The Vacuum Castrator
by Zoltán Komor
My wife thinks it’s about time to neuter our vacuum cleaner because it keeps impregnating our neighbor’s bagless Zanussi machine, and our apartment building is once again filled with a litter of hungry vacuum cleaner offspring. Yup, this is the second incident this year. The three-story building is now so spotless that you can’t even find a single speck of dust to feed the newborn machines. So, the caretaker once again takes the cardboard box of baby vacuums down to the basement and beats the small, whirring mechanical puppies to death with a heavy meat cleaver. Then, of course, he lectures us about taking better care of our crazy machine because, once it escapes, that horny dust sucker knocks up every vacuum cleaner bitch in the neighborhood.
I’m not exactly thrilled about castrating my good old dust-and-vacuum-pussy-chasing pal. As a man, I can empathize with a horny electric appliance. But on the other hand, I also don’t want us to be flooded with bastard machines and vacuum cleaner cum.
“Sorry, buddy,” I apologize to the gadget and take it to the doctor, who hums and caresses the shivering machine on the cool examination table.
“We usually recommend sterilization only as a last resort,” the doctor mutters. “The performance of household appliances tends to drop after castration. They become depressed. A sterilized vacuum cleaner might stop sucking up the dust bunnies from under the bed. Last time, I neutered a kettle, and it couldn’t boil water for weeks afterward; in fact, it started producing ice.”
“Listen, doc, if I bring this machine home with its balls still in place, my wife will probably cut off mine!” I say.
“There is an alternative solution!” The doctor grins at me. “You just have to train the vacuum cleaner to be gay. Then it won’t chase after vacuum cleaner bitches anymore. That is, if your family isn’t religious… Catholics usually don’t tolerate homosexual cleaning appliances in their homes.”
“And, um… is that possible? Just turning a machine gay like that?”
“Well, of course. You just have to get it used to the penis. Want me to try?”
After some hesitation, I nod. The good old doc needs no further encouragement. He pushes down his white linen pants and begins shaking his semi-erect cock in front of the frightened, buzzing vacuum cleaner. The tip of his rod is already wet with excitement—he sets the machine to low suction and sticks his tool inside the vacuum tube, then starts sweating and moaning, uttering all kinds of medical slang like, “Oh yeah, suck my dick, you cable-rewinder whore!” or “Yeah, lick my balls, you vacuum slut!” He even adds, “Oh, for the love of God, I fucking love this job!”
I watch in horror as he violates our vacuum cleaner right in front of me. The machine roars and hums painfully; it doesn’t seem like it’s getting used to being gay.
“Stop! Can’t you see it’s suffering?!” I burst out.
“Suffering? Oh, come on!” The doctor roars, balancing on the tightrope of orgasm, ready to empty the contents of his sack into the dust bag. “Have you ever tried getting a hot iron used to your dick? Now that’s real suffering! This is paradise in comparison! Oh shit, this is better than my wife!”
In one swift motion, I’m next to the cloaked pervert, yanking the vacuum cleaner off his dick with such force that I almost tear off his penis. Then I rush out of the clinic and onto the street, not stopping for a good ten minutes. Meanwhile, I stroke the vacuum cleaner and beg for its forgiveness.
“I’m sorry you had to go through this, buddy,” I mumble. “But look on the bright side—you can keep your balls for a while.”
From now on, I decide to ignore doctors. They’re probably all fucking perverts. But suddenly, I remember Aunt Pálma, to whom we took our dog for castration when I was a child. Maybe she still lives on Arany János Street.
Back in the day, everyone took their pets to Aunt Pálma for neutering—she made quite a business out of it in the ’70s and ’80s, maybe even the ’60s. She was considered a sort of testicular guru in town because Aunt Pálma could neuter anything painlessly with just her mouth, whether it was a cat, a dog, or a goldfish. “It’s a divine gift,” she always said over cold tea and biscuits. Her teeth somehow grew outward from her mouth, allowing her to perfectly chew through any scrotum. Because of her protruding teeth, Aunt Pálma’s lips were constantly pushed forward, giving her face a peculiar, somewhat monkey-like appearance.
One of her wonderful qualities was that her saliva, due to some unusual mutation, contained painkillers and anticoagulants—as if God had really created her to chew through vas deferens. When she was younger and lived in a small village, they didn’t dare let her into the barn because she would quickly turn a colt into a gelding. Once, she even neutered a wandering rooster in the yard in the blink of an eye.
