The Turd: An American Journey – Xperience Fiction

The Turd: An American Journey – Xperience Fiction – by Liam Sweeny.

Ernest sat in the green room with his palms making out with his knees. His eyes made time with the brick face of the outer wall and the bare sheet-rock inner walls. The fluorescent overhead bulb strobed out in a rust-edged ballast. The low pile ringlets of the stained gray carpet beneath his feet was perfect breeding ground for static charge and he wondered if there were green rooms that were actually green. He glanced over at Lysette who had her notebook resting on her prototype, pages in a whirlwind, speared at points by anxiety. Ernest got a queer feeling in his stomach seeing his surefire wife scrambling over anything.

Two days prior, a man in an easy suit showed up at their door. He handed them a handshake and a card that said Funding Angels. It was a show on VidYou that was really a knock-off of a more famous venture capitalist show, blending it with a seventies variety show and an antiques appraisal show. It was Lysette’s guilty pleasure;

Ernest could’ve taken it or left it.

Their visitor told Lysette that he had seen her inventions and wanted to give her a shot on the show. Moreover, he saw Ernest’s daily struggle in the background and knew viewer junk food when he saw it. Lysette was invited so long as she could bring Ernest as her plus one.

“You okay, hun?”

Lysette scratched her temple with her pen cap. “I’m fine. I just didn’t have enough time to put this in trials. I tried it quick myself last night, but I don’t know if it’s supposed to taste like that.”

“Wait, you took a shit and ran it through that thing?” Ernest said. “When?”

“Last night. But I ate it this morning. I made my flapjacks with it.”

Ernest soured his face. “That’s why you wouldn’t let me have any. I just thought you were being greedy.” He scratched his face. “So how did it taste?”

Lysette concealed a grunt. “Nutty,” she said. “Very nutty.”

“Did you eat nuts?”

“I had a peanut butter sandwich yesterday,” she said. “Crunchy. I don’t know if it tasted nutty because the nuts didn’t digest and just got ground up by the machine.”

Ernest got up, patting Lysette’s two-hour hairstyle, to her swatting him away.

“It worked though, right?”

A PA with a busy headset opened the door.

“You guys are on,” he said. “Just remember not to swear. We’re live. And this is just a guideline – don’t walk out there with a shit.” He looked at Ernest. “Not that you could, big guy, if I heard right. If they want to see your shit…” he looked at a clipboard in his hand. “Lysette, they’ll ask. They have a Porta-Potty offstage which they’ll bring out.”

“Oh, I just have an invention,” Lysette said.

“Yeah, I get that, but…” he reached in his pocket and pulled out a tiny party bottle.

“Laxative,” he said. “Just in case. Good luck folks.”

Ernest guarded Lysette with her invention and notebook gripped tight to her chest as they walked out on stage. It was a real green-room, the size of an old factory.

Cheap tables, chairs, almost everything in Big Value black plastic or particle board.

One of the investors, a placard named ‘Cal’ on his chair, held up a card.

“So we have Ernest and Lysette Kreb. Welcome. Why are you here?”

“Um, you sent a guy?” Lysette said. The investors all laughed.

“Oh, no, honey,” another executive, ‘Tina’ said. “What do you have for us?”

Lysette set down her device and placed her notebook on top.

“I wanted to invent something to make a positive impact in the world,” she said. “And it occurred to me that if we could reconsitute our own waste and turn it into something that could nourish us, we could radically reduce our agricultural footprint. So I found an amazing combination of microbes and enzymes that can turn that waste into a material similar in form and function to flour.”

‘Teddy’ swiveled in his executive chair and came to a rest with a pencil aimed at

Lysette.

“Are you saying we can eat shit?”

“I would never tell you that.”

“No, but with that device, we could eat our own shit, right?”

“Well, yes,” Lysette said. “Exactly, yes.”

The investors swiveled toward each other seeing if they had concord in giving their supplicant the funding that might not launch the assembly lines, but would at least further the development.

“So Ernest,” Cal said. “Word is you haven’t shit in… forty-three days. That true?”

“Yes sir.”

“What are you going to do with the turd once it does come out?”

“I’m going to flush it,” Ernest said. “Maybe break it up a little before it goes.”

“Not even take a picture of it?” Tina said.

“Probably not.”

“Okay, so I’ll tell you what,” Teddy said. “Lysette, we’ll fund your project. We’ll figure out what you need. But Ernest, we want that shit. It’s a package deal.”

“Y’all think this is a joke, right?” Ernest said. “I hate this thing inside me. I’m flushing it. That’s it.” He looked over at Lysette and saw disappointment. “I’m sorry, Lys, no.”

“We were going to give her up to ten thousand dollars,” Teddy said. “Name your price. I’ll give you twenty thousand.”

“No.”

“Thirty,” Tina said. “No; forty.”

“Fifty-five,” Teddy said. “And we’ll fund the poop oven.”

Ernest felt his face hot. He wasn’t carrying a turd for forty days to give it to some entitled rich asshole to forever own a piece of him, no matter how despised a piece it was. Ernest walked over to the craft table tipped it over, spilling eclairs, donuts and bottled water all over the stage floor.

“Lysette, I’ll be out in the car,” he said. “Fuck these people. I’m sorry, babe.”

