Altitude
A Fictional SPH Story by Nice_Document_7299.
You can’t get up and walk away. You can’t excuse yourself to the bathroom and collect your thoughts and come back when the moment has passed, and the heat has left your face and your dick has softened inside your pants. You’re in a metal tube at thirty-five thousand feet, strapped into a seat that’s too small, pressed shoulder-to-shoulder between two people, and whatever happens in that tube happens to you in front of whoever is sitting nearby. There’s no escape. There’s no privacy. There’s just you and the seatbelt sign and the recycled air and the slow, ticking awareness that you are trapped.
I should have known something was going to happen. I should have felt it in the way the morning started—the way my girlfriend had been extra chatty, extra loose, extra prone to saying whatever popped into her head without running it through the filter that most people use in public. She’d been like that since we got to the airport, talking loudly about the food at the terminal restaurant, making jokes about the couple at the next table, commenting on a man’s outfit as he walked past us. She wasn’t being mean. She was being herself—open, unfiltered, the kind of person who says things out loud that other people think and keep inside. I loved that about her, usually. I loved it right up until the moment I didn’t.
—
We boarded the flight at around two in the afternoon. It was a full flight—a long-haul, maybe six hours, the kind where you settle in and accept that your personal space is going to be violated for the duration. We were in economy, three seats across. My girlfriend was by the window. I was in the middle. And the aisle seat was taken by a woman who was probably in her early forties—pretty, dark-haired, wearing a silk blouse and reading glasses on a chain around her neck, the kind of woman who looked like she traveled for business and had learned to make herself comfortable in small spaces. She’d smiled at us when she sat down, a brief, polite smile, and then opened a book and settled in.
I’m not great with people I don’t know. I’m not great with people I do know, honestly—I’m the kind of person who gets hot-faced when someone talks to me unexpectedly, who feels the blush rise before I’ve even processed what was said. Social anxiety, my therapist called it. The feeling that you’re being watched, that you’re being judged, that at any moment someone is going to say something that puts you on the spot and you won’t be able to get out of it. I manage it. Most days, I manage it. But airplanes are hard, because airplanes are full of people who are right there, inches away, with nowhere to go and nothing to do but exist in proximity to you for hours.
I settled in. I adjusted my seatbelt. I pulled out the in-flight magazine—the glossy, ad-heavy publication that airlines stuff in the seatback pocket, full of articles about destinations you can’t afford and products you don’t need. I wasn’t really reading it. I was flipping through it the way you flip through a magazine on a plane because your phone is in airplane mode, the movie selection looks bad, and you need something to do with your hands.
My girlfriend leaned over to look at the magazine with me. She had her head on my shoulder, her hair brushing my neck, her hand resting on my thigh in that casual, possessive way that girlfriends do. She was in a good mood. We were going on holiday—our first trip together, two months into the relationship, the kind of milestone that feels exciting and terrifying in equal measure. She was wearing a sundress. She smelled like coconut sunscreen. She was happy.
At the same time, there was movement in the aisle. The flight attendants were doing their pre-departure checks—opening overhead lockers, checking seatbacks, verifying that seatbelts were fastened. The one working our section was a blonde woman in her late twenties or early thirties, tall, with her hair in a French twist and the kind of composed, efficient beauty that flight attendants seem to cultivate as part of the job. She was wearing the uniform—fitted skirt, blouse, neckerchief—and she moved through the cabin with the practiced ease of someone who has done this a thousand times and could do it in her sleep.
She came to our row. She was checking the overhead locker above us—the one directly over my girlfriend’s window seat and my middle seat—and to reach it, she had to lean across. She leaned right over me, one hand on the headrest of my seat, the other on the seat in front of me, her body extending over me to adjust something in the locker. I could smell her perfume—something light, floral, professional. Her blouse was close enough that I could see the stitching on the collar. She was right there, inches from my face, and I did what I always do when a stranger is in my personal space: I froze. I went still. I looked down at the magazine in my lap and tried to disappear.
My girlfriend was still looking at the magazine. She reached over and turned the page.
—
The photo took up the entire page. Full-bleed, glossy, high-resolution. It was a statue—a famous one, I’d learn later —the Manneken Pis, the little boy in Brussels who pees into a fountain and has been doing it for four hundred years, and is one of Belgium’s most visited attractions. The photo was a close-up, shot from the front, at an angle that captured the whole statue—the small, chubby body of the boy, the cherubic face, the arms behind the head, and the penis. Small, child-sized, sticking out from the stone body, peeing an arc of water into a basin below.