“It’s true! Once, I bit off a mosquito’s balls before it could bite me!” she always joked. The kids half-believed this epic story. The boys, at least, always armed themselves with metal colanders in their pants whenever they had to take their pets to Aunt Pálma. They looked funny with those big bulges, and Aunt Pálma teased them, “Oh, you silly boys, don’t protect your balls so much! I only bite off the ones causing trouble!” Then she added, “Of course, sooner or later, every little boy gets into some kind of trouble because of his man-pearls, and then you’ll come to me begging me to chew them off!”
Hearing this turned the boys’ faces into white chalk, and the ugly songbirds of nightmares moved into their skulls, crowing bitter thoughts into their headcages at midnight.
Arany János Street hasn’t changed at all over the years: the same broken benches, discarded juice boxes, and kicked-over bins greet us in front of the panel houses that are slowly melting in the heat, just as they did in my childhood. I ring the bell at Aunt Pálma’s, and to my utter astonishment, she answers the door. Then she lets me in.
The woman must be eighty years old. Although her face has turned into a crumpled paper bag, she still retains her ape-like features. Her teeth, yellowed from too many cigarettes, still stick forward and swell her otherwise string-thin lips. The vacuum cleaner buzzes in fright for a while but quickly settles down as we take our seats in the kitchen, surrounded by happy cats and a barking dog chasing its own tail.
“They’re all castrated!” Aunt Pálma smiles with trembling hands. “And as you can see, they’re all extremely happy!”
She offers instant coffee and some kind of ground biscuits I didn’t even know were still being produced. I last encountered them as a child. Behind her, a folk-embroidered tablecloth hangs on the wall, depicting a boy with a bleeding crotch alongside the text: “Use your pee-pee to pee!”
“Sometimes they still bring dogs, mutts, and rarely a hamster,” Aunt Pálma says. “But for some reason, most people are alarmed by the thought of an old woman chewing off their pet’s testicles. They take them to charlatan animal doctors who organize a soulless, sterile massacre. I don’t think much of them. There’s no philosophy behind their procedures; they just want to make life more comfortable.”
I look at the vacuum cleaner, then back at Aunt Pálma. I dare not admit that this is exactly what I want, too.
“I castrate in such a way that I give new life in the process!” Aunt Pálma raises her wrinkled finger over the biscuit bowl. “I will liberate males from the ravages of testosterone! I’ll expand their minds so they can pack the whole world inside! Men are only interested in sex; if that doesn’t work, they play with themselves. How would such beings ever have time to explore the most majestic secrets of the universe? If I could, I would castrate every man and boy: yes, humanity would die out in less than a century, but in those few years, we would achieve more than in a hundred—or even a hundred thousand years!”
I am quite moved by Aunt Pálma’s mind, which literally lights up the entire kitchen like a glowing fireball. Even the vacuum cleaner is no longer afraid. As I place it on the table, it boldly bulges its ass towards the old woman.
And there are those balls hanging under the coiled wire—the spherical organs really enchant her.
“And now I will set you free, my son!” Aunt Pálma declares, pressing her dry mouth to the vacuum cleaner’s testicles. Her teeth begin to work, tearing and ripping the bag—vacuum cleaner blood splashes onto the biscuits. When Aunt Pálma’s mouth starts to foam, I realize that her special blood-clotting saliva is in action. She finishes and leans back, her mouth bloody like spoiled lipstick, the torn balls glistening between her teeth. The severed vas deferens dangles between her yellow incisors like a thread. Aunt Pálma swallows, and the two ripped balls slide down her throat to meet the half-digested biscuit. Her eyes roll back from the eaten testicles; she transforms into a shaman in a trance, chanting from some secret plant recipe:
“Oh, the rocks of light have grown over me; now they pierce the night I carry inside! The heat is endless, but my face is cooled by the crystal of the almighty condensing vapor! The snowballs of creation are already melting in me; I kiss my stomach with pleasure, thinking of the juices, the flowing dragonfly wings, the most wonderful ray of torment!”
The vacuum cleaner whirls up—but not from pain. Its wound looks almost healed. It literally jumps off the table and starts cleaning at full steam, spinning and spinning, and woosh—where there was dirt, there is no dirt anymore. Within minutes, the apartment shines so brightly that we must shield our eyes.
