds as his sweat dripped off his forehead onto me. I lay in stunned silence.
This was always a risk. But Jason had all of his fingers, all of his toes. I checked before we did anything, and he checked mine too. Our digits we’re all there. We counted to twenty.
I heard of it happening like this, but I didn’t believe it. The man’s penis falling off, it was the type of story religious mothers told their daughters to scare them out of premarital sex. I heard it from my mother before she passed, but my aunt, not being religious, laughed at the idea. She gave me condoms on my prom night. She told me, “make sure you count his toes. Everyone remembers the fingers, but don’t forget the toes.” I always expected to find one of her toes in the shower, clogging the drain. Or notice one of her fingers missing as she painted my nails. When she died in the fall of last year, I counted them in her coffin, thinking there was no way she had made it to death with them all. I slipped off her shoes and socks, when no one was in the room. But every wax covered digit remained.
“Fuck,” Jason yelled as he pushed off of me. He dropped to the ground and crawled back to the wall, sat against it and sobbed. It was the first time I'd ever seen a man cry.
I rolled over and ran to the bathroom. I pulled his penis out by the open end of the condom and dropped it into the toilet. I stared at the limp member floating in the toilet, the condom covering it completely, the latex yellow highlighted against the porcelain white. There was no blood. I thought there would be blood. I didn't think it would be so clean.
I felt ill and looked at myself in the mirror, breathing deep before lifting my hands and counting my fingers. I half expected one to disconnect and run away as I watched. My toes were there too, I didn’t count them, instead I felt them against the cold bathroom tile. I wondered if you lost feeling first. He watched me in the corner of the room, flickering.
I went back into the bedroom. Jason was still on the ground, looking at himself in disbelief. I picked my clothes off the ground and quickly put them on, as Jason crawled to the bed and searched for his member.
I ran out the door as he sobbed.
The next morning, I held my husband’s hand. I could feel his wedding ring between my fingers. The cold metal burned my skin, a sensation I worried was the beginning of something happening, something coming undone. I imagined the inside of one of my fingers creating a wall, hardening and stopping the flow of blood. I wasn’t sure how long I had, it could be as quick as a few days, or as long as a few weeks. I let go and placed my hands under my armpits, thinking maybe warmth would keep the blood flowing, and leaned close to him.
“It’s cold in here,” I whispered.
“Churches are always cold,” he said.
Our church had a new pastor. The last one had lost his left ring finger. It fell off just below above his ring as he was preaching. The wedding band rolled off the stage and stopped where his wife sat on the first bench. The ring hit her foot and tipped over, at least that’s what Joyce said.
“You should have seen her face. I thought she had a stroke, the way her mouth turned sideways, and her eye-twitch.” I couldn’t believe everything Joyce said, she had a penchant for gossip and exaggeration. But enough of the church confirmed the ringfinger tale that I believed it.
“The pastor’s wife lost one of her thumbs a few days later. It fell down a drain while she was washing the dishes,” Joyce told me.
The new pastor was much older than the last, with all his fingers, and as a sign of his faithfulness to his Lord and his wife, he wore sandals as he preached. I watched his feet as he paced the stage, all ten of his toes—fully intact.
The old pastor’s wife still came to service every Sunday. She sat in the back row and wore gloves as a sign of new beginnings, white gloves with the left thumb hole sewed shut.
Jason wasn’t at church. I hadn’t expected him to come, but I wondered if others would notice he wasn’t around. In some ways, he was lucky. No one would ever know if he didn’t want them too. Women were more likely to lose their fingers, men more likely their toes. One more curse God gave women, another way for women to be publicly shamed.
High school girls without a digit often dropped out of school. Their parents feared the ridicule they would endure, though some showed their fingerless hands with pride.
We hadn’t been coming to the church long. It was our therapist’s suggestion that I do something meaningful for my husband. He had grown up heavily churched and his family had always gone. I hadn’t been since I was a child, since before my mother had died. She suggested that going would show I was willing to try to fix our relationship. Something, I thought of as a concession, a way to pretend to be the ideal wife he wanted. The therapist didn’t say it that way, she said I was going halfway, but sitting on the wooden pews, the eyes of Jesus behind the altar staring down at me, it didn’t feel like halfway.
Jason was an acolyte. The first time we came to this church, it was him that handed me the goblet of wine as I knelt next to my husband. He wasn’t here today.