He left the set and stormed out in the parking lot with hot stinging moisture in his lower eyelids and a dull ache in his gut.

#

Their bag straps hung draped over the back of the chair in front of Jasen’s desk. They were lucky to get back to the office from the conference room without grabbing employees at random by the shoulders and shaking them.

They were going to purge the whole internet. All social media. Everything. Gone.

Jasen unraveled his four-lane cheeseburger. Four patties, shredded and sliced cheese, bacon strips, tomato, lettuce, onion – everything. Ophelia’s chin rested on her clenched fist. They were watching the Weather Channel because they couldn’t agree on what to watch and at least the Weather Channel had tornadoes on it. And it didn’t involve poo in any way.

“Everything,” Ophelia said. “I’ve never not had social media.”

Jason flicked a paper football across the room. “My first real memory was of a cat playing piano,” he said. The internet’s been my whole life. I met my first girlfriend on Gravesong; I used to make mods, like really high-end equipment, god-killing hammers and shit, and she bought from my shop in the game. We had a long distance relationship for like six months.”

Ophelia chuckled. “My first boyfriend broke up with me with a meme. Really weird, too. Like one of those cartoons you have to think about to get it. He basically had to explain what he meant by it, which made me feel pretty stupid, to be honest.”

Jasen walked over to his bag, leaving his burger unmolested for the moment to pull out a small, thin laptop and cable.

“You need a flash drive?” He asked. “I got a couple. I got a one-terabyte, that should hold everything you got.”

“What do you mean?” Ophelia said.

“Pictures.” Jasen flipped her the flash drive. “Figure we got advanced notice here.

Grab as many of your pics as you can before they shut it off.”

“So you have, just, no faith in us whatsoever.”

Jasen plugged his laptop into his office desktop’s USB-C port to charge it. “We gotta find the anti-poo before our government scratches this itch,” he said. “We have no idea when they’re going to do that, and from everywhere we’ve gone, poo reigns supreme.”

“What about the hospitals?” Ophelia said. “I’m sure people are eating poo, so they gotta be getting sick with E. Coli, not to mention like thirty other things. Maybe we can go to the hospital and film some of it.”

“You want to go to the hospital, we can, but do you think warning people of the dangers of eating poo is going to be the end of poo? They had a fried-egg commercial about ‘your brain on drugs,’ and it just made stoners hungry for eggs.”

“So that’s it? We’re going to lose the internet and our jobs too?”

“I’m just saying, we need to find a way to lean into the poo in order to throw people off it. We have to grab the attention before we can divert it. And we got a ticking clock.”

The room grew quiet to all but the sound of the meteorologists explaining the whims of mesoscale convection and the soft hum of three computers. Jasen started compressing his data from Profiles.

“I ate poo once,” Ophelia said. “By accident.”

“Oh, nice,” Jasen said. “How did that taste?”

“Like shit. I don’t know. Wasn’t good.”

“How do you eat shit by accident?”

“I was twelve,” she said. “Susie Whitmore told me that if you put poo on your face

like a mask, it gets rid of pimples. I had pimples, so I tried it. And I got some in my mouth. Come to find out Susie was making the whole thing up.”

Jasen chuckled.

“Wasn’t funny then, asshole.” Ophelia grabbed the remote and turned the Weather Channel up loud enough to drown out Jasen’s mirth.

“In the fight against climate change,” the anchor said. “We have many inventions that could use a fighting chance. In a town outside of San Francisco, a married couple have developed a machine that can turn human waste into flour to make bread, and one of the two has a miraculous story.

“Turn that up,” Jasen said.

“It is up.”

The screen shifted to a crappy venture capital show knock off calling Funding Angel. A quirky couple had a device in a white case between them. He was in blue denim overalls and red flannel shirt, she was in a blue sequined dress.

“Lysette is the inventor, and her husband, Ernest, is an amateur engineer. They’ve developed a device that uses enzymes and microbes to break down everything in our waste and reconstitute it into a protein- and carbohydrate-rich food, a flour of sorts.”

“You think that could help us?” Ophelia said.

“Shh… I’m listening.”

“But the real story here is Ernest hasn’t gone number two in close to forty-three days. He eats normally, and it is a good question of where this food goes. But on the show, a bidding war broke out for Ernest’s poo when it comes out, a bidding war ended with Ernest leaving the show in a meltdown.” The screen switched over to Funding Angels, and Ernest turning over the craft table.

“Maybe he’s saving the poo for himself to use the machine on,” another anchor said. “Forty-three days could make a lot of flapjacks.”

They took their time in banter, and Jasen shut off the television.

“Ernest Kreb,” Jasen said as he jotted the names down. “Ernest and Lysette.”

“I can’t think of anyone more anti-poo than a guy who can’t poo,” Ophelia said.

“We gotta find him,” Jasen said. “I think he’s our shot, but we gotta be careful. He hasn’t shit in forty-three days, he’s bound to be ornery. And if he’s our only shot, we can’t afford to piss him off.”

“You think he’ll talk to us?” Ophelia said.

“I think he’s tired of poo culture right now,” Jasen said. “Real tired. He might just be looking for us right now without even realizing it.”

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