It was a famous statue. It was a cultural landmark. It was a charming, historic, beloved piece of European heritage. And it was a full-page photo of a small penis in an in-flight magazine that my girlfriend was looking at while a beautiful flight attendant was leaning over me and a woman I’d never met was sitting inches away.
My girlfriend saw the photo. She looked at it for about half a second—the time it takes for the brain to register an image, process it, and react. She didn’t hesitate. She didn’t think. She didn’t glance around to check who was listening or lower her voice or consider the fact that we were on a full airplane surrounded by strangers. She just said it.
“That’s crazy! That little dick is the same size as yours.”
She said it at a normal volume. Not a whisper, not a mutter, not a sotto voce comment meant for my ears only. A normal, conversational, this-is-how-I-talk-to-my-boyfriend volume. The kind of volume that carries in a small space. The kind of volume that the two women on either side of me heard perfectly.
—
Time did the thing it does in moments of humiliation—it stretched. It slowed down and became granular, each second a distinct, separate unit that I moved through like honey. I could feel the moment fracturing into pieces: the sound of my girlfriend’s voice, the words hanging in the air, the silence that followed, the awareness of the two women on either side of me, the heat beginning to rise in my face.
The flight attendant was still leaning over me. She’d heard it—I could tell because her hands stopped moving in the overhead locker for just a beat, a pause, a microsecond of stillness that said, “Did she just say what I think she said?” Then her hands resumed. She finished adjusting whatever she was adjusting, and she pulled back from the locker, and as she did, she looked at me. Just a glance—a quick, sideways, couldn’t-help-it glance at my face, at my red face, at the face of the man whose girlfriend had just announced to the row that his penis was the same size as a statue of a peeing toddler.
She snickered. It was small—a breath, a sound through the nose, the kind of involuntary reaction that happens when something catches you off guard and you don’t have time to suppress it. Her lips pressed together. She pulled this face—a face I’ll remember for a long time, a face that was trying very hard not to be a face. It was the face of a professional at work, unable to laugh at a passenger but laughing inside. The corners of her mouth twitched. Her eyes flicked away—down the aisle, toward the next row, toward anything that wasn’t me and my burning face and the magazine in my lap with the full-page photo of a small stone penis.
She moved on. She went to the next row. She did not look back. But the snicker was already in the air, already part of the moment, already lodged in my memory alongside the words that had caused it.
The woman in the aisle seat had heard it too. I knew she’d heard it because I could feel her react—not a sound, not a movement, but a shift. The quality of her attention changed. She’d been reading her book, politely ignoring us, and now she wasn’t reading. She was looking at her book but not reading it, the way you look at a page when your ears are doing the listening and your eyes are just a front.
Then she snickered too. The same sound—the breath through the nose, the suppressed exhale, the involuntary response. And she pulled the same face—the pressed lips, the twitching corners, the looking away. She turned her head toward the aisle, away from me. I could see the expression in profile—the smile she was trying to hide, the amusement she was trying to swallow, the reaction she was having to my girlfriend’s words and to my face and to the fact that she was sitting next to a man whose dick was, according to his girlfriend, the size of a small boy statue’s.
Neither of them said anything. That was almost worse. If they’d said something—made a joke, asked a question, acknowledged it out loud—I could have responded. I could have laughed it off, made a self-deprecating comment, done the thing that confident men do when their penis size is mentioned in public. But they didn’t say anything. They snickered, looked away, and left me sitting there with the words in the air, the photo in my lap, the heat on my face, and nothing to do with any of it.
—
My girlfriend didn’t notice. That was the thing about her—she said things like this and moved on. She wasn’t dwelling. She wasn’t savoring the moment. She’d seen the statue, made the observation, and was already turning the page to the next spread, an article about restaurants in Lisbon. She’d moved on. She was in Lisbon now, mentally. She was thinking about food. She had no idea that the two women on either side of me had heard her, had reacted, had filed away the information that the man in 23B had a small dick.
I was not in Lisbon. I was in 23B, middle seat, trapped, and I was on fire.
The blush was full. I could feel it—my cheeks, my ears, my neck, the skin above my collar. The kind of blush that doesn’t hide, that doesn’t fade quickly, that announces itself. I could feel my pulse in my face. I could feel sweat running down my hairline. I was the color of a stop sign, sitting between two women who knew why.