I wasn’t sure how long I could refuse my husband sex before he’d ask questions. I told him I wasn’t feeling well, and that I was tired, and then that I had cramps. But after one week, I had to get more creative. I thought about pleasing him in other ways, ways I knew were supposed to be safe. But I couldn’t be sure, and I found myself even afraid to kiss him, though I knew nothing could be transmitted through saliva.
“Sorry,” I said when he leaned in before going to work. “I think I have a cold.”
He smiled and left without a word. And I shut the door and cried.
I thought about going to my doctor, but why? To be charged hundreds of dollars to tell me what time eventually would. Maybe it would be best to end it, it was moving that way before any of this. This was some sort of divine sign that I should end it, that I should sever the marriage before it could rot, but it had been rotting. It had a stench that others noticed.
They can’t reattach the digits, I remembered, because they’re rotten. Even if they are reattached they fall off again, right away. They’re more than just dead, they’re decaying.
One of my bridesmaids was missing her pinky and her index finger. I asked her about it the night before my wedding at my bachelorette party, drinks making what had been unspeakable and closed, open.
Most people only lost one. But some lost two, even three. It’s believed, though studies have never confirmed its accuracy, the more people you sleep with that have the condition, the more likely it is that another digit will fall away.
“I used to play the piano really well,” she told me. I had never known her with all her fingers, they were gone by the time we met in college. I had always been too scared to ask, like asking might expose me to a world I’d rather keep at a distance. But getting married made me think I was safe; I was about to enter a world where it could never reach me.
“I lost my scholarship when I showed up at an audition without my pinky.”
“How’d it happen?”
“It was a party,” she said. “And I drank too much, and he must have been missing a toe because he showed me his fingers. He told me everything would be okay as his warm breath and heavy body took more than a pinky.”
My morbid curiosity pushed her further into the conversation that had already formed tears in her eyes and made her start to shake. “What was losing your finger like?”
“It didn’t hurt, if that’s what you mean.” She played with the nub where the pinky had been. “It was like I never even had it, like I always was without it. Which in some way, was worse. Honestly, I never even saw it. One day, I looked down and it was gone.”
“What about the other one?”
“A couple of years later,” she said. “I met a guy who was missing a big toe. We hooked up. We felt connected by what we lost and had a short of pity for each other.” She held up her right hand with its missing index finger. “I kind of thought it was safe. But a few weeks later, I woke up next to my detached finger.”
She moved across the country shortly after the wedding. And we grew distant. So I hesitated to call her, but the distance was also reassuring that I could really talk to her now and ask her for advice.
“No, don’t tell him.” She waited for me to respond and when I didn’t, she said, “It’s not positive that you’ll contract, a few people are immune, and he might not have shared it with you. You used protection, right? How long was this going on? It’s not worth throwing your marriage out. Just wait it out, you’re probably overreacting. Just put it out of your head, live your normal life. You’ll be fine.”
I repeated everything she said in my head again and again. Don’t tell him. Live your normal life.
That night in bed my husband turned out his light; a shadow in the corner of my eye, he started kissing my shoulder, moving up to my neck. I had gotten in the habit of imagining Jason, it had gotten me through the worst parts of our recent nights together. I couldn’t pinpoint the moment that my husband’s advances started to make me feel displaced. I only know that it had changed and now felt like when a stranger touches you in a public place — the feeling you get when men back into you on a subway, and stay inside your space and sway back and forth slightly so their elbow rubs against your breasts. And then the trapped feeling of not being able to tell them to stop, because they’d say it was an accident, and maybe it was, but you're sure it wasn’t.
I would float above myself, out of my body, and look down at the shadow on top of me, and imagine Jason, but tonight I couldn’t. The thought of Jason returned me to the toilet and his floating penis, shrinking inside the condom. I wish I had flushed it, done something to get rid of it forever. Jason a figure of power, sex and freedom, reduced to something so pathetic, helpless, weeping in the corner of that hotel room.
“What’s wrong?” my husband asked. The kissing stopped and his question dropped me back to the bed, my retreat failing.
“Nothing,” I started to kiss him and put everything out of my mind as we made love, thinking how strange it is, that no one continues to count to twenty after getting married.
In the morning I would find a pinky toe inside my sock. But I would wait to see if he noticed. I’d wait to see what he lost, to see if he had been careful too, or if he, like me, had done something to risk what we were desperately trying to save. And maybe if he had done something too, maybe I could forgive him.
Jonan Pilet studied Creative Writing at Houghton College, the University of Oxford, and received his Master of Fine Arts at Seattle Pacific University. His debut short story collection “Nomad, Nomad” is being released on March 1st, 2021. For more on his work, please visit his website.
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