Micro
An SPH Experience by Vegapunk_Stella.
I sit to pee. I’ve sat to pee for years—since high school, probably, since the first time I stood at a urinal next to someone and realized that the distance between my hand and the wall in front of me was the same as the distance between my hand and my body. There was nothing to aim. There was barely anything to hold. My dick, soft, is a little under an inch—barely a nub, barely a head, a pink, circumsized button that sits flush against my balls like it’s trying to hide inside them. When I pee standing up, it doesn’t project. It dribbles. It runs down my shaft, which isn’t a shaft so much as a suggestion, and it pools in my pubic hair and drips onto the rim of the toilet or the front of my pants or wherever gravity takes it, which is never where I want it to go.
So I sit. I sit like a woman sits—pants around my ankles, dick pointing down into the bowl, and I wait for the stream to start, and I wait for it to stop, and I shake, which is a joke because there’s nothing to shake, and I pull up my pants and flush and leave. It’s cleaner. It’s easier. It’s the only option that doesn’t result in me smelling like piss for the rest of the day.
The problem with sitting is that you need a stall, and the problem with stalls is that there’s never enough of them, and the problem with not enough of them is that you wait, and when you wait, people notice.
—
It was a Saturday. Our friend group—six of us, three guys, three girls—had driven two hours to see a baseball game in a city none of us lived in. We’d tailgated in the parking lot, drinking cheap beer and eating hot dogs off a portable grill that one of the guys, Travis, had lugged in from his truck. It was a good day. Sunny, warm, the kind of day where you’re a little buzzed by the second inning and a lot buzzed by the fifth, and you don’t care about the score because you’re with your people and the beer is cold and the sun is on your face and everything is fine.
By the seventh inning, I needed to piss. Badly. The beer had caught up with me, and I’d been holding it through two at-bats and a pitching change. My bladder was at the point where it was starting to override my dignity, which was the only thing keeping me from getting up and walking to the bathroom, because the bathroom at this stadium was the kind of bathroom I dreaded—a big, concrete, echoey room with a long trough urinal and no dividers and a line of men standing shoulder to shoulder with their dicks out, and I couldn’t do that. I’ve never been able to do that.
Travis stood up too. “I gotta go,” he said, and we climbed over our friends and headed up the aisle and into the concourse. The bathroom was exactly what I feared—a wide, bright room with a trough urinal along one wall and a line of men three deep and a separate line for stalls along the other wall, and the stall line was long. Six, seven guys, all waiting, and the urinal line was moving fast—guys walking in, unzipping, pissing, shaking, zipping, leaving. In and out. Thirty seconds, maybe less.
Travis went to the urinal line. I went to the stall line. He glanced at me. “Stall?” he said, and I shrugged and said, “Yeah, I’ll meet you out there,” and he nodded and went, and I stood in the stall line and waited.
The line moved slowly. Each stall had a door that closed and locked, and each guy in front of me took his time—sitting down, doing his business, flushing, washing his hands in the sink inside the stall, which I thought was weird but whatever, I wasn’t in a position to judge anyone’s bathroom habits. I waited. I crossed my legs. I uncrossed them. I shifted my weight. The line moved one stall. I waited more. The line moved again. I could feel the beer pressing against my bladder, and I could feel the minutes pressing against the game. I knew I was going to miss part of the inning, and I didn’t care, because I’d rather miss an inning than stand at a trough with my inch of dick in my hand next to a man who was packing five or six or seven.
Travis was back at the seats before I even got into the stall. I know because I saw him on the concourse when I finally emerged—walking back toward the section with a beer in each hand, one for him and one for his girlfriend, and I was still zipping my shorts and trying to look casual.
I washed my hands. I dried them on my shorts because the paper towel dispenser was empty. I walked out of the bathroom, into the concourse, and headed back toward the section, and that’s when I saw Jillian.
—
Jillian was standing in the concourse outside the section entrance, leaning against a railing with a beer in her hand, talking to our other friends—Travis and his girlfriend, and the other guy, Kevin, and the other two girls, Aubrey and Nicole. They were all there. All of them. Waiting, apparently, for me.
Jillian is the kind of person who says what everyone else is thinking. She’s not mean—she’d tell you that herself, and she’d believe it—but she has no filter, no pause between thought and speech, no internal editor that catches things before they leave her mouth. She’s funny. She’s loud. She’s the person at the party who starts the game of Truth or Dare and makes it weird. She’s short—five-two, maybe—with dark hair and a round face and a mouth that moves faster than her brain, and she’s been my friend for years, and I’ve always liked her, and I’ve always been a little afraid of her.
She saw me coming and called out. “Dude, what took so long?”
She said it loud. Loud enough that the people around us—strangers, walking by with hot dogs and beers and kids on their shoulders—could hear. Loud enough that our whole group turned to look at me, and I was suddenly the center of attention, which is the last place I want to be when I’ve just spent ten minutes in a bathroom stall because I can’t pee standing up.
