Our little town (pop. 21,275) has four grocery stores, eighteen churches, zero hospitals, three urgent care clinics, nine restaurants and 28 fast food options. We also have nine gun and ammo shops, 23 bars, 12 liquor stores and seven massage parlors, five of which are rated “nut-positive” on TugMaps.com. 

This last number might seem excessive, but where divorce rates run close to 69%, the local massage parlors are more than just a dirty open secret. If you’ve ever interacted with the men around here at any major intersection or the drive-in line at Caffeine Queens, you must also know that the parlors are the only bulwark between us and a daily rash of suicides and mass shootings.

But you’ve got to wonder, in a town with so many desperate and unlovable men, where all the women go. Someone must strike the balance and flick the beans. Some say that man is the mechanical bull operator working ladies’ night at Cahoots Bar & Grill, but after eavesdropping on soccer moms in line at the post office, I uncovered the truth. Hiding in plain sight in a rundown strip mall between Little Caesar’s and Planet Fitness, is Serenity Now, and certified Swedish physical therapist Svenhard Swardsen.

Getting an appointment with Svenhard was tougher than the other parlors, especially when the receptionist discovered I was a he/him. TugMaps gives Serenity Now a 0, with a handful of reviews touting the therapeutic rigor and cleanliness of the facilities, but shooting down any chance of a happy ending. But all of these reviews were posted by men. Like many more of us than will admit it, Angel Spa takes in most of its traffic through a rear entrance. 

Of the four regular masseuses at Serenity Now (two women, two men), only one is in much demand. I agreed to pay double the hourly rate for an emergency session with Svenhard, but even then, I had to wait for a cancellation.

As a New Age version of Abba’s “I Have A Dream” plays from hidden speakers and lingonberry-scented candles burn, I lay supine under one of those gold foil blankets French paramedics give you after a winery explosion, a tow-headed slab of beefcake in a smock covering a sleek Spandex bodysuit enters and scrubs up with the icy reserve of a brain surgeon. Not batting an eye at my sex, Svenhard removes my protective sheet with a flourish and oils his hands from a tiny decanter, working the oddly musky mixture into the sinews of his surprisingly lean and sinewy hands as he hums along with the endless song. 

He looks like a bear who plays piano when he’s not fighting crime. He answers my probing questions in monosyllables, his voice an oddly disarming alto with a lavish and alluring vocal fry. But he gives away nothing about his female clientele, or his popularity with them.

As he works my back, I begin to wonder if he’s not just punishing me, until I objectively recall every other Swedish massage I’ve endured. Pushing his fists into my vertebrae like he’s trying to pulverize them, rolling his knuckles into my muscles until every knot unravels into jelly. 

I have never felt more relaxed; so much so, I almost don’t take my wallet out from under my pillow and open it. Without a word, he pours more oil onto his right hand, then spreads my legs with his left. 

He pushes me back down as I twist to turn over. “You want to know why all the ladies come to Svenhard?” he murmurs, so that the fine hairs of my inner ear stand on end. Left hand pressing me effortlessly down, he works a finger into me and deftly corkscrews it up my rectum. 

Gliding frictionless up inside me until he tickles my last breakfast burrito, I can feel the chill pressure of a signet ring against my perineum. Hot, steamy plumes of his breath wash over my twitching buttocks. Droplets of briny monsoon rain fall from his brow onto my spine.

Something scrapes me deep inside, where I’ve never felt anything but full or empty. I squirm and try to beg off and offer him twice as much to stop, when I see he’s doesn’t just have one rigid digit up my anus. It’s his whole hand, up to the wrist. 

“Relax,” he whispers, makes a fist and knocks on the door of my prostate.

I go away…

Riding the undertow of alien pleasure right out of my body. Up through the ceiling and the strip mall and into the sky, adrift on a secret current stronger than the wind. I float over the rooftops and through walls and windows, riding a river of forbidden pleasure energy. 

I watch a housewife get double-teamed by the pool cleaning crew while her husband naps; a recently divorced teacher works the train on ecstatic ninth graders (they come so fast, she has to run them five at a time); two bored clerks at the donut shop lick icing off each other’s vaginas in a race to get off before the after-school rush.

I rove on, a voyeuristic ghost growing with each little death. I want to see more! I voicelessly crow. I want to see all of you! And for my sins, I do… 

A bank manager fingers his shriveled manhood and drags his lit cigar up and down his secretary’s inner thighs; a Harvest Market security guard takes a shoplifter across his desk while her young son plays a game on her phone; a sheriff’s deputy pounds his pregnant wife while their kindergartener and toddler rifle through Dad’s gun cache. The varsity football team circle jerks in the showers after practice, trying to direct their ejaculate onto a single Ding Dong. The first kid to cum has to eat the Ding Dong. The coach bellows at them, pocket-pooling his stubby erection and ogling a stopwatch. A youth pastor pumps his dick watching the local little league team practice but breaks off to look me dead in the eye and whispers, “Get it, sinner,” as his spunk splatters the steering wheel of his Cybertruck.

Connecting the dots of afternoon delights and sordid secrets almost takes me over the hills into the next town when I’m brutally whiplashed back into the spa and my body, still tingling with shameful joy at the orgasm and the visions. No wonder every unsatisfied wife in town comes to Svenhard. In his hands, every client flies free of their dumpy drive-thru McDonalds body and peeps enough sordid fuckery to fuel the neighborhood gossip mill for another week. 

He pokes my prostate one more time before discreetly withdrawing his hand. As he washes his hands, I marvel that I could have contained such size and strength. I sit up, gingerly separating my shrunken junk from a dry scab of semen, and look for my clothes. He turns his back to me and asks me to help him with something, pointing at the zipper at the back of his neck.

“You want to know everything?” He explains that it’s been so long since he worked on another man who seemed to get it, and somehow, he feels like he can, at last, reveal himself. 

I told myself I would say yes to whatever this article wants, so I reach for his zipper and tug it down.

His svelte physique spills out onto me like molten lava. Quivering, sweat-slick Jell-O skin in such shocking abundance that I recoil from it; but it engulfs me, pinning me to the table as his zipper unzips the rest of the way under the tsunami of extra skin.

He used to weigh 675 pounds, he tells me. He’s saving up to get nearly 90 pounds of excess flesh surgically removed, but the women of our town are not generous tippers. It’s a lot cheaper if you have high quality skin with fine pores and no scars, because private collectors will buy it on the gray market.

Babbling nervously, he turns to face me as I push the oleaginous skirt of skin off my lap. When I ask why he chose to show me this, he nibbles his lips, crestfallen. “Something you said when you went away.” He trembles so that the drapery of his arms flaps like a bat’s wings. “Never mind,” he says, “it’s nothing.” 

I dress, leave a moderate cash tip and flee the room before he starts crying.

7/10; would visit again.