Log

Troy and Matt had left hours ago, cashing in to go home and smoke weed and argue about who had enough money to order a pizza.

It was only after that, shit started happening. The fact that he’d been drinking straight Grey Goose gas for the last two hours didn’t help matters at all. He’d been trying out every fucking boozed out cliché he could think of, trying to work an angle before last call which, in Ithaca New York, was two a.m. At 1:35 he’d approached a girl on the dance floor and bent in smiling, like to tell her a funny secret. She gave him one ear and he said:

“Hey, I’m Al. You wanna see my cock?”

“What, I can’t hear…!”

She made a motion, hands-to-ears, like “The music in here is way loud,” He wasn’t discouraged. Leaned in once more:

“My cock! Would you like to see it!!”

Again she motioned that she was hearing only bass thumps and auto-tune. He yelled, directly into her head with his lips brushing her ear.

“I want to fuck you! I will show you my penis! I’m going to do it now!!!”

She heard, and reacted. By the time the bouncers were done forcibly removing him, he felt a massive retch building in his gut. He didn’t even have to move, just rolled from where he’d been dumped, took a knee, and let go into some bushes. He passed out into the same bushes just after he was done.

***

When he woke, he was on his feet, walking, and talking to a girl. It was like magic. She was with a friend, and it seemed like they were headed back up the hill towards campus. The friend was fat, and she kept on saying how hungry she was and he found that funny. She, the fat friend, had mentioned that she lived in Hobart, and that they could come over and eat with her if they wanted. The fat friend said she’d give them Ramen noodles. The other one kept putting her arm around him and touching his torso and arms, even though he was quite sure his speech was coming out dis-understandably. Since he was so trashed he wasn’t registering that this girl was actually the same girl he’d been propositioning just before the bar closed. Since the girl was so bombed, she had no recollection either of being propositioned, or that this man was the one responsible. It was a drunken coincidence of improbable proportions, but it went unnoticed because everybody involved was shit-faced.

***

The scene in the room was ugly. At one point the tried to eat her pussy, while at the same time pulling his own pants off. He kept firing off course and licking his own fingers, and eventually he stopped what he was doing in order to stand up, and fix the pants situation once and for good. He was finally able to get them off, but in the process he’d rolled himself over towards the hallway and he had to feel around in the dark bedroom for the girl. Instead he found a lamp. He fumbled with that for a while, trying to find the “on” toggle. He frustrated easy though, in this soup-fog of his drunk, and he gave up fast. He tossed the thing, rather more forcefully than he’d needed too, and the impact pressed the on switch. Bathed in sudden bare-bulb flooding, he saw that the girl was asleep, and snoring, and that she was drooling a big booger out of one nostril. Looking at her in the aggressive glow of the uncooperative lamp, he felt no ease. She did not look as good as he’d thought a few hours ago.

***

It wasn’t till 10 a.m. the next morning that he saw the turd. They’d slept, the two of them alone in his studio apartment, until his roommate’s pet ferret woke him. The animal didn’t actually wake him up in any traditional sense. Nevertheless, the animal was responsible, completely, for his getting out of bed way before he would've liked. He’d been just sort of lying there in post-drunk stasis. His eyes were closed, but in his mind he was looking all around the room and he knew about his eyes. He thought: “My eyes are closed but I’ve developed some odd sort of super-human ability to see through my own closed eyelids. I must use this power for good, but how…” And other such madness, but eventually his brain needed further convincing and, not finding it, forced the eyes to open as if to prove his point. When they did he found himself looking at the ferret, who was standing on his vinyl copy of Katy Lied and facing him. The weasel began pissing and the pee expanded out from his weasel rump, covering very quickly, the weird insectine cover art of the Steely Dan classic. He jumped from the bed to take care of Bruce. En route across the apartment he took note of an especially funky odor, even for his place. He chalked it up to wildness and humidity and fixed the situation with the weasel Bruce. He was on his way back to the bed when he saw the it.

Seeing unexpected feces, human feces, anywhere but in the toilet, is always a confusing, instinctually irritating affair. The mind does a kind of odd double-take, as if the shit is so unlikely and out of order, that it’s being here simply cannot be true. He begs off for a bit, recalibrating and checking for contextual error. Finding none, he looks back at the brown log. It’s in sweet, razor sharp relief in a beam of am sunlight kissing off his white bed sheets. The turd is touching the girl, leaning on her because of the bed imprint. He is frozen transfixed, as if staring at hole in the fabric of space/time.

As he stared, he became aware that the increased odor was actually from this unwanted BM sitting on his bed. Breathing it now he wondered how he could have missed it. Few smells carry the focused concentrated heaviness of unsubmerged human shit. Left out in an enclosed space? Left to fester and redouble for god knew how many hours? It’s a wonder the stench hadn’t just killed them both in their sleep from suffocation. What to do now? A play for the shit with anything even approaching proper gear (gloves, grocery bag turned inside-out, worn like a glove) would wake the girl up. He couldn’t have that, because was it her shit? His shit? A recon mission by his toilet paper wrapped fingers proved inconclusive. Stealth was still key. He moved in. Just as he went to make his move though, the girl rolled over toward him, pancaking the shit-log under her bare, slightly hairy, left thigh. He let an audible

“Ooooohhh…!”

Slip out. Then he grabbed his pants from the floor and left the girl sleeping on shit in his own apartment.

***

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