The Turd: An American Journey, Chptr. 1 – Xperience Fiction – by Liam Sweeny.
If there was ever a more effective, or more risky way to exercise every muscle in the human body, Ernest Kreb had found it on the spotty porcelain toilet of the Mini-Mart on the corner of Madison and North Allen. His core burned. His chest felt like strips of overcooked lasagna noodles and his legs like bundles of angel hair, and all the thinking of carbohydrates wasn’t exerting a downward pressure on his bowels.
He clenched like he was taking a punch to the gut, and he pondered whether or not a real punch would do the trick. Should he go outside and grab the bum’s bottle, smash it against the wall? Would that even score a punch, or would the bum just beg him the money to replace it?
Ernest was six-foot-two and lanky with the kind of muscles that removed stubborn bolts without resorting to blowtorches and threw loads of metal scrap into dump trucks. But one dump eluded him; the big dump. The one that hadn’t dropped since the day was the same on the calendar but the month was the one prior. A
September dump awaiting an October release.
Hopefully an October release.
Ernest was not a fanciful man. He wore red cotton flannels in the winter and white tank tops in the summer. He ate toasted oat cereal with just a teaspoon of sugar, and invariably, three unseasoned chicken drumsticks weighed down his plate every dinner. He had a gorgeous wife and they had the biggest silver Airstream camper in the side yard that they took to the Nevada salt flats every January. So the salt flats was a bit odd, but in all the normalcy, Ernest had the distinction of being the person with the longest-held turd in North America. He guessed so; it wasn’t in the Guinness book. It was just a figuring, a comforting thought amidst the colorectal turmoil.
Push, Ernest wanted to scream in frustration. Two cockroaches looked to be playing hide the pickle. Did roaches do doggy style? Could they have called it roachie style? Surely roaches had been around longer than dogs.
Ernest realized they couldn’t be fucking. Roaches laid eggs. But did the male roach have to fuck the eggs out of the female?
Puuuuuush. Ernest sucked in his breath at the pain. It stung. It wasn’t coming out in a Mini-Mart. Ernest pulled out his collapsible poop knife and looked it over, like he hadn’t done that for three weeks, like he didn’t know its every surface and contour. When it did come out, it would clog any toilet short of the one at Taco Pronto, which had industrial pressure and flow. He bought the poop knife on Hudson Trading, not at all surprised that they carried it, though a little bit surprised that a poop knife existed in the first place.
He would be overjoyed to shove his hands in some lucky toilet to chop up his bulky opus.
He pulled out his phone as he rocked back and forth on the seat to goose his guts. He checked his email. Mostly automotive and tool spam. He found an interesting article on one of his newsletters about artificial intelligence, and how it might freeze up the whole internet by making everybody want the same thing and force feeding it to them. Ernest groaned at the word ‘feeding,’ but the story was a nothingburger. The internet had been doing that since it got out of its diapers. He didn’t get on social media much. He didn’t have any friends in high school that he wanted to get stale political memes from.
Ernest took the deep breath of defeat and got up from the toilet. He didn’t bother wiping; his asshole was a desert. He lifted his pants, heard the jingle of his wallet chain. The jeans were scratchy against the goosebumps on his legs from all the pushing. He splashed cold water on his face and flushed the toilet with his toe. No point; he just wanted to get the most from his possession of the bathroom key.
When he first walked through the doors of the Clifton Corner Market, he wasn’t yet five. His father would take him there to steal cigarette packs off old man Clifton, stuffing them in the back of Ernest’s diaper, under the correct assumption that when old man Clifton accused the theft, Ernest’s dad could challenge him to go find them. When Ernest looked back, he realized he did play an unwitting role in his fathers’ lung cancer.
Times had changed, and the door keys of Clifton Corner Market changed hands going East to West, first Koreans, then Indians, then Lebanese, then finally Eastern European. A Serbian owner, known only by the flag behind the bulletproof glass partition. But it was his kids back there every day on their phones.
Ernest grabbed every box of laxatives they had on the medicine shelf. He saved a free hand for a six pack of prune juice. Two kids talked in Serbian. Serbian? Yeah, why not? He couldn’t make it out anyhow. He set the stuff on the counter loud enough to get them off their phones. Barely.
“You could get a fiber powder,” he said. “It’s something you could buy for a dollar and sell for ten. Prune juice got too much sugar in it. You could make more money anyhow.”
“Yo, guy,” the cashier said. “You be the only one that’ll buy that shit. Who the hell comes to a bodega for fiber?”
Kid looked down at Ernest’s haul. “For real, when was the last time you shit?”
Ernest cleared his throat. “Your mom won’t let me shit in her bed. Been a while.”
“Jokester,” the kid said. “You the guy who laid the Turd, huh?”
“No idea,” Ernest said. “I ain’t laid any turd yet.”
“You ain’t seen the Turd? That ain’t why you’re about to go home, plug the can?”
The kid turned his phone around. Ernest was looking at a turd. A healthy turd. Swear he saw steam, like it was right out of the chute. Perfectly cylindrical, rough texture, rough enough to catch the light; a brown two-carat diamond, and Ernest realized the light was cinematic. Someone had gone a baker’s mile to film the perfect shit.
