Dr. Tolliver's Bosom Balm

Donald was nowhere to be seen when Bronagh arrived home from the town, and, heart pounding with the excitement of gatecrashing Doctor Tolliver's mystery contest, she set straight to work on her dress. It was a beautiful confection of silk in various shades of green, a colour she always felt not only reflected her proud Irish heritage, but set off her copper hair in bold contrast. She shed her brown corduroy waistcoat and, with no small amount of relief, unpicked the starched, boned corset and let her bosom inflate back outwards to fill out her undershirt so comprehensively that she worried that it too might be on the verge of ripping asunder. Bulbous beneath faded cream lace and cotton, each turgid breast jousted for occupancy of the sorely outmatched undergarment like two groundhogs in a burlap sack.

'Behave yourselves now,' Bronagh found herself muttering aloud to her breasts as she looked down at the jostling altercation under way before her. To show her breasts who was in charge, she gave her shoulders a brisk shimmy to settle them into their naturally jutting pout. The action sent a strange tingle through her, that began at her pink nipples as the fabric grazed them, then radiated outwards, reverberating through the resonating volumes of her bosom and as far as her every extremity, from her scalp to her toes to right down between her... she tried to ignore this new sensation and returned her attention to the here and now and the task in hand.

There was almost no fabric left to let out, and it was with great care and attention to detail that the young Irishwoman undertook the painstaking task of sewing together the various panels of the dress's upper portion to allow for the the greatest capacity. Bronagh frowned as she concluded that every fraction of an inch by which she increased the amount of room for her bosom reduced the amount of fabric which could be stitched together, which would result in a more fragile assembly. She decided that if her chest had more room to move about, the strength of double-stitching would be less necessary. And she could simply avoid too much chest-heaving by taking smaller, shorter breaths. It would be worth it, though. This dress was too gorgeous not to wear. She'd upstage those nasty women from the town. After all, they'd decided they hated her already, so she didn't seem to have much to lose any more.

She decided to go for an underbust corset. There was no room for anything in the upper half of the dress except her bosom and her bosom alone, not even underwear. Every single nook and cranny within the dress would have to be filled all the way up with breast. The responsibility for the maintaining of a smooth, dignified profile would be carried by the natural firmness and high shape of her bosom itself. As she strapped her lower torso into the boned support garment and tried on the newly-adjusted dress above it, she was satisfied that the way her breasts rose, protruded, and compressed together all by themselves created an illusion of underclothing that would fool anyone. Originally, the neckline of the dress had risen all the way up past her throat as high as her collarbone, but of course that was now no longer feasible, and now the decollétage swooped from shoulders all the way down to the equatorial expanses of her chest's halfway line. The deep, bulging cleft that extended from below her chin separated two vast domes of pale cream skin which descended, eventually, beneath a narrow margin of lace trim.

'No peeping out,' Bronagh said, growing more comfortable with this habit of addressing her breasts like disobedient pets, but her breasts didn't listen, and within seconds Bronagh could feel the cool breeze of freedom tickle her errant nipples, which slipped upwards into view like pink kittens' noses, buoyed by the balloon-like defiance of gravity which was one of the characteristics that made her breasts such an apparently enviable commodity.

She tucked the naughty nipples back down beneath the trim, but there was no guarantee that they would not make a bid for freedom at what would no doubt be the worst imaginable moment. And even with nipples out of view, the immense panorama of exposed bosom flesh was likely to invite all the wrong kind of attention. Bronagh saw on her sewing table a spare swatch of white lace, six by twelve inches in size. She placed it over the bared twin domes of her upper bosom, creating the illusion of a modesty-preserving undershirt of some kind, and the effect in her reflection pleased her, and so she shrugged her unruly puppies back out of the dress and sewed the panel loosely into place before putting it all back on again to admire the finished design. She was ready to go. Donald, wherever he was, could fix his own dinner.

Taking her hat, she hurried down the stairs to be sure of intercepting the early evening mail coach towards Cannon Town, from which she intended to alight when it passed through the charred remains of the original settlement, but as she set foot in the kitchen, there he was: Donald, darkening the doorway, backlit by the orange setting sun.

'Darling!' Bronagh stammered at last, her pounding heart wobbling her left breast about so much she feared it might betray her otherwise undetectable abandonment of a support garment for her jutting shelf of a chest.

'You look nice,' Donald said in a slurred snarl. He had uttered the same words on their wedding day, which now seemed an age ago in another place and another life. The words then had been tender, sincere and brimming with husbandly pride. But this evening, they sounded at best like an insult, at worst like a threat. He was drunk, as usual.

'I'm going out,' Bronagh replied by way of explanation for her heightened appearance. She wasn't usually this confident with her husband, and she cursed herself for allowing a slight tremor in her voice betray her fear of him. He had never been violent, but she had a feeling where that day was coming.

'You're going nowhere,' the liquor-sodden layabout said, then took a step forward, tripped over the doormat, and flew to the ground, walloping his forehead against the cast iron stove on the way down with a sickening thud.

He was out cold.