I looked down at the magazine. The photo was still there—the statue, the boy, the small stone penis. I looked at it. Really looked at it. The penis on the statue was maybe two inches, maybe less—it was a child’s penis, carved in stone, proportionate to the small body. My girlfriend had looked at it and thought of me. She’d looked at a statue of a naked boy and her brain had gone to my dick. That was the association. That was the connection her mind had made: small stone penis, my boyfriend.
She wasn’t wrong. That was the part that made it worse—the part that turned the humiliation from social embarrassment into something deeper, something physical, something that was happening in my body as much as in my mind. She wasn’t wrong. My dick was small. Not two inches—I was around three hard, less than an inch soft, thin, barely there, the kind of penis that doesn’t create a visible bulge in jeans, that doesn’t fill a hand, that doesn’t make an impression in any context except the absence of one. She’d seen it. We’d been having sex for two months, and she’d seen it, and she’d been polite about it—or at least quiet about it, which I’d mistaken for polite—and now she was on a plane, looking at a statue, and the filter was off, and the truth was out.
That little dick is the same size as yours.
I closed the magazine. I put it back in the seatback pocket. I stared at the seat in front of me and tried to breathe.
—
The woman in the aisle seat was doing a very good job of pretending nothing had happened. She was reading her book. She was turning pages. She was the picture of composure, a businesswoman on a flight, minding her own business, unbothered by the small-dick announcement that had just occurred six inches to her left.
But I could see the smile. Not a full smile—a residue of one, a trace, the ghost of the snicker still sitting on her lips. She’d glance at me occasionally—these tiny, involuntary, micro-glances, the kind that happen when you’re trying not to look at someone but your eyes keep drifting back. She’d glance at me and then back at her book, and each time, the smile would flicker. Not mocking. Not cruel. Just the amusement of a person who has witnessed something funny and can’t quite let it go.
I was aware of her in the way you’re aware of a wound. Constantly. I could feel her presence next to me—her shoulder, her perfume, her book, her quiet, contained, occasional glances. She knew. She’d heard the words, she’d seen my face, she’d made the connection, and she knew. And she was sitting next to me for the next six hours.
The flight attendant came back through the cabin twice more before takeoff—once to check seatbelts, once to demonstrate the safety features. Both times, she passed our row. Both times, I felt her eyes flicker toward me—just for a moment, just a fraction of a second, the kind of look that says I remember you, I remember what she said, I remember your face when she said it. Both times, the same micro-expression—the pressed lips, the controlled face, the professionalism covering the amusement.
She was beautiful. That made it worse. She was tall and blonde and composed, and she was doing her job, and she was trying not to laugh at me because my girlfriend had compared my penis to a statue of a peeing boy and she’d heard it and she’d seen my face and she knew.
—
The plane took off. The seatbelt sign turned off. The flight attendants began the drink service. The normal rhythms of air travel took over—the cart in the aisle, the clink of ice, the murmur of conversations, the hum of the engines. The world moved on. The moment passed, the way moments do, absorbed into the general noise of a full flight.
But it didn’t pass for me. It didn’t pass because I was sitting in the middle seat, with knowledge of what had been said and who had heard it, and that knowledge didn’t go anywhere. It sat with me. It sat in my face, which was still warm. It sat in my stomach, which was tight. It sat in my lap, where my small, soft, barely-there dick was resting inside my jeans, the same size as a stone boy’s, and I could feel it—feel the smallness of it, the thinness, the way it just sat there without creating any shape or pressure or presence.
My girlfriend was looking out the window. She was watching the clouds. She was peaceful and happy and completely unaware that she had just done something to me that I would think about for weeks, months, maybe longer. She’d said a thing. A true thing. A casual, throwaway, didn’t-even-think-about-it thing. And it had landed on me like a door slamming.
I thought about the statue—the Manneken Pis. I’d look it up later, on the ground, with my phone out of airplane mode, and I’d read about it—the history, the replicas, the costumes, the tourists who flock to Brussels to see a small boy peeing. I’d look at photos of it. I’d zoom in on the penis. I’d hold my phone next to my own dick, in the bathroom, alone, and I’d compare. She was right. It was about the same. Maybe the statue was a little bigger. Maybe not. The margin was small enough that the comparison held. The holding of it—the accuracy of it—was the thing that made my face burn even now, even at thirty-five thousand feet, even with the clouds outside and the drink cart approaching and the woman in the aisle seat still occasionally glancing at me with the residue of a smile.
—
The drink cart reached our row. The flight attendant—the blonde one, the one who had heard—was working the cart. She leaned over to take our order.
“What can I get you?” she asked. She was looking at my girlfriend first.