“What the hell is that?”
“What you think it is? It’s a turd, man. ‘The’ turd.”
“So you guys just watch turds all day?” Ernest said. “Wonder you can’t keep the shelves stocked.”
“It’s got a billion hits on VidYou,” kid said. “It went up yesterday.”
“So that means what?”
The second kid, quiet save for giggles, spoke up.
“A turd just took over the internet.”
Nipples. American and Brazillian, African, Malaysian, pulling down droopers like they were made of solid gold. Solid gold nipples on Inca treasures, forever milking time. Male nipples thrown in for weight, and maybe for a little confusion. Jason glanced over at Genevieve to see what she was doing with her nipples, a distinct no-no.
“Eyes front,” she said. “On your own nipples, and if I see one male nipple, you’re forfeit.”
Jasen whole handed a hoagie, stuffed from the cafeteria, two hoagies sliced into a
Frankenstein’s monster, with jalapeño peppers carrying the torches. Jasen was hungry. Jasen was stoned, quite a feat in VidYou headquarters, but if there was a will, there was a jay.
“I got fifty thousand hits,” Jasen said. “What do you got?”
“Thirty-four. But my nitrous is about to hit the playground. I’ll blow by you real quick.”
“No way school kids beat perverts.”
“I should’ve ruled ‘no perv tags.’”
“But you didn’t, and it’s too late now.”
Jasen flew through channels, copying down links and placing others, creating a pipeline for his nipple montage. He was happy to finally be beating Genevieve at something, after the last game of Troll, which was exactly what it sounded like, getting on political videos and pissing people off so hard in the comments that they’d get booted for violating Terms of Service. Whoever got the most people booted in an hour won, and Genevieve had the record with forty-four.
Their bullpen was a bit like the UN in design; long, curved tables with computer stations, all facing a giant screen, used when a call had to be made about Susie
Sunshine’s nip-slip on her Barbados vacation. Was it a nipple? Was it half an areola? Throw it up on the big screen for a closer look. But most everybody that worked in the section of content moderation known as the Nipple Factory shared memes on the big screen but nothing else. This is why it was a surprise for Jasen to see his montage up on the big screen, all glory areola. He looked back to see a straight, slick-haired man in horn-rimmed glasses and a full sleeve tattoo that would indicate he was cool, but he was not. His supervisor, Bradley. Not Brad. Bradley.
“I could fire you for this,” Bradley said as he leaned over Jasen’s shoulder. Jasen caught Genevieve with her mouth covering her hand. He felt fear and loathing, fear that he would be hitting the classifieds that night and loathing that Genevieve would again best him in competition.
“You need to come with me,” Bradley said. “Some people want to see you.”
Jasen’s loathing traded its ticket in for extra fear. Who wanted to see him? The feds? The Illuminati? He was visited by the feds when he was fourteen, when his family had gotten broadband Internet for Christmas. They visited, and he couldn’t use the Internet until he was eighteen. So was it the feds?
He followed Bradley into the conference room shared by all of the content moderation bullpens and used by no one, as the trade talk of nipples, vaginae, and penii wasn’t fit for the type of room that would seat a quarterly report.
Familiar figures occupied every seat in the conference room, save one. Figures that got up on stages at shareholder meetings with trendy headset microphones to gave positive speeches. Figures framed in pictures on the ground floor. Figures with hands that likely signed Bradley’s paycheck.
It was the Illuminati. Bradley brought Jasen to the Illuminati.
“Jasen, sit.”
“I just want to say we were playing that game because nudity has been way down since the, you know, the ‘thing.’
“It’s a turd, Jasen.” The head of the table pointed to a pitcher of water – young, trendy haircut and glasses, trends he likely started. And as Jasen considered it, he felt pressure. The kind of pressure that pushes air around the intestines. The kind of pressure that imposes its will on downtown cheeks and tightens them up.
“Are you all right, young man?”
“I am, sorry,” Jason said. “I can do better, whatever I did wrong…” Groan. “I like my job.”
“We’re not here to get you in trouble,” Cool guy said. “We’re here to make you an offer.”
They outlined the problem. Jasen sat rapt, not in their pitch, but in the growing agony in his below decks. They seemed to be talking about the Turd, which was the reason they had time to play games in the first place. The original turd spawned copycats, and people were taking pictures of their turds as much, if not more, than they were taking pictures of their restaurant dinners. But this is what Jasen knew, fuck all if that’s what they were talking about. The figures at the table did seem to be mighty interested in it, but every utterance of the word turd told Jasen that what he’d spent all day cooking had to come out of the oven.
“Well, what do you say?” The older gentleman said. “Do we have a deal?”
Sensing the quickest way to get to the bathroom, he jumped up, threw both thumbs in the air and said, “Absolutely! Count me in!”
Very shortly after, as Jasen sat in the stall, he couldn’t remember whether he’d asked to be excused. Add that to the fact that he had no idea what he’d agreed to, or how to find out without looking like