Image of Man

[6 word request: Bodybuilders flattened, displayed nude at museum]

The lights in the subterranean hallway blinked on as the elevator reached the bottom floor. As the industrial doors slowly slid open, the elevator’s occupants--Geoff, the curator’s assistant, and Pietro, a wealthy effeminate man in his late 60s--stepped off. Geoff seemed as weary as Pietro did giddy. The old man clapped his cane in his hands a few times and smirked at every corner of the underground passage.

“I can’t tell you what this level of security says about your operation,” Pietro said, angling his cane at the sealing elevator doors. “It only speaks to how impressively in demand you are!” He clapped his hands lightly, making no sound.

“Our artwork is beyond priceless,” Geoff said, casually scratching his thick brown beard. The husky man gestured at a doorway. Pietro took the cue and stepped through gleefully. The lights buzzed on as he entered.

The room they were in was hexagonal. On every side of the room, and on crystal daises throughout the room, were two-dimensional depictions of muscular men in various poses. Pietro stopped at the first, a hulking black man, and eyed it up and down, running around to see it from the backside.

“Look at that endowment!” he said, nudging the crotch section of the flattened cutout of the flexing brute. It was clear that, had the figure been in three dimensions, his silver posing trunks would have hung low and heavy. “And that body! Flawlessly smooth… look at his expression! So confident! So cocky! He’s beauitiful!”

Geoff seemed bored by the presentation. He checked his phone, barely aware of Pietro’s awe at the delicious depiction of a man before him. “So is this the one you’d like to choose?”

Pietro stepped back from the pedestal, looking around. “Well, I don’t want to commit so soon… not before I’ve seen everything you offer.”

Geoff bristled. “This section of the museum isn’t for perusal,” he said in a firm tone. “Describe to me what you’re looking for and I’ll lead you there. Time is money, my friend, and we’re burning valuable currency just by standing in this room.”

“Well,” Pietro said, tamping down his whimsy at Geoff behest, “what I need is a couple of kitschy display mannequins.” He gazed around the room as if he were looking for someone in particular. “I thought it might be trendy and fun to display some of my fashions on these two-dimensional men. They have the right figures for it!” he said, his eyes going wide at the impressive width of one bald two-dimensional man. Try as he might, Pietro couldn’t seem to locate the man’s neck.

“So you’d rather have a nude man then?” Geoff said, beckoning Pietro to follow as they left the room and went down a hallway. “We have plenty of nude models for you to enjoy.”

The next room they entered was a perfect cylinder. It seemed more of a storage area than anything else; flattened cutouts of men leaned against each other like albums. Geoff flipped through a few before he pulled out a tall man--6’5” tall, at least--with a mane of blonde hair hanging down around his shoulders. Of course, on this two-dimensional figure, the difference between shoulders and hair was simply a variance in color.

Pietro’s eyes scanned the man’s bronzed bulging figure before stopping on his bare manhood: small, especially in comparison to his large frame, with two little balls barely visible behind the short dangling shaft.

“How delicious!” Pietro said. “I’ll dress him in something skimpy, so my customers can peek inside to see how little he bears downstairs. How delightfully wicked!” He clapped his withered fingers together as Geoff scanned the tag on the man’s ear, ringing up the purchase. “For the next one, something not quite so pretty… something nice and butch. Oozing with masculinity.”

Geoff crossed the room and fished out from the pile of men a grizzled old bear of a man. He was only slightly taller than Pietro but his body had very obviously been built wide and powerful by a lifetime of heavy lifting plus incredibly gifted genetics. Pietro leaned in, adjusting his spectacles to take note of the details: old stretch marks on the outer edge of his pecs; scars around his abdomen. He licked his lips when he saw the slightly-above-average dick hanging between his powerful legs, as thick around as a soda can.

“Yes,” Pietro said, leaning the two-dimensional figure so that the short man could look into the powerful beast’s eyes. He savored the angry grimace on the strongman’s frozen face. It made him giggle. “Oh, you’ll do perfectly,” he whispered to it, as if the flattened man could hear him. “I’ll dress you in the frilliest getups. You’ll be my pretty little princess! Big musclebear like you, tough as nails, wearing the laciest and most humiliating outfits around…” Pietro licked his lips as he rubbed his cane against the man’s flattened dick. “You’ll do perfectly.”

