Arcanum et Homunculus
Person of uncertain gender, solo masturbation and penetrative vaginal sex using a marble statue whose sentience is unclear.
The tower room was a small circular space that could be crossed in less than twenty strides, and it was all that I knew for sure, or that is, all that I had physical experience of. There was one window, from which I could see the bristly canopy of the forest stretching nearly to the horizon, and in the other directions I had no real idea. I rarely saw another human being, and certainly from this high in my stone prison I would have no way of talking with them. The only other person I ever spoke to was my caretaker, my guardian, a woman who had raised me but made it clear that I was not her child in other ways than parental responsibility. For the most part I had cared for myself since I had been brought here, however long ago that may have been. Food was provided twice a day, usually in a small basket that was winched up to my window, and occasionally my caretaker arrived to check that I was progressing to her satisfaction, though what precisely she expected of me was something I still struggled to understand.
I could inventory the contents of the room in a single glance: a small narrow bed, a washstand with basin and jug, a commode in the corner, a small chest containing a number of well-read leatherbound books, and the statue. The statue, I assume, had been here as long as the tower, as it fit so well in the alcove in which it stood, and was so large and solid that I could not imagine it had been placed here. Rather, I had always fancied, the tower had been built around it.
There were many things that I knew, as I had been provided with a small cache of books, from which I drew most of my knowledge. First was that my experience was very unusual as I, unlike most human beings, had no childhood and no formative early years. I had merely… not existed, and then, suddenly, one day five years ago (or so I had been told, but had little way of verifying the fact) here I was, fully formed, the size of a human adult and with all the same faculties, yet without the process of having become one. Brought into being, for no discernible purpose, to live in this tower and not interact with the outside world that I only half believed in. I did wonder if this too was a fabrication, whether perhaps I had been born of a womb as most humans were, and raised as a small being that played and scraped its knees and learned to walk and talk and read all in degrees. Perhaps it was merely that somehow I did not remember. Yet it seemed equally likely that I had bypassed such stages, which after all did not really seem necessary, and had instead emerged fully mature, waking up one morning in this tower room, already knowing many of the things that I might want to know, and yet still in some areas hopelessly naive.
My books entertained me for some of the time, and other times I amused myself by imagining the world outside my tower. I had plans to escape and explore the world, perhaps moving to a town or a city and spending time with all the people there. I pored over the ink drawings in my atlas, wondering how the ocean would feel on my bare legs, or what grass would smell like if I crushed the verdant blades between my fingertips and rubbed them to my nostrils. Sometimes I asked my guardian to bring me fragments of the outside world, just to touch, to smell, to experience as more than a shadow, but she scoffed and told me that the outside world was nothing but dirt and fear. When I pleaded and cried, she would bring me another book, knowing that this would be enough to calm my curiosity for at least a day.
Some days I spent hours stripped to the skin, hands tracing the shape of my body, curiously stroking the flesh that was not mentioned in my book about the human anatomy, where everybody was a skeleton or a mass of bloodied muscles. Nowhere did it mention that skin was the softest texture, and yet if you rubbed your fingertips with the correct pressure, it felt as though the strangest sensation was writhing its way through your entire body, to your core, and just from a touch- remarkable! I felt like the inventors I read about, discovering for the first time the way the flesh pulsed between my legs when I pressed, just so, on the base of my throat, or caught my nipples between my curved knuckles and twisted until I almost cried with pain and my hips turned and distorted.
I knew enough about anatomy from the illustrations in my books to know that there seemed to often be two main types of genitalia, which was also my sample size. I had seen my own, of course, explored it in detail, legs sprawled across my bed and lifting my hips to see as much as possible. I had also the statue, which was a thing of hard green-ish marble, carved with a face that frowned with the eyes and smiled with the mouth, and stood entirely naked with legs slightly apart on the plinth and a slightly curved shaft pointing mostly upright towards the stomach, and a solid but delicately carved, with veins and all, scrotal sac. That was the other main type of genitals I knew about, though if I hadn’t had the book with the diagrams I would perhaps have assumed that there were infinite types. Even if I could vaguely group them to these two categories, however, neither I nor the statue looked identical to the pictures. Certainly none of the pictures showed anything so straight and hard and upright as the marble appendage attached to my companion, and my own genitalia was more furred and much more fleshy than the meagre arrangement of lines in my book which were labelled ‘vulva’.
Sometimes I wondered what sort of body my guardian, the only other human I had ever seen, had underneath the cloak she usually wear when visiting me. It was simply curiosity, you understand. My sample size was far too limited. Two sets of genitalia didn’t seem nearly enough to go off, especially when one of them was made of stone. I longed to know, for example, whether anybody else shuddered and grew liquid between the thighs when they rubbed in a certain place.
Don’t misunderstand me: I knew precisely what these things were for, even if I did not know the precise ins and outs. I knew about sexual intercourse in the most abstract mechanical sense, and I spent time cautiously easing fingers into the soft warm space between my legs, muffling my gasps with a pillow even though there was no other person for miles, and spreading the wetness that coated my fingers, tracing circles, and endless spirals, pressing harder until my body was shaking and heat was flooding me from my scalp to my toes until I wasn’t able to conceal the sound wrenched from my open mouth.
