3 inches. Covered in short hair. Curled around itself like a question mark knocked down for the count. Gyn let it slide across her hand. She opened her palms exposing the fleshy part to the thing that throbbed like an organ.

Viral shuddered. Watching Gyn on her knees in the dirt of the mall's overgrown garden, allowing something so foreign, so small, so alive, caress her skin with its own violated a rule to which he did not know he held himself. Playing dirty was beneath him.

"What?" Gyn asked, her light Turkish accent appearing on her question's closing consonant. "You don't like the way it feels?"

The smile on her lips, the gentle manner with which she cradled the object of her affection in her cupped hand, the rich, green, brown eyes reflecting back the heavens through the skylight into Viral, the supplicant request for him to meet her on the terms of what gave her pleasure, pushed Viral like an ocean. But reason trumped emotion, and emotion implied truth. When then was it reasonable to lie? Viral concluded, definitely not when a woman was kneeling before him.

"No," he said. He did not like the way it feels.

"You just haven't tried with someone else," Gyn said. She took his hand in hers and pulled him toward the ground. Kneeling near her in the dirt Viral could not tell if the warmth he felt beneath him was from the soil or the loin. Science being the discipline of conjecture and criticism, Viral decided to test his hypothesis. Cautiously, he ventured to find out.

He eased his tail bone further on to his heels, allowing his shins to sink into the dirt. He allowed Gyn to unwrap his fingers with hers and create a bridge between their palms.

The caterpillar Gyn had been entertaining in her hands shuffled its dozens of feet toward the edge where skin met skin. It paused for a moment, seeming unsure of the integrity of the structure on to which it would pass. In its hesitation Viral felt a familiar burn of rejection.

But then the caterpillar came and Viral felt its organic, chaotic being on his own. Skin on skin except not skin, fuzz, hair, insect.

The revulsion bucked through Viral like the spasm of a long held sneeze. He felt the wind whip past his ear before he saw the body of the caterpillar splat against the tree trunk at which he threw it.

"What the f*ck, Viral!" Gyn shouted.

Viral's hand was covering his mouth. Slowly, he pulled it away, looked at it. What had he done?

"You fucking murdered the caterpillar!"

That he had, he acknowledged. He hadn't known what came over him. "I'm sorry. I panicked," he said.

Gyn put her face in her hands and shook her head. Viral watched the brown curls of her crown bounce. When she looked back at him he saw the dirt she'd smudged on her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. She looked like Eve emerging from his rib; woman zero rising from the earth to meet his each command.

"Here," she said. Again she took Viral's hand in hers. But holding his wrist she did not pull him into her. Instead she plunged his fingers into the dirt. She pushed and pushed, leaning her weight on his thumb bone, wrapping her fingers around his until their palms met across a mattress of rich clay.

The coolness of the dark, subterranean soil held his sweaty hand in hers like a swaddle cradling an infant to a Nordic man's chest at a farmers market.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Loins. Heating, he thought. He made a mental note to update his hypothesis.

"What does it feel like?" Gyn asked.

Viral thought about it. Honesty, he remembered, was the only way to keep his lies straight when speaking to the opposite sex. Or was it gender?

"Wet," Viral said.

Gyn smiled. Is she smiling at me or with me, Viral wondered. A quiet but growing voice near the back of his skull told him to shut up. It also called him "Bruh." He would have to look into that too, he noted.

"The earth gives life. Makes sense that she is wet," Gyn said.

Viral waited for the new voice in his head to tell him not to read too much into Gyn's, ahem, diction. But all the voice said was, "Yo, she might be a freak."

A lotta help, Viral thought.

Gyn ran a finger down his forearm, leaving in its wake a streak of black as curvaceous as the caterpillar's twitching carcass, as expressive as the silhouette Gyn cut in her olive shorts.

"All that we know about nature we only assemble from the feelings through our skin," she said. "But the same things in us are the same things in plants and nature." Her finger left his skin and joined her others tented on the ground near Viral's still potted palms. "So what is there to be of afraid of in nature?"

Viral offered, "the same thing that there is to fear in myself?"

The voice inside his head asked if that was a riddle. Viral told it to shhh.

Again Gyn smiled, but this time bigger than before, this.time showing him her teeth, crooked, crowding like buildings in Beirut. "We do not talk enough about fear in science," she said. "It is the only certain sign of growth. Men are too timid to feel it, fear, inside their minds. That is why our science is stuck spending billions of euros smashing things like trucks."

Here we go with the gender politics again, Viral thought. But a semester at a liberal arts college had trained him well to stay silent and smiling while women spoke of CERN.

"They are babies, these scientists," Gyn said, carving symbols in the ground. Viral peeked to see if maybe they included a heart around his name. "They are hitting things to break them open even though there is nothing left inside to find. Ask them. They will even admit it. What are they looking for in the mess that comes after two particles collide? They will tell you. God, they say. The God particle." Gyn laughed into her chest. Viral could no longer see her eyes; her fingers were clawing deeper into the dirt. Viral began to pull his hands from the ground, closer toward covering his nethers. He had heard his father's attorney, Mr. Noogle, tell his father during cognac aperitifs once that "fem-nazis like to break your balls."

But Gyn remained still. Moving only slowly at the shoulder as her finger tip bore down like a tentative drill. "They will tear this earth apart, these men, these scientists, break open the fundamental elements only to avoid breaking open themselves. What are they so afraid they will find by looking inward?"

The flash of green Viral saw as she raised her eyes to his caused Viral to brace his quads. While looking down into her eyes earlier Viral had felt supplication. But now that he was on her level, on his knees beneath the barricade and leaves that hid them from the mall, he saw the tigress that mauls to feed her cubs.

Bruh, I think she wants us to answer, Viral's amygdala said.

"Uhh..." He sought change for time. Pennies, maybe nickels, to buy just that one more second of thought. "Nothing?" he finally said.

Her head lifted and the laugh she bellowed bounced from the ceiling to the clearance shelf at the empty Hot Topic. Gyn slapped her thigh with her hand, a smack that left a hardy imprint of dirt and lightly reddened flesh. She playfully pushed Viral on the shoulder, and he fell back on to his hands.

Your balls are open! His amygdala called, but Viral had been utterly disarmed by Gyn's mirth. That he could call her laughter his gave him a pride that nearly burst from his chest.

"You are funny," she said. "Funny like your father."

Viral's joy caught in his throat. "You know my father?" he asked.

"Of course," she said. "I got his first book for my 13th birthday. His face on the jacket was the image I saw the first time I inadvertently brought myself to climax."

So much heat, Viral noted. But the source seemed now to be further up his body than his loins. It was near his chest, quickly replacing the expansion incited by Gyn's laughter with a back-draft constriction which threatened to ignite from the densest coal with the wrath of a neutron star.

While he calculated the outcome of his experiment on the veracity of his hypothesis, only one sound rose above the din humming between his ears.

It was his quickly emboldening amygdala. And all it said was, "Bruh..."