A[s]fixion
It all started in Biology class. The 6th grade curriculum in some rural Midwestern community included something or other to do with little live lab mice (hey, that's really fun to say!), and the kid was very interested. Not exactly in the actual point of the demonstration, or experiment, or whatever it was, but rather in the peculiar instrument the teacher undextrously applied. The kid asked lots and lots of questions about it, to the sideways embarassment of the poor woman.
Eventually the class drew to a blessful end, the whole momentary pretense of interest dissolved in the sure solvent of the bell, but the kid wasn't quite satisfied.
That was only the beginning ; less than a year later the procedure was quite well and in all likelihood permanently entrenched. The kid would cut a thin pine splint in two along the length. He'd then whittle a tiny little round half-hole in either half, with two even tinier half-holes on either side. Sometimes he even placed little hinges in a side he beveled for the purpose. He then drove in two screws to either side, through the looped end of thick gauge copper wire. He made lots of these, and then, when the time was right, he'd buy some lab mice and affix them.
The afixion procedure consisted of trapping the mouse's neck in the small central hole, and its forepaws in the tiny holes to either side of it. The animal's hindlegs were entrapped in the copper wire, creatively, in a manner that seemed to the kid evocative of stockings ladies wore in something he, for having only caught a furtive glimpse once, didn't know was called burlesque.
After the mice were thus affixed, he'd rub the female's tiny, minuscule -- and yet in its diminutive, wheat kernel size perfectly mature and entirely functional -- vulvai over the male's snout, and then he proceeded to copulate them, by himself. Manually. The mice, immobile, convulsing ineffectually in their excruciation, enjoyed such carnal knowledge as the kid allowed, and at the pace he fixed through movement of the afixions.
The holes had to be exactly right, the kid found, or else the mice would expire, sometimes after, sometimes during their obligation (as he for some reason called it in his own mind). In practice he'd sometimes, though not always, slightly expand the hole in a slat that had killed a mouse prior, but he soon found out that actually preferred the holes so that the mice die just during their paroxysm -- a feat not altogether trivial, especially owing to variation in mice anatomy. Nevertheless, in time the kid grew expert in mice selection for the purpose, aided no doubt by helpful notes that had grown out of original markings on the very slats subjective.
As the years passed eventually the kid grew up, and therefore as the years passed the kid moved on to affixing little girls. But that is, of course, a story for another time.
———- No, it's not a vagina. The part of the female reproductive apparatus visible outside the body is called a vulva. [↩]