“Sparkling water, please,” my girlfriend said. She smiled. She was charming. She was always charming—to strangers, to service workers, to anyone she interacted with. She had the kind of warmth that made people like her instantly. The flight attendant smiled back.
“And for you, sir?”
She looked at me. And there it was again—the flicker. The micro-expression. The pressed lips, the controlled face, the professional composure with the amusement underneath. She was looking at me, remembering, and trying not to.
“Same,” I said. My voice was flat. I was trying to be normal. I was failing.
She handed us our drinks. As she passed me my sparkling water, our fingers touched briefly—her hand cool, mine warm, the contact lasting a fraction of a second—and she looked at me one more time. This time, the expression was different. Not amusement, exactly. Something softer. Almost sympathetic. The look of a person who has witnessed something slightly painful and feels a small, guilty pang about having laughed at it. She looked at me, and she saw my face—still flushed, still warm, still carrying the evidence of what had been said—and her expression softened for just a moment before she moved on.
It didn’t help. The sympathy was almost worse than the snicker, because the sympathy meant she’d thought about it. She’d moved past the initial reaction—the surprise, the amusement—and she’d landed on something like pity. She pitied me. The beautiful blonde flight attendant pitied me because my girlfriend had said my dick was the size of a small statue’s and she’d seen my face, and she’d put it together: small dick, red face, embarrassed man, middle seat, nowhere to go.
I took a sip of sparkling water. The bubbles burned. My girlfriend took my hand and squeezed it, casually, affectionately, the hand of a woman who loves her boyfriend and has no idea that she just eviscerated him.
The woman in the aisle seat spoke to me about an hour into the flight.
She’d finished her book—or set it aside, more likely, because I noticed she’d been on the same page for a while—and she turned to me and said, in a quiet, conversational tone, “Is this your first time visiting?”
Small talk. The kind of small talk that happens on airplanes, the forced intimacy of strangers in close quarters. She was being polite. She was being friendly. She was also, I suspected, giving herself a reason to look at me, to study my face, to see the man who had been publicly small-dicked by his girlfriend thirty minutes ago.
“First time, yeah,” I said.
“How exciting.” She smiled. A real smile, warm and open, the kind of smile that says I’m a nice person and I’m not going to bring up the thing. “Where are you headed?”
I told her. She nodded. She asked a follow-up question. I answered. We had a conversation—the kind of light, surface-level conversation that happens between strangers on airplanes, covering the basics of destination, purpose, and duration. She was easy to talk to. She was smart and funny and had the kind of confidence that comes from being comfortable in your own skin.
And the whole time, the thing was there. Under every word, behind every smile, the thing was there. She knew. She knew my dick was small. She’d heard it from my girlfriend’s mouth, she’d seen the statue, she’d seen my face, she’d snickered and looked away. And now she was talking to me about my holiday plans with the full knowledge that the man she was talking to had a penis the size of a little boy’s.
I could see it in her eyes. Not cruelty—she wasn’t cruel. But the awareness. The knowledge sitting behind her pupils, coloring everything she said. When she asked about the trip, she was also thinking about the magazine. When she smiled at my answer, she was also remembering my face. When she said “Have a wonderful trip,” she was also saying I know your secret, and I’m not going to say it, but I know.
“Thank you,” I said. “You too.”
She smiled. She picked up her book. She turned to a new page—actually reading this time, I think. And I sat there, in the middle seat, between my girlfriend and a woman who knew, and I felt the smallness of my dick inside my jeans. I felt the heat in my face, and I felt the thing that I always feel in these moments—the thing I don’t want to feel, the thing I can’t stop feeling, the thing that is shame and arousal and the terrible, confusing overlap between them.
—
My girlfriend fell asleep about three hours in. She curled against the window, her head on a neck pillow, her mouth slightly open, her breathing slow. She looked peaceful. She looked innocent. She looked like a person who had not, three hours ago, told a full airplane row that her boyfriend’s penis was the same size as a cherub statue’s.
I was awake. I was very awake. I was the kind of awake that happens when your body is running on adrenaline and cortisol and the lingering heat of public humiliation. I sat in my seat, stared at the back of the seat in front of me, and thought about it.
I thought about the statue. The small, stone, child-sized penis. The way my girlfriend had looked at it and thought of me. The immediacy of the connection—no hesitation, no filter, just that’s the same size as yours. The casualness. The matter-of-factness. She hadn’t said it to humiliate me. She’d said it because it was true and she said true things out loud. She was a person who observed the world and narrated it, and the observation she’d made about the statue and my dick was just another data point in her running commentary on the world.