“Look! It’s making light! They all do! When I erase the darkness from them, they can only shine!” Aunt Pálma claps, and the vacuum cleaner hums in such a way that it turns into music—an unfathomably beautiful melody containing the pain of sailors bemoaning fallen lighthouses, yet also the joy of reindeer munching on magic mushrooms in the frozen forests. We dance around the kitchen with the vacuum cleaner, Aunt Pálma joins in, her laughter ethereal, a glass violin played with an icicle.
“Aunt Pálma, please castrate me too!” I shout.
“With great pleasure, my son!” she replies, and soon I am sitting on the kitchen table with my pants down. I sprinkle crushed biscuit crumbs on my round scrotum to please my liberator. She takes the whole bag in her mouth, digging her teeth deep into my skin, into the heavy, fat fruit I have carried between my thighs all my life. Blood sprays up to the ceiling, and the pensioner with the peculiar mouth foams. I melt in the throat of light; my torn testicles disappear down her gullet—turned-out eyes, prophecies harvested from eyelids, the ashes of forced thoughts blown off my forehead by an unseen lung. Like two tiny catfish whiskers, my bloody, severed vas deferens tremble from Aunt Pálma’s mouth like jelly strings.
“Aunt Pálma, let’s free the world!” I cry into the musty air of the ancient kitchen.
“Let’s do it, son! I have nothing better to do today!”
We need no further encouragement. The vacuum cleaner picks us up like a flying carpet, carrying us out to Arany János Street, where all the males suddenly feel that a savior has arrived. They line up with their pants unbuttoned and balls like swollen plums. Aunt Pálma takes them in her mouth one by one; then comes the sweet, delicate bite, and the mind unfolds its multi-folded earwig wings. Stray dogs arrive, and mothers bring their children. A woman hands over her infant son—Aunt Pálma peels him out of his diaper, bends over his tiny pebbles like a hungry vulture, then tears them out with her teeth. A stream of blood is born, then dies—the baby cries only for a moment, then turns into the baby Christ.
“Go in peace, child,” murmurs the pensioner, her face bloody and foamy. She spits one of the torn testicles into the infant’s tiny grip. He immediately puts it in his mouth and, while his own testicle dances on his toothless tongue, realizes that, on this meat-made dock, only souls dressed in starlight may board the pearling ship.
I throw Aunt Pálma into the sky like a boomerang. She spins through the air, castrating an entire arriving fire brigade with her mouth—the rolling firefighter testicles are sucked up by the vacuum cleaner, its bag swelling into a fat insect gut from the many male treasures.
“We are finally God’s frontal bone!” the flame knights scream in unison, stretching out a tarpaulin. Now the testicle-hungry pensioner, almost rejuvenated by male tissue, bounces on it like a trampoline, higher and higher, reaching for the sky.
You lie in a mirror, your own reflection curled up under you, you mossy, membranous fetus.
“My God! Oh Almighty! Now I’m going to bite off your testicles, too!” Aunt Pálma hisses, drawing ever closer to the lamb-like clouds, her foaming, tooth-baring mouth wide.
The Almighty feels Aunt Pálma’s cockroach-scented breath on his testicles, and that makes him very angry. In his sonorous voice, he calls out: “What the hell do you want, you ugly furball? Don’t you dare touch Ricardo and Eduardo with that filthy mouth!”
(The Good Lord gave his nuts those names. Don’t judge. You’ve probably named yours too.)
Then he decides to destroy the world. He did not create testicles and dicks for frigid old bitches with twisted heads to negate them or lead a castration crusade. Yet, at the last moment, he comes to his senses. Instead of reducing the world to ashes, he merely incinerates Arany János Street, which is close enough.
Rays of fire shoot down from the heavens, consuming all the miserable mortuary bugs: me, the vacuum cleaner, the heroic firefighters, the testicle-sucking baby, but most of all, the bouncing Aunt Pálma, who, screaming, falls straight onto the straining scrotum of the afterlife.
And that is how Arany János Street was destroyed by a fucking vacuum cleaner. Many weeks have passed. We now haunt the ruins as transparent ghosts. Turns out, being a ghost sucks—especially if you have no testicles. Ghosts mostly fuck after they die, because there’s little else to do. But those castrated in life don’t grow their balls back in death.
So I pass the time by vacuuming.
“Avoid false prophets,” murmurs the ghost vacuum cleaner, humming sadly.
“Shut up!” I snap. “Everything would have been different if you had turned gay.”
Of course, no matter how much I curse it, it can only be what it was created to be.
A big pile of shit.
“Lick my balls!” retorts the vacuum cleaner.