Bronagh was too taken aback to react at first. Her emotions were mixed, to say the least. Instinctively, she checked to see if he was still alive, and as she stooped to his side he let out a strange, guttural noise between a moan and a snore. Bronagh stood straight again and looked down at her pathetic, unconscious wreck of a husband. In a fit of anger, she wrestled her wedding band from her left ring finger and threw the cheap metal trinket into the pot of stew on the stove. 'Choke on it,' she hissed, fighting back tears.

Then, without a look back, she fled the house towards the road, where the mail wagon was approaching.

***

Bronagh was still fidgeting with her naked ring finger and trying to calm herself down when the wagon stopped in the burnt down old Cannon Town. Darkness was descending, and the whole place had an even eerier aspect than usual.

'You quite certain you gonna be all right, Mrs O'Shea?' the driver said as she hopped down.

'Quite certain,' said Bronagh, head held high. She tucked a stray copper lock from her brown behind her ear. She was less concerned now about the ghost town in which she was being abandoned than by the now very strange experience of being addressed as Mrs O'Shea. The name fit her as badly as the dress fit her bosom. The bumpy coach ride had caused her chest to bounce so much that her nipples had escaped the trim of the dress, and she was glad to have hit upon the idea to protect her modesty with the panel of lace which was still just about staying sewed in place. Furthermore she was fortunate to have nipples of such a gently blushing pink, as a darker pigmentation would have made those sensitive extremities very clearly visible through the small holes in the fabric. But, now alone, she took the precaution of tugging the dress back up until she felt her nipples disappear back down into the warmth of the tight-fitting cotton. 'And stay there,' she said aloud to those naughty nubs.

The old church hall was the only building standing, and was not only conspicuous from being brightly lit from within but from the sound of it crammed full of patrons to an extent it had never been in its former capacity as a place of worship. So Bronagh had no trouble locating it in the falling darkness.

As she stumbled along, holding her skirts high of the dusty terrain, she wondered how she would get home after the evening's event. She didn't feel that she could face Donald again. Her left hand felt strange and she realised that it was the absence of the wedding band. It was a weight lifted from hand and shoulders, but she didn't feel necessarily better for it. Even if she never returned home, she knew that Donald, proud as he was, would come after her. If she was to burn the bridge behind her, she wanted it completely and utterly raized to cinders like the remains of old Cannon Town that surrounded her in the fading light.

A poster pinned to a fencepost in front of the hall announced "WOMEN ONLY". Nothing else was written on the poster, but Bronagh recognised the suggestive snake drawing from Doctor Tolliver's advertisement at the foot of the paper and knew she was in the right place. All that troubled her was that despite the light from within and the horses waiting patiently without, no sound emitted from the hall, no speech, no response, no applause.

Bronagh pushed open the door and slipped inside.

The first thing that struck Bronagh was that the hall was full, which made the deathy silence all the more incongruous. She door creaked a little, and a women turned to hiss a faint "sshhh!" at her. It was one of the women who had taken to shunning Bronagh at the bath house, and, recognising her, she turned again to narrow her eyes and scowl, then returned her unblinking attention to the front of the room.

A flight of wooden steps led up to the small gallery, and Bronagh ascended as quietly as she could, just a few steps up, so that she could see over the heads and hats of the assembled ladies to see what it was on the stage that was keeping them so breathlessly rapt.

The sight which met Bronagh's eyes shocked her to the core.

A man was standing on the stage, his left side turned to the audience. This, she presumed, was Doctor Thornton Ignatius Tolliver. He was very much in the mould of the snake-oil hustlers who visited the town regularly. Tall, gaunt of build, perhaps in his mid-forties. His chin-length dark hair was shiny with pomade and slicked backwards, his waxed moustache curled fancifully beneath a Roman nose. Behind him, to stage left, a placard on an easel promised the same reward as the flypaper had. His jacket hung on a wooden chair, and shirt garters clung to the arms of his pinstripe shirt.

So far, so predictable, but what Bronagh could not have predicted was that Doctor Tolliver's suit trousers hung half way down to his knees where he stood, and from the opening his his grey long-johns extended a pink, thick, fully erect penis. And this penis was enjoying the determined left hand of Mrs Gulliver, the undertaker's wife, who knelt before him, herself still fully dressed, on a prayer stool of all things, her tongue protruding from the corner of her mouth as she dedicated her concentrated manual efforts to the rhythmic stroking of the obscene priapism before her.

Bronagh clutched the hand rail as a fierce blush boiled in her freckled, ample breast, setting off the emerald green of her dress in contrast still starker than before. It had been a long time - longer than she cared to recall - that she had engaged in sexual relations with her Donald. Whatever remained of his ability to perform after no doubt exhausting it on the whores of the Cannon Town saloon was invariably eradicated by the excessive intake of cheap whiskey. And so it was now some years ago that Bronagh had seen an erect organ. She had not expected to see another man's, nor would she ever have expected to see one in public. Not so turgid. Not so long.

An alarm clock rang on stage, and an expectant murmur went through the crowd of women that filled the old church hall.

