Atyphobia
by Hari Manev
Fidelio was
surprised by how easily he adjusted to life among
the Snailwooders.
Still, he was
concerned: How long would it take before the
snails exposed him as a fraud?
Surely Fidelio
was not an ordinary snail.
For one thing,
his penis did not show on his head.
Never fear—it
hadn’t been cut off; there just wasn’t
any trace of a penis on Fidelio’s head.
What was more,
there wasn’t any trace of a vagina on his
head either.
In short,
Fidelio didn’t look like a normal
Snailwooder.
The reason was
simple: Fidelio, a Slugwood slug, had overlooked
the full implications of using a snail house to
disguise his true identity.
He had
neglected to realize that snails and slugs, while
both carried their genitals on the right side of
the head, did so differently.
So as not to
be obstructed by their houses, snail penises and
vaginas were located closer to the top of the
head.
By contrast,
slugs, whose bodies were not hampered by shells,
carried their sex organs further down, almost on
their necks.
Clearly
Fidelio hadn’t taken this anatomical
difference into consideration when he’d
chosen a snail shell.
The house he’d
picked was too large for his body, so it covered
his penis and vagina entirely—hence, his
bizarre appearance.
In any other
place, a genitalia-free body would have raised
questions—lots of questions.
But not among
the telepathically synchronized Snailwooders.
It took
Fidelio some time to get a handle on the nature
of Web Socialism.
First off, the
Slugwooders could not have constructed such a
synchronized social order because only a few
slugs could telepath.
There could be
no Web Socialism without telepathing: the
permanent sharing of all thoughts by all members
of society.
Second, slugs
and snails differed significantly in their
opinion of public shaming.
Unlike snails,
adult slugs opposed that social tool.
By contrast,
Snailwooders believed public shaming was a good
thing; it was at the heart of their synchronized
social order.
Snails
believed wrong thoughts were irreparable because
wrong deeds could be corrected while wrong
thoughts couldn’t be undone.
Thus, every
Snailwooder’s worst nightmare was to make a
thought blunder and not even be aware of it.
This peculiar
fearful state of mind was known as atyphobia.
Or, translated
in plain gastropod: fear of one’s own wrong
thoughts.
It must be
the overreliance on the safety of their shells
that makes them so fearful, Fidelio
thought about his new compatriots.
Atyphobia
depended on synchronized public shaming, which
was maintained by the Snailwood telepathic Media.
So that’s
how it works, Fidelio thought, admitting
that atyphobic Web Socialism was a very safe and
polite form of society.
Indeed, the
Snailwooders were superbly nice and polite; they
knew what questions to ask and what not to even
think about.
So the thought
that the genitalia-free Fidelio might not be a
snail never crossed the atyphobic minds of the
well-mannered Snailwooders.
Atyphobia
is the adapted chapter of The Eye, the first book
in the Twitter trilogy The Meaning of Fruth (published
as e-books on Amazon Kindle).
|