I walked up to the group. I tried to play it cool. “I had to wait for a stall,” I said. “I’m pee shy.”
I said it like it was nothing. Like it was a minor quirk, a personality trait, the kind of thing you mention and move on from. I said it the way you’d say, “I don’t like cilantro,” or “I’m afraid of heights,” and I expected the conversation to move on, because who cares about how someone pees at a baseball game?
Jillian cared.
“Pee shy?” she said, and her face did something—a tilt of the head, a narrowing of the eyes, a slow-forming grin that I recognized from years of friendship as the expression she makes right before she says something devastating. “What, do you have a micro penis?”
—
The word hit me like a physical thing—micro penis. Two words, spoken at full volume, in a concourse full of people, in front of all my friends, and I felt my body do something it had never done before—it froze. Not metaphorically. Literally. My feet stopped moving. My mouth opened slightly and then closed. My hands, still damp from washing them on my shorts, hung at my sides. I was a photograph of a person, caught mid-step, mid-breath, mid-everything.
I could hear the concourse around me—the crowd noise, the announcer’s voice echoing from the speakers, the crack of a bat from inside the stadium, the footsteps of strangers walking past—and underneath all of it, the silence of my friends, who had gone quiet because Jillian had just said the thing that no one says, the thing you’re not supposed to say, the thing that I’d spent my entire adult life making sure no one would ever have a reason to say.
She was looking at me. They were all looking at me. Travis, who’d been in and out of the bathroom in thirty seconds, who’d stood at the trough and pissed like a man and walked out without thinking about it. Kevin, who I’d never seen use a stall in his life. Aubrey and Nicole, who were watching with the kind of wide-eyed, slightly horrified, slightly fascinated expression that people get when they witness a car accident. And Jillian, whose grin was widening, because my face was telling her everything she needed to know.
I tried to speak. I tried to say something—anything—a denial, a joke, a deflection, a “shut up, Jillian,” a “what’s wrong with you,” anything that would make the moment smaller, less real, less public. But my mouth wouldn’t cooperate. The words got stuck somewhere between my brain and my tongue, and what came out was a stutter—a pathetic, stammering, high-pitched stutter that I’d never heard from my own mouth before.
“Um, n-n-no I don’t.”
It was the least convincing denial in the history of language. It was the sound of a man who had a micro penis and couldn’t even lie about it convincingly. It was the sound of a man whose body was betraying him in real time—face flushing red, hands trembling, voice cracking—and every person standing in that circle knew, in the way that you know things without evidence, that the answer was yes.
—
Jillian laughed.
Not a small laugh. Not a polite, “oops, did I say something wrong” laugh. A full, head-back, body-shaking laugh that echoed off the concrete walls of the concourse, carried across the space, and landed on me like a weight. She laughed the way you laugh when you hear a joke that’s funny because it’s true—when the punchline confirms something you already suspected and the confirmation is so satisfying that your body can’t contain it.
“Oh my God,” she said, between laughs, looking at the group. “He does. He actually does.”
She turned back to me. Her eyes went down—just for a second, just a flick of the eyes toward my crotch, which was hidden behind my shorts but which might as well have been naked, because the look on my face had already told her what was there. “You have a micro penis,” she said, and this time it wasn’t a question. It was a statement. A fact. A diagnosis delivered in a stadium concourse by a woman wearing a baseball cap, a beer in her hand.
I didn’t correct her. I couldn’t. My mouth was dry. My face was burning. My heart was pounding in my chest, and I could feel my dick—my inch of dick, my nub, my button—shriveling even further, retreating into itself, as if it could hide from the word that had just been used to describe it—micro penis. The word was out there now. It had been spoken, and it couldn’t be unspoken, and the people who had heard it would remember it, and the memory would follow me home.
Travis was looking at the ground. Kevin was looking at his beer. Aubrey and Nicole were looking at each other with wide eyes and pressed-together lips, trying not to laugh, trying not to react, trying to be polite in a situation where politeness was impossible. And Jillian was still laughing, still grinning, still looking at me with that expression—the one that said, I knew it. I always knew it. And now I have proof.
—
We went back to our seats. That was the worst part—not the comment, not the laugh, but the walk back to our seats, which was thirty seconds of silence that felt like thirty minutes. I walked behind the group. Jillian was in front of me, talking to Aubrey. I could hear snippets—”…just asked, and he totally froze…” and “…I knew it, the stall thing, come on…”—and Aubrey was responding in a low voice that I couldn’t quite make out. I didn’t want to make out, because whatever she was saying was about me and my micro penis and the fact that it was now a topic of conversation between two of my friends.
We sat down. I sat in my seat, stared at the field, tried to watch the game, and pretended that nothing had happened, but everything had happened, and everyone at the game knew it because the energy in our section had shifted. Jillian was on her phone—probably texting someone, and I could guess what she was writing—and Travis was being careful not to look at me. Kevin was careful not to look at me, and Aubrey and Nicole were careful not to look at me either. The carefulness was worse than looking, because carefulness meant they were thinking about it, and thinking about it meant they were picturing it, and picturing it meant they were imagining my inch of dick in their minds and trying to reconcile it with the man sitting next to them who was pretending to care about a baseball game.