As I learnt more about the reactions I could elicit from my body, I stopped thinking so much about the world outside the tower. It could swallow entire days. My fantasies became much more specific, not merely about interacting with people in the outside world but touching and moreover being touched, by three, four, five at once maybe. I imagined my body being overwhelmed with hands and pressed with other skin and feeling pleasure crash over me.
Some days I swivelled my body and propped myself up to look across at the statue, at their naked form, and their smiling lips. One arm resting casually at their side, the fist clenches at their hip, and the other arm bent across their torso, hand spread over where their heart would be, if they were alive. The pose was so lifelike and the carving so intricate that it was easy to pretend that they were another person of flesh and blood, who had perhaps climbed through the open window, or used the trapdoor in the floor, accessible only from below, that my guardian used.
My fingers between my legs and eyes trained on the statue, I imagined them stepping closer and their fingers replacing my own. As I slid one digit deeper, I tried my best to tell myself that it wasn’t mine. I imagined that they wouldn’t say a word- not needing to, after all, since they had been here as long as I had. We spent every minute in the same room, and they had been watching me touch myself for hours. They knew what I wanted and, in my mind, they wanted it too- wanted to touch me.
I’m not sure exactly when I decided to do it. It felt like maybe it was in the back of my mind for a long time. My arousal throbbing and trickling down my thighs, I pushed myself upright and padded the small distance from the foot of my bed to where the statue stood. When I stood on the plinth, we felt more like the same height, although I was still outmatched by more than a foot. I felt hard cold marble pressing against my front and I wrapped my arms around their neck and pulled myself up off my feet, flinging my legs around their waist, crossing them at the ankle and feeling my toes brush against the rough stone at the back of the alcove. A shiver of excitement ran through my body as I slipped my hands to grasp the figure’s shoulders for support and used my arms to lift myself up and lower my spread legs to press against the tip of the marble phallus before I carefully let myself slide down. At first I forced myself to be patient, but the feeling was exhilarating and I relaxed the grip of my arms, slipping with a jolt to take the entire thing inside me, and letting out a small groan as I felt myself stretched open. The angle was awkward, frustrating, and I wanted more. I lifted my hips, using my thighs to lower and then lift again, gasping as I felt a jolt of pleasure low in my groin, and desperately grasped the statue’s shoulders and bouncing my entire upper body, with legs locked hard on their hips, not caring about the bruising pressure on the inside of my thighs.
In fact, the more I moved, the more I thrust myself onto the statue, it felt more and more as though it wasn’t a statue at all, but a real human person, alive and desperate for me. I felt as though the part of them inside me was real, sensate, twitching hard with each rock of my hips. It had been a frequent part of my imaginings, the idea that lust for me would cause the statue to come to life, and I imagined it now as I moved faster, wetness spreading further down my thighs and making loud sloppy noises. I imagined that the statue’s frozen stone hands would come to life and grip me by the hips, using their strength to lift me and lower me and thrusting their hips to powerfully use my body for their own release just as I was in fact using theirs for mine.
I could feel my body grow closer and closer to finishing, just as I began to hear a faraway noise, but I was unable to fully process it while my brain was fogged so fully and focused purely on the idea of reaching climax. I imagined my partner was pressing me up against the wall and holding me there purely by the powerful thrusts of their hips, and cried out as I was tipped over the edge, heat exploding through each nerve or so it felt, as though I was being filled with lava. Dimly, I heard the noise again, and finally realised what it must mean: my guardian’s footstep on the wooden staircase that led up to the locked trapdoor which in turn led from my room.
Quick as a flash, I swung myself down, bare feet landing on the floorboards with a thud, and I grabbed a quilt from the bed to hurriedly wipe down the statue before turning to pick up my robe and pulling it over my head, throwing myself on the bed and catching up a book. I could feel liquid, thicker than my usual fluid, leaking from between my legs and pooling on the bedsheets, and quickly twisted the robe to press up and hide that area, as well as to soak up some of the liquid. Much more than usual. As I swiped myself as clean as I could do under the circumstances, some of it coated the outside of my finger and I sucked it clean, momentarily surprised at how different to usual it tasted: more salty, and of a different consistency.
But I barely had time to think about it before I heard the familiar sound of bolts sliding across and padlocks being opened, and the creak of the trapdoor opening. I quickly buried my face in the book I had picked up, pretending to be deeply engrossed in a watercolour sketch of a foxglove flower. Hoping that I didn’t look like I had been up to anything, I gazed over the top of the book at my caretaker, stepping up out of the trapdoor towards me. Over her shoulder, I could see the statue, still solid marble, unmoving and upright, with that same fixed expression. My eyes travelled down automatically to the crotch, and the once rigid shaft that now curled and nestled down between the statue’s legs, in a way that, despite being carved from solid marble, almost looked soft.
