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A bunch of schoolgirls start following me on the street, mocking me for my breasts not growing yet. They call me a plank, telling me that no boy will ever love me. I feel that their childish accusation is quite unfair considering I’m a thirty-year-old man, but I can’t get their words out of my head, not even at my workplace.

Later that night, I can’t fall asleep. I realize it’s because something is poking my back. There’s a tiny lump between the sheet and the mattress that keeps buzzing me. When I look under the sheet, I find one of the girls lying there – her growing breasts were poking my spine. She smiles at me with an evil grin and calls me Pea Princess. She informs me that statistically, small-breasted women are more likely to commit suicide at the age of forty, have a higher risk of giving birth to mentally retarded children, and break the cork in the wine bottle more often than big-breasted women. I try not to listen to the wicked whispers coming from under my mattress, but when I finally fall asleep, I dream of giving birth to broken bottle cork pieces through my penis and then jumping from a giant wine bottle to end my life.

I wake up. It’s still dark, and the bed still feels uncomfortable. “I’ll show you who the real Pea Princess is!” I hiss, turning onto my stomach, and I begin to kick the bed with my knee. The mattress whines painfully.

This gives me a great idea. Night after night, I begin dislocating my kneecap, pushing it back and forth. The bone-lump under the skin starts to swing in a greater, longer line back and forth under my fingers. At first, it can only slide about an inch up, and it hurts a lot, but by the third night, I can make it travel up and down almost three inches. I keep at it until something snaps inside – suddenly, the exploding sunlight of pain blinds me – and then the bone-lump jumps up to the middle of my hairy thigh. I know my time has come. I slide the two kneecaps slowly up, up, and up – the left one moves much harder than the other. I bite into my pillow, trying not to scream, as the bones scratch the tendons inside my legs, but after one hour, they reach the underside of my pelvis. I know if they can get past my protruding hip bones, the fight is almost won. I give it my all, and by dawn, the slow bone-snails under the skin reach my floating ribs. I swallow painkillers as my skin stretches over the traveling knots, scraping my rib bones under my shaking fingers. When the sun comes up, they finally reach their destination: my hairy brown nipples strain painfully over the bone-mounds, blood leaking out, but finally, look at me, I have boobs – rock-hard, fist-sized breasts. I can’t wait to show them to the girls. But I can’t get up; I can’t flex my legs properly. I’ll probably have to learn to walk again. I read that men can walk without kneecaps. I get to the door, crawling on my stomach. As I open it, I notice a young boy on my doorstep. His face is all red as he hands me a flower, then he runs away giggling.

“Did you see that? That boy likes me!” I yell at the mattress, but she doesn’t respond. Someone throws a rock at my window. I slither slowly to the window and peek out. Oh, it’s another boy – he just stands there, waving at me. As I lift my arm to wave back, a small amount of blood spurts out from my milk ducts onto the glass.

“Did you see that? Did you just see that?” I tell the mattress, but still, she doesn’t respond. I crawl to the bed, but when I stick my hand under the sheets, I feel something hard and cold. It’s a wine bottle with a broken cork. Where’s the little girl? Was there even a little girl? I just don’t understand anything; I’m so tired, my body aches. I climb into my bed and fall asleep. In my dream, one of the little boys marries me, and I give birth to several babies. Their faces bash in as I keep kicking their heads with my kneecap-breasts while nursing. And my husband’s skull crushes in too at night. We’re taking a trip in the field with my lovely bashed family. We’re lying on our backs in the grass – the summer rain falls into their head-holes, creating small lakes. I float tiny leaf-boats in their face-puddles.

I can’t even leave my room anymore. I only eat the flowers the boys keep bringing me. Some kind of infection is spreading inside my body – thick pus leaks from my swollen nipples. I’m sliding on the yellow fluid like a snail on its slime. But I know one must suffer to be beautiful. My belly keeps rumbling. In the second week, I decide to capture a flower-bringing boy to eat him.

The days pass. Everything is bloody. Or is it spilt red wine? No, that can’t be, the bottle cork is broken. I threw a knee-stone into the face-lake of a boy. Yes… I remember nursing his bashed-in red skull with my tit-pus, and the mattress was so envious, telling me I’m such a good mother and a sexy wife who won’t kill herself when she turns forty. Oh God, yes, I’m so beautiful.