I watched the game. I didn’t see the game. I saw the field and the players and the lights and the scoreboard, and none of it registered, because my brain was stuck on a loop—micro penis, micro penis, micro penis—playing the word over and over, hearing it in Jillian’s voice, seeing her face, seeing the laugh, feeling the freeze, and underneath all of it, buried deep in the shame and the horror, something else. Something I didn’t want to name. Something that was warm and tight in my stomach and was making my inch of dick tingle in my shorts, and I hated it, and I knew it, and I couldn’t stop it.
—
Jillian didn’t let it go. Not that day, not that week, not that month.
At dinner after the game—burgers at a place near the stadium, all six of us crammed into a booth—she brought it up again. “So when you said pee shy,” she said, leaning across the table with a fry in her hand, “you meant small dick shy, right?” And Travis told her to drop it, and Kevin told her to be cool, and she shrugged and said, “What? It’s not a big deal. It’s a small deal. A very small deal.” And she held up her pinky finger and wiggled it, and Aubrey covered her mouth, and Nicole looked at the ceiling, and I sat in the booth and felt my face go red again and my stomach drop again, and my dick shrivel again, and I laughed along with them because that was the only option. After all, laughing was easier than crying and crying was easier than admitting that the humiliation was doing something to me that I didn’t understand and couldn’t control.
At Travis’s birthday party a month later, Jillian told the story to people who hadn’t been at the game. “He waited in line for a stall,” she said, holding court in the kitchen with a drink in her hand, “and I asked him why, and he said he was pee shy, and I said, ‘What, do you have a micro penis?’ and he just froze. Like, literally froze. Couldn’t speak. Stuttering. It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.” And the people who hadn’t been there laughed, and the people who had been there laughed again, and I stood in the corner of the kitchen, held my beer, smiled, and died a little.
At a barbecue at Kevin’s house, Jillian introduced me to one of Kevin’s coworkers—a woman named Dana, who I’d never met—and within ten minutes, she’d told the story. Dana looked at me with a mix of curiosity and pity that I recognized, because I’d seen it on Aubrey’s face at the game, and I’d seen it on Nicole’s face at dinner, and I’d seen it on every face that had heard the word micro penis attached to my name. It was the look of someone who now knew something about you that you never wanted them to know, and who couldn’t unknow it, and who would look at you differently forever because of it.
—
Here’s the truth that I can’t tell anyone, the truth that sits under the shame and the stuttering and the red face and the silence:
When Jillian said it—when she said micro penis, loud, in public, in front of everyone—something happened to me that I’ve been trying to understand ever since. The shame was real. The embarrassment was real. The freeze, the stutter, the burning face—all real, all involuntary, all the genuine reactions of a man whose deepest insecurity had just been shouted across a stadium concourse by a woman with no filter and a beer in her hand.
But underneath the shame, there was something else. A spike. A jolt. A current that ran from the word to my gut to my groin, that made my inch of dick twitch in my shorts, that made my face go red not just from embarrassment but from something darker and stranger and more complicated than embarrassment. It was the feeling of being seen. Not just seen—exposed. Named and called out. Reduced to the thing that I was, the thing I’d been hiding, the thing I’d been sitting to pee to avoid acknowledging, and the naming of it—the public, loud, undeniable naming of it—was humiliating and arousing and terrifying and freeing, all at the same time.
I have a micro penis. A little under an inch soft, and even hard, I’m not much—not enough for anyone to feel, not enough for anyone to remember, not enough for anything except a stall in a stadium bathroom and a stutter in front of my friends.
Jillian named it. She said it out loud, in front of everyone, and I couldn’t deny it, hide it, or pretend anymore. She took the thing I’d been carrying, and she held it up, and she showed it to the world—not my actual dick, which was hidden in my shorts, but the truth of it, the fact of it, the small, undeniable reality of what I am.
And I went home that night, lay in bed, and replayed the moment—her face, her voice, the word, the laugh, the freeze, the pinky finger—and I was hard. Not very hard. Not impressive hard. Micro hard. A little under three inches of hard, straining against my boxers, leaking into the fabric, and I touched myself with two fingers—thumb and forefinger, the only grip that works—. I came in under a minute, a thin, weak spurt that barely made it past my navel, and I lay there and stared at the ceiling and thought about Jillian’s voice and the word and the look on her face when she knew.
She knew. She still knows. And now everyone knows. And I can’t unknow it, and I can’t unfeel it, and I can’t stop thinking about it, and I can’t stop the thing that happens to me when I think about it—the shame, the arousal, the spike, the current, the warm, tight, terrible feeling of being small and seen and named.
Micro penis. That’s what she said. That’s what I am. And the worst part—the part I’ll never tell anyone, the part I’ll carry until I die—is that I wanted her to say it again.
The End.
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