As Geoff rang up the second purchase (which came to a quarter of a million dollars altogether) he couldn’t help but notice the sensual way Pietro caressed the cutouts. Geoff smirked. “You act like those men are aware of your ministrations,” he said as they walked back to the elevator.

“That’s a testament to your artwork,” Pietro said, licking his lips. “So damned realistic… they exude masculinity. It’s almost like I can smell them…” He leaned in and inhaled slowly. “My goodness, they do smell realistic! Like barechested man, testosterone pumping through their veins.”

Geoff chuckled. “Nothing’s pumping through those guys,” Geoff said. “Trust me, they’ve been frozen in that state for years now.”

*

Geoff’s second appointment for that day was on the surface of their facility, in the display area. Some overgrown ape wanted to come look at their artwork, possibly to do some modeling. Geoff rolled his eyes as he read the e-mail on his phone. There was a link to the musclehead’s Instagram page. He followed it to see dozens of pictures of the hyperdeveloped freak flexing in tiny posing trunks.

Geoff wasn’t that impressed. He worked everyday in a museum displaying some of the most aggressively built male anatomies to ever grace the earth. This guy--Antoine Vaillant was his name, according to the e-mail--wasn’t anything spectacular. (“Well, he’s got a good-sized dick,” Geoff noticed, although for modeling for their type of artwork, a hefty bulge didn’t mean much; they all had flattened fronts after the artwork was complete, anyway.)

Geoff was perturbed that the man was dressed in his gym clothes with a duffel bag over his shoulder at the door. From the smell of him, he had just come from the gym; a funk like a locker room came off him in waves. “Couldn’t even shower first,” Geoff thought, repulsed by the lack of class--unless, he thought, this man’s huge muscles and his powerful hormones just gave off that smell all day long. The idea was intriguing.

This Antoine man towered over Geoff, and his form was so big he had to turn sideways to get through the museum doors. “I’m curious how you heard of us,” Geoff asked suspiciously. He nodded at the duffel bag. “You can leave your items by the doorway. No need to carry them all the way in.”

“Actually, a guy approached me at the gym,” Antoine said. His accent made him seem dopey; his bright eyes and wide smile only added to the effect. “Older gentleman, silver hair, one glass eye… A little off, but very complimentary of my…” He gestured to his wide, muscle-packed frame. “...physique.”

Geoff nodded. “Winston Theron,” he said. “One of our museum’s benefactors--and an incredibly wealthy and powerful man, so please refer to him respectfully from now on--for your own good.”

Antoine’s eyes went wide and he held up his hands. “My mistake, sorry,” he said.

Geoff placed his hand on a panel in the wall and leaned forward, holding his eye in front of a small point of light. The red lights in the ceiling turned green and the wall shifted aside, revealing the museum itself.

“This is some… very high-tech security!” Antoine said as he walked in. “Wow, my god. I can’t believe how locked-down you keep this stuff. If it’s a museum, aren’t you supposed to have… y’know, visitors?”

“Visitors travel from around the globe,” Geoff said, leading Antoine into the first gallery. Antoine lumbered ahead, staring at the flattened images of bodybuilders in their various flexes. “And I assure you, they are all appointment only.”

“Holy shit!” Antoine said, stopping at a bulky display of a massive black man with full, swollen muscles and a fully-stuffed purple poser. “That’s Victor Richards! Damn, I haven’t heard from him in years! He was a beast, man! And look at him, you got him at his prime, too!” The cutout of Victor was leaning forward in a most-muscular pose with his big tongue hanging out. Antoine imitated the pose.

“I’m afraid he’s got you beat,” Geoff said dryly. Antoine just laughed, slapping the cutout on its wide back as if it were the bodybuilder himself.

“Holy shit, I remember this guy--from back when I first got started.” Bulky Antoine nearly waddled on his wide quads over to a different display, that of a hunky young man with mindblowing proportions. “Trey Brewer! This freak was over 300 pounds back when nobody was!” Antoine examined the cutout, and all its swollen, pillowy muscles. “Couldn’t win a show to save his life, but damn if he wasn’t impressive in the offseason! Always wondered what happened to him.”