That’s what made it devastating. It wasn’t cruel. It was honest. She’d seen a small penis on a statue and her mind had gone to mine, and she’d said it, and the two women next to us had heard it, and the honesty of it was worse than cruelty would have been. Cruelty I could dismiss. Cruelty I could file under she’s being mean. Honesty I couldn’t dismiss. Honesty I had to sit with, in the middle seat, for three more hours, with the knowledge that my girlfriend looked at a famous statue of a naked boy and saw me.
I looked down at my lap. At my jeans. At the flat front of them—the denim sitting smooth and undisturbed over my crotch, no bulge, no shape, no evidence of a penis underneath. Just flat. Like the briefs. Like the underwear I wore at home, the ones that showed nothing because there was nothing to show. The jeans were the same. Everything I wore was the same. Flat, empty, smooth. A front with nothing behind it.
The woman in the aisle seat was reading. The flight attendant was in the galley. My girlfriend was asleep. And I was sitting in the middle seat with a half-hard dick that was invisible inside my jeans, three inches pressing against the denim without creating any visible change. I was thinking about the statue, the snicker, the face the woman had made, and the way the flight attendant had looked at me with something almost like pity.
I was hard. Not fully—half-hard, maybe, the kind of partial erection that happens when the body is responding to a situation that the mind hasn’t fully processed. My dick was maybe two inches, maybe two and a half, stirring inside my jeans, and I could feel it—feel the smallness, the thinness, the way it barely existed even when it was trying to be hard. I pressed my hand against the front of my jeans, casually, the way a man adjusts himself, and I felt myself through the denim. Nothing. Barely anything. A small, warm nub that was trying to be an erection and was managing something closer to a suggestion.
I thought about the statue—the Manneken Pis. The little boy peeing. The small penis that was the same size as mine.
I thought about my girlfriend saying it. The words. The volume. The way they’d landed in the air between us and been heard by two strangers who would carry the knowledge of my small dick off the plane and into their lives, into their stories, into the anecdotes they’d tell at dinner parties: I was on a flight once, and this woman said her boyfriend’s dick was the same size as the Manneken Pis.
I thought about the flight attendant’s snicker. The woman’s face. The pressed lips, the looking away, the amusement they were trying to hide and couldn’t.
I was fully hard now. Three inches, inside my jeans, invisible, pressing against the flat denim without creating a shape. I could feel it straining—my full, maximum, hardest erection, and the jeans were still flat. Still smooth. Still showing nothing. If anyone had looked at my lap, they would have seen nothing. No bulge. No outline. No evidence that a penis was present and erect and trying.
That was the thing. That was always the thing. Even hard, even aroused, even in the moment of maximum humiliation, my dick was too small to show. Too small to create a visible shape in my clothes. Too small to be anything other than absent. The statue had a bigger presence than I did, and it was made of stone, two inches tall, and a child.
—
The flight attendant came through the cabin with the snack service. She was pushing the cart, handing out pretzels and cookies, moving efficiently down the aisle. She reached our row. She looked at my girlfriend—asleep, curled against the window—and then at me.
“She’s out,” I said quietly, gesturing at my girlfriend.
The flight attendant smiled. She leaned over to place a snack on my girlfriend’s tray table, and as she did, she was close again—close enough that I could smell her perfume, the same light floral scent from before. She straightened up and looked at me.
“Snack for you?” she asked. She was holding a small package of pretzels and a package of cookies. Her eyes met mine, and for a moment, I saw it again—the awareness, the memory, the knowledge of what had been said. She was looking at me, and she was thinking about the statue and my dick and the comparison and my red face, and she was trying to be professional. She was mostly succeeding, and the part of her that wasn’t succeeding was visible in the slight tightness at the corners of her mouth.
“Pretzels, please,” I said.
She handed me the pretzels. Our fingers touched again. This time, she held for just a beat longer than necessary—not long enough to be inappropriate, not short enough to be nothing. A moment. A fraction of a moment. And in that moment, she looked at me with an expression that I couldn’t fully read—something between sympathy and amusement and something else, something almost like curiosity, like she was wondering about the man in 23B and his small dick and his sleeping girlfriend and the six-hour flight he was spending in the middle seat with the knowledge of what had been said.
“Enjoy,” she said. She moved on.
