This is the last week I’ll be sharing from “Darling Proktiphallus” for Rainbow Snippets. “Darling Proktiphallus” appears in the new Lethe Press anthology His Seed: An Arboretum of Gay Erotica. It follows JD, a horticulturist who works at a public garden in the Midwest, as he works with a new plant from an unidentified species that was sent to the public garden by a university botanist.
JD and Robert, his co-worker and occasional lover, have been trying to figure out the plant’s ideal growing conditions. They learn that it needs not only sunlight and water to thrive, but also touch. (There are lots of evolutionary explanations for this that I get into in the story, but since we’ve only got six sentences, I’ll have to skip over them here.)
As JD spends time each day nurturing the plant, he begins to develop not-so-professional feelings about it—feelings that interfere with his sleep. … Read more