“Some would say,” Geoff said, reaching into the hidden inner pocket in his vest, “that being put on display in his absolute prime here, rather than just faded into obscurity and decaying into old age as he lived his pointless life, would be quite a gift. What do you think?” Geoff took a few steps toward Antoine, who was now admiring a two-dimensional image of Markus Ruhl.

“Holy shit! This guy was always impressive as fuck!” Even Antoine’s massive frame paled in comparison to Markus’ monstrous dimensions. Despite being a two-dimensional image, the German behemoth still made Antoine look small in comparison. “Big fucking Markus from back at his biggest!” He stared into the bodybuilder’s flat, lifeless eyes. “Weird face he’s making though,” he said.

Truly, Markus’ expression stood out from the grimaces of the other flexing cutouts: Markus, instead, had a look of shock, his mouth open as if shouting a plea, his eyes panicked as if something horrible were overcoming him.

“It’s intriguing to have such a powerful man with such a helpless expression,” Geoff explained. “That’s the point of that piece. Are you unphased by the nudity of some of the men?”

Antoine squatted down to survey Markus’ fully exposed manhood. “It’s funny,” he said, examining the crotch. “It looks like he was getting all stubbly above his dick,” he said. “You think the artist would just… not paint that.”

“We strive for realism,” Geoff explained. The box he’d removed from his vest clicked open, and Geoff produced a small syringe he held behind his back without Antoine ever noticing. “When Mr. Ruhl showed up to model for this artwork, he was… mildly unkempt. Thus it is reflected in his artwork.”

“I’d love to find out how you make these,” Antoine said, rubbing his thumb over the head of Markus’ exposed dick (which looked shrimpy on his massive physique).

“Well, you’re about to,” Geoff said, lunging forward and jabbing Antoine in the trapezius muscle with the syringe. He was just able to plunge the needle before Antoine spun around and shoved him back. Geoff tumbled through a cutout of Lee Priest, snapping it in half as he fell to the ground.

“You piece of shit… the fuck was that?” Antoine said, shoving the Markus cutout aside as he stomped toward Geoff. The little curator’s assistant truly panicked as the goliath approached. The ground actually shook with his footsteps!

Antoine grabbed Geoff’s shirt in his meaty hands, hoisting him off the ground as if he weighed nothing. Geoff’s feet kicked in midair as Antoine shook the little man.

“The fuck did you sitck me with, hunh? The fuck was that?”

“Just… wait a second…” Geoff said through gritted teeth. “Then you’ll see!”

Antoine looked shocked as Geoff slowly began to sink--not because Antoine was lowering him, but because his arms had begun to bend.

“The… fuck….” Antoine mumbled as he watched his ludicrously huge limbs starting to sag like wet pasta. Geoff’s feet touched the ground and Antoine stepped back, shocked as his arms wiggled like warm wax. He doubled up a fist and punched at Geoff, but as the blow connected, it had no force behind it. The fist just collapsed as it hit him as if it had been hollow and made of paper.

Geoff smirked. “You’re starting to hollow out,” Geoff said. “How does that feel?”

Antoine was confused as his arms hung uselessly at his side like loose drapes. He took a few steps backward, then cried out as his tree-trunk leg gave out beneath him, folding like an accordian as the rest of him hit the ground hard.

He tried to push himself up but his limbs were no longer solid. He looked down in horror as his torso collapsed, his massive pecs sinking down until they had completely flattened out. His clothes didn’t shift along with him; instead, the humongous man within them just deflated until he looked more like a skin-suit than a three-dimensional man.

Geoff smiled at the undulating pile of empty flesh. He smirked as he heard Antoine softly moaning, then yanked the man out of his discarded clothes, shaking him out like he was fresh laundry. “There we go,” he said, holding Antoine by the formerly enormous shoulders. Antoine’s head had slumped backwards, looking in the opposite direction. Geoff turned him around and stared into his upside-down face.

