The neighbour had moved out in a hurry, and that wasn't the least of it. The movers that had come following his departure had seemed equally hurried about the transfer of his belongings. They had arrived during the day, when most people were at school, at work, or out running errands, and a dozen large men in leather jackets had moved the entire contents of the house into a truck in under an hour. On this fairly quiet suburban street, people noticed things like that.
People like Jo, curled up in her bed, getting over the flu on a school day, peeping out the window as the furniture disappeared into the white truck.
Soon enough, all that was left were twin tyre-tracks in the lawn where the truck had backed up next to the side door of the house for loading. Through the windows she could clearly see the house was devoid of any possessions at all. The curtains were gone, and scruffy floorboards were left where previously there had been carpets.
The neighbour, Paul, had been a pleasant enough guy. Friendly. Unremarkable. At 25, he'd been a good seven years older than her, but not so much older that she'd been unable to savour the occasional fantasy. Now an old couple would probably move into the house and she'd have no-one to lust after except the idiot boys back at school. The last time she'd seen Paul, he'd been wandering to the back of his garden, where a back gate gave onto a dirt road that led into the woods. The road where Paul had parked his trailer when he first arrived.
The movers hadn't gone out the back of the garden, they were probably going to tow the trailer away.
"Josephine Charlotte Emin".
"Present".
English Literature. Professor Jacobs had always, and would always, take roll call. Must be something to do with the previous generation. Jo still felt like she had cotton wool in her head, but she was definitely on the mend, and sufficiently so that her mother had decided she could make the effort and go to school today. This being the last class of the day, she only had another hour to go before going home.
Mike Cowley was sitting next to her, sweaty and fat. Sitting seemed to be an activity to him, the longer it went on, the hotter and more sweaty he seemed to get. Jo was wearing a skirt to compensate for the heat, and the way he looked at her legs was making her uncomfortable. "Everyone wants what they can't have", she thought.
Class was soon over, and true to form, the Cowley kid had scarpered, not having managed to build up the courage to exchange more than a glance with her. The thirty minute walk home was ample time for her to consider the very unattractive boys in her class. Those that weren't hideous were so obnoxious she wanted nothing to do with them. She ran through the different options while she walked, and it was soon obvious to her that she would have to look further afield if she was to find someone she could like before she left for university at the end of the year. As a senior in her class, at 18 years old, almost the entire school was now younger than her, and the few people in her year that were presentable she had eliminated as potential romantic interests ages ago.
Her thoughts were just coming to the point where she'd start thinking about Paul the neighbour and the adolescent fantasies she had on permanent repeat in her mind when she walked past the trailer.
It was long, oblong and silver coloured - like a battered metal train carriage on wheels. She only had a few meters to go before coming across the gate to her parents garden, but the trailer was right there - she really wanted to know something about Paul - something to nourish her fantasies. Anyway, the door of the trailer would inevitably be locked. All she had to do was try the handle, see that she couldn't get in, and be on her way. How hard was that?
The handle was warm in her hand, the sun had been beating down on the trailer all day and it had to be like a furnace in there now. The handle dropped, she pushed on the door. It was locked. She could see the metal latch in the gap between the door and the frame. The door was sealed. She could go home now. At least she'd tried.
Her mother would be furious. There were already mud stains on her skirt from where her knees pressed the hem into the ground, but she'd seen the reflected light from something underneath the trailer, and thinking it was a way in, had decided to get on her hands and knees and see what the light was from. After all, she had tried to get in through the door, it was only logical for her to follow through and test if there were any other exits, and Paul had left, as had his somewhat ominous and curiously efficient movers. She looked up at the underside of the trailer and saw the gap in the floor panel that would require only a little effort to pry loose.
The inside of the trailer was as hot as she had anticipated. The metal had been standing out in the blazing sun for hours and the heat had nowhere to go. The furnishings, on the other hand, were anything but what she had expected.
The trailer had been stripped - it was like an empty room. You could see where a small kitchenette had once been installed from the holes in the wall where the piping had been attached, but all the amenities had been stripped, as had any partitioning or separation - the entire inside had been fashioned into one large room with no windows and nothing to distract from the object, hidden under a heavy blanket, in the centre of the empty space.
She wasn't sure if she should touch it. It was pretty large - the size of a child's cot perhaps, but wider and shorter. It was as high has her belly button. She was also getting very warm very fast in this furnace. There were a good three hours of sunlight left before this place would start to cool down, and even then, it would do so only slowly.
She grabbed the edge of the blanket and pulled, revealing a gleaming statue made of black stone.
She wasn't sure what she'd expected, but it wasn't this. The statue was of a naked man, lying on his back. There were a number of things wrong with it - quite apart from the obvious fact that he wore a prominent erection. The torso was too wide and too large in proportion to the height of his body, the chest was too small, and the legs were in a position that didn't seem to be natural for a person lying on their back, with one foot off the ground and one knee leaning inwards. His hands were at the end of a couple of slightly foreshortened forearms and his hands were halfway up his chest, as though he was holding a woman by the waist while she was astride him. His face was unnaturally beautiful.
Most of all, his erection was a strange shape. It rose proudly at forty-five degrees from his groin, before curving smoothly back towards the space between his belly-button and the root of his cock. At the base of the erection, pubic hair had been carved into the stone as sinewy patterns set into the chest above the crotch.