I ate my pretzels. I stared at the seat in front of me. My dick was soft again—retreated, shrunk, barely there inside my jeans. The arousal had faded into something quieter, something that sat in my stomach like a low heat, like an ember, like the memory of a fire that was no longer burning but hadn’t gone out.
—
The plane landed. The seatbelt sign dinged. The cabin filled with the sounds of arrival—seatbelts unbuckling, bags unzipping, phones coming out of airplane mode, the collective rustle of two hundred people preparing to stand up and squeeze into the aisle and wait.
My girlfriend woke up. She stretched, yawned, rubbed her eyes. She looked at me and smiled—the smile of a woman who has had a nice nap and is ready for her holiday.
“Good sleep?” I asked.
“Great,” she said. She kissed my cheek. She was warm and affectionate and present and completely, utterly, blissfully unaware.
The woman in the aisle seat stood up. She gathered her book, her bag, her jacket. She turned to me one more time.
“Enjoy your trip,” she said. The same words, the same smile, the same warmth. And then, just for a moment—just long enough that I caught it, just long enough that it registered—her eyes dropped. Down. To my lap. To the flat front of my jeans. Just a glance, a fraction of a second, the kind of look that could be accidental, could be nothing, could be a person’s eyes naturally moving as they stand up. But it wasn’t nothing. It was a look. She was looking at the place where my dick was, the place where it wasn’t visible, the place that was flat and smooth and empty, and she was looking because she knew what was there—or rather, what wasn’t.
She smiled. She turned and joined the line in the aisle. She walked off the plane without looking back.
The flight attendant was at the door, thanking passengers as they exited. She was standing in the aisle, composed, professional, beautiful, saying thank you, have a wonderful trip, thank you to each person who passed. When I reached her, she looked at me one last time.
“Thank you,” she said. And then, very quietly, just for me, just low enough that my girlfriend—who was ahead of me, already in the jetway—couldn’t hear: “Don’t worry about it.”
She smiled. A real smile, not a snicker, not a suppressed laugh. A smile that said, “I heard it; I laughed; I’m sorry I laughed; and you don’t need to worry about it.” A smile that was kind and also, underneath the kindness, still a little bit amused, because the amusement hadn’t fully left, because the image of my face when my girlfriend said it was still in her mind, because the whole situation was still, on some level, funny.
I nodded. I walked off the plane. My girlfriend was waiting for me in the terminal, looking at the departures board, planning our next step. She saw me and waved and smiled, and I walked toward her, and I was carrying the moment with me—the statue, the words, the snickers, the faces, the glances, the six hours in the middle seat with the knowledge that my girlfriend had compared my penis to a cherub’s and two strangers had heard and laughed and known.
—
That was three months ago. We’re still together. She still says things—true things, casual things, the unfiltered observations of a person who narrates the world. She’s said other things about my dick since then, in private, in bed, in moments of honesty that land on me the same way the statue comment did. She’s not cruel. She’s honest. And the honesty is its own kind of humiliation, its own kind of exposure, its own kind of truth that I can’t escape because it’s true.
I think about the flight sometimes. I think about the magazine, the statue, and the words. I think about the flight attendant’s snicker, the woman’s face, and the way they both looked at me, then looked away. I think about the middle seat and the six hours and the flat front of my jeans and the small, invisible erection that was my response to being exposed.
I looked up the Manneken Pis. I read about it. I looked at photos. I zoomed in on the penis—the small, stone, child-sized penis that my girlfriend had looked at and thought of me. I stood in my bathroom with my phone in one hand and my dick in the other and I compared.
She was right. It’s about the same.
I think about that sometimes. I think about the fact that there is a famous statue in Brussels—a statue that millions of people visit, that is reproduced on postcards and keychains and chocolate boxes—and its penis is the same size as mine. That my girlfriend saw it and made the connection. That the connection is accurate.
I think about the flight attendant, the woman in the aisle seat, and the fact that they know. They know my dick is small. They know it’s the size of a cherub statue’s. They know because my girlfriend said it out loud on a full airplane, and they heard it, and they laughed, and they looked at my face, and they saw the truth of it written in my blush.
I think about the next flight. The next time we travel. The next time my girlfriend is next to me in a confined space with strangers and a magazine and her unfiltered mouth. I think about what she might say next. What she might compare me to. Who might hear.
I think about the flat front of my jeans. The space. The three inches that is all I have.
I think about the statue, peeing forever in Brussels, small and famous and the same size as me.
I think about the snicker. The face. The looking away.
I think about it, and my dick gets hard, and it’s invisible, and the invisibility is the thing.
The End.
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