Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex

Background: The Dream LISA TUTTLE

YOU’VE ASKED ME TO tell you about myself.

I’ll begin with the dream.

First, the precipitating cause: One night I noticed a small excrescence on my inner thigh. It wasn’t painful or disfiguring, but once having noticed it I became increasingly aware and self-conscious whenever dressing or undressing brought it to my attention, and I wondered how long it had been there, and what it was. You know how it is, especially getting older, when every minor bodily change or malfunction makes you think in terms of Early Warning Signs rather than simple mutability. One day, sitting naked on the edge of the bed, I began to prod and then to pinch it until eventually I pressed it between my thumbs and squeezed it like a pimple. And I guess it was a pimple, or something similar, because when I squeezed, out shot a long, thin yellow stream. I was mildly shocked, squeamishly excited, a child again in my response to a bodily emission. The little bump or lump was gone. There was a slight redness at the site for the next day or two, then nothing.

I didn’t forget. For a long time I examined the skin of my inner thighs compulsively, but I never again found a similar blemish.

Phallic symbolism? Call it what you like, but it really happened, and seems to me to be an (if not the) obvious source for the dream that followed, some months later.

In the dream I’d had a small, fleshy growth on my inner thigh for some time without doing anything about it. I was vaguely aware that it was growing larger, but when I finally examined it closely I was shocked to see an excrescence as long and thick as one of my fingers. I felt squeamish about handling it, and knew at once that I would not be able to rid myself of it by squeezing it. The excrescence was enormously, seemingly abnormally, sensitive to the slightest pressure. And even after I’d dressed myself I was morbidly aware of it chafing between my thighs. I had the horrible feeling it was growing larger and didn’t dare look at it again, fearful that it had been my own examination of the thing which had made it suddenly so much worse. Terrified, I wondered what it was. It was too much to hope that such a thing could vanish as suddenly as it appeared; I’d have to see a doctor about getting it removed.

With a tremendous sense of relief that there was something I could do, I woke, and for a few moments, swimming hazily in the aftermath of sleep, I could think of nothing but calling my doctor, wondering how soon he’d be able to see me, and how simple or difficult the subsequent operation would prove to be.

Then I woke a little more and realized I’d been dreaming. The relief was that much greater: there was no peculiar growth on my inner thigh; the whole thing had been a dream. To prove it to myself I passed my hand across, over, down and up my bare thighs beneath the sheet. Bare, smooth flesh made me smile until I felt it.

So much bigger, fatter, grosser than it had been in the dream—full of pus, I thought in helpless horror—and attached to me, undeniably growing out of my body, sprouting not from one of my legs as in the dream, but in reality from my trunk, rooted in my pubis and dangling—this was no mere phallic symbol but the thing itself.

Nauseous with shock, I struggled to cling to the idea that this, too, was a dream and in a moment I would wake.

But I was as wide-awake then as I am now. I am what I have always been, and I have always had this thing, this normal, fleshy excrescence. I’ve been told that my memories of a different sort of body are delusions. I can’t argue with the records, pictures, doctors, facts, authorities, you—but neither can I argue with my feelings. I don’t want this fat, swelling thing. It’s not me. I’ve tried and tried to get rid of it, but now they’ve tied my hands. Please, won’t you help me? Please, just squeeze it for me.