'Time's up, madam,' Doctor Tolliver said. There was a Southern twang to his voice. New Orleans, perhaps? Bronagh had not yet attuned her ear to the varying accents of this sprawling frontier. Mrs Gulliver reluctantly let go of the medicine peddler's protruding rod, and it twanged rigidly from the horizontal to its natural angle, aiming up at the vaulted ceiling. As the undertaker's wife stood, collecting her skirts, and made her way back to the steps at the side of the wooden stage, Doctor Tolliver turned, tumescent nude erection shuddering and throbbing, to the crowd, a genial smile spread beneath his dapper moustache. 'A valiant effort, I'm sure you will agree ladies?' Some lacklustre applause arose. Doctor Tolliver raised a tin bucket from the table behind him and jingled its contents. 'The pot now stands at some sixty dollars!' he announced. 'And still my patented stamina tonic keeps little Thornton here from either deflating, or from depleting the backlog of seed stored within the sack beneath! The next contestant please!'

To Bronagh's further surprise, the Doctor cupped his pendulous pink scrotum from beneath with his right hand and hefted it to illustrate the plentitude of its contents. It was now dawningh upon Bronagh what exactly was happening here. The challenge was, for a fee, to propel the lanky-limbed (and prodigously-endowed) scientist to issuance within an alloted time. With each attempt by a plucky Cannon Town woman, the accumulated pot of money grew, while the Doctor, presumably, veered closer and closer to the point where his powers of resistance - medicinally aided though they may be - would finally give in to stimulation. The woman to overpower him would win the pot of money, and a free supply of the product. Public obscenity aside, it was a powerful advertisement for the tonic he was selling, which the womenfolk would most likely buy in large quantities in order to guarantee peak performance from their husbands in the bedroom. And even if some skilled masturbatory practitioner were to take Doctor Tolliver's increasingly overstimulated organ over that explosive edge, it looked like this contest had been under way for at least an hour, and so the selling point had been well and truly made.

Another woman was making her way onto the stage, eyeing that insurmountable challenge of an erect penis with pursed lips as she dropped her fee into the proferred bucket. She looked to be around forty, hair elaborately combed and streaked with grey. Under all the powder and blusher Bronagh was certain she would recognised her from the bath house, another of the flat-chested, scrawny townswomen.

'Your name, madam?' said the lewdly exposed scientist.

'Isabella DeVere,' the contestant announced.

'Well, Mrs DeVere, I must remind you of the rules. You have one minute to induce me to orgasm by any means at your disposal. Nudity, however, is not allowed and will result in disqualification. Do you accept these conditions?'

'I do, Doctor Tolliver,' said Mrs DeVere with undisguised eagerness to get down to business.

Doctor Tolliver counted down from three, set the alarm clock, placed it on the table beside the tin bucket, and stood, erection outstretched, in order to submit himself to the woman's experimental ministrations.

She hesitated. Bronagh, inhibitions dwindling as she began to take a greater interest in these crude proceedings, found herself frustrated with Mrs DeVere's timewasting as the seconds ticked past. She thought of the envious looks of the townswomen. They knew that her body had grown irresistible, and were using arbitrary rules of fashion against her. Driving Doctor Tolliver to climax would be easy! Especially after he had been holding it in for so long. These ointments and balms were always a hoax anyway, there had to be some trick to it. No nudity was allowed, it seemed, but the line would presumably be drawn at the revealing of nipples. Were Bronagh to remove the lace panel covering her décolletage, then the vast acreage of creamy bosom left on display would most certainly help her on her way. Assuming, of course, that Doctor Tolliver was that way inclined. Not all men liked bosoms, of course. Some were leg men, some preferred posteriors. But the rule about nudity suggested to her that nudity of the upper body was specifically what would count as cheating. So the closer she could get to cheating without breaking the rules would mean certain victory.

Mrs DeVere was cradling the Doctor's testicles and flicking the tip of his purple plumlike head of his penis with a tentative tongue when the alarm went off. Another inexpert sexual encounter had failed, increasing the pot of money yet further. Honestly, thought Bronagh. These women didn't deserve husbands with stamina like this, if that was all they were capable of!

Husband. Bronagh's thoughts returned to Donald with horrible mixed feelings. She was never going to return. So she had no need of a lifetime's supply of male stamina tonic. But the money would come in very useful if she were to run away to start a new life elsewhere.

'Me!' cried Bronagh. The word had left her mouth before she could even consider it further. She waved her hand in the air, feeling her bosom fight against the dress as it wagged, otherwise unconstrained, from side to side.

The womenfolk turned, and tongues clicked and muttered.

'The young redheaded lady at the back,' said Tolliver over the sniffing heads, his white teeth flashing. 'Come to the stage, please!'

Head held high, and doing her best to ignore (or to be perceived to ignore) the snide remarks of her fellow women all around, Bronagh made her way from the staircase along the side of the hall. As she went, she discreetly whipped the lace panel from her bosom, taking a glance down to make sure that those naughty pink nipples were staying concealed just beneath the ornate neckline of the green dress. Eventually, she reached the small stack of crates that functioned as steps up to the platform at the front, and ascended.