“This is how we make our art,” Geoff explained. “First, you’re hollowed out. Then, you’re processed. Join me on the way to the processing room, won’t you?” he said with a taunting lilt. Then he flattened the former hulk along the ground and started tightly rolling him up, starting from the feet. Antoine moaned and screeched, but it sounded like he was expriencing more pleasure than pain.

“As you’re experiencing,” Geoff explained, “your hollow body is extremely sensitive. So you’ll enjoy this part.” When he was finished, ANtoine was just a tube of flesh. Geoff tucked him under his armpit as he started cleaning up the museum. He sadly regarded that snapped-in-two Lee Priest cutout.

“Poor baby,” Geoff said. “Although I think I’ll talk to the curator about displaying your two halves so you’re  staring into your own big cock,” he suggested. “What a sight that would be! And what a sensation for you.”

Geoff took both halves of Lee with them to the elevator, where he punched in a long code on the brightly lit keypad. A thirty-second elevator ride later, Geoff emerged in a dark room. He set down the shattered Lee Priest and unrolled Antoine. When he saw the look of dismay and bewilderment on the hollow man’s face, he couldn’t resist the urge to lean in and kiss the big, supple lips. Antoine couldn’t do anything to stop him.

“Now, here’s where we process you,” Geoff explained. “Although I’ve always wanted to keep one of you men as a blanket--this beautiful body would keep me SO warm in the winter--but we’ve already got a buyer for you.”

“What buyer?” Antoine said, his voice a gentle whisper since his lungs were almost empty now. “Please let me go, please…”

“Where would you go? You want to inchworm around for the rest of your life? Nope, sorry.” He climbed a ladder to a machine that look like a steam press. He spread out Antoine’s body on it, smoothing out any wrinkles. Then he moved the limbs so they were in an impressive pose. “Yeah, pretend these muscles have some meat in them,” Geoff taunted, knowing the helpless bodybuilder could only vaguely wiggle about. He used his thumbs to rearrange Antoine’s face into a smile. A starch spray in his pocket locked the face in its new shape. Antoine could only softly moan now as his eyes darted around, the rest of his face looking exuberant.

As a final touch, Geoff used his thumb to pry up one of Antoine’s eyebrows. “Very sexy,” he said as he starched it in place. Then he backed up, pressing a bright green button at the machine’s base.

The press slammed down suddenly, a cloud of steam erupting on all sides. When it pulled up, the hollow noodle of a man had been flattened and solidified. Geoff pulled out the new Antoine Vaillant cutout, leaning it against the machine.

The raised eyebrow and the confident smirk were an amazing touch, he thought as he examined his work. Antoine’s body was incredibly built, so masculinely powerful--and that dick! It was flattened now, nothing more than an image on the side of a flattened figure, but Geoff had to rub his hand over it just to admire its beauty. “My my,” he said. “As I’m sure you’re now experiencing, your body is… extremely sensitive. That’s the point. Of course, you can’t cum. So your mind will be driven mad in desperation, as you’ll be forever building to a climax you’ll never reach, unable to beg for the contact you so desire.”

Months later, Pietro couldn’t wait to unveil his new piece in his high-priced boutique. His wealthy and eccentric clientele were blown away by the image of the massive, sexy brute before him!

“So manly!” they said, admiring his beard.

“Look at all those muscles! No real man could be that big,” said another.

“Look at his huge cock!” another said, rubbing his hand over the smoothly shorn crotch of the former pro bodybuilder. “Man, what I wouldn’t give to have a man like this naked in front of me!”

The Antoine cutout brought crowds to Pietro’s boutique in droves for awhile--until he grew tired of it, moving it aside for a newer display: a blonde man with freakish thighs named Brad Rowe. From his new spot up against the wall, modeling a harness, the cardboard Antoine silently begged to be front and center again--and while he pitied Brad, looking so huge and yet so helpless as men fondled his depthless body, he also envied all that attention. He yearned for the day Brad was replaced by yet another man.

If only Antoine could speak, he would have begged Pietro to put the Brad cutout near him--maybe touching each other, so the nights wouldn’t be so mind-numbingly lonely. It wasn’t long before Antoine quit yearning for the days when he was a big powerful man. He accepted his role as a helpless display, wanting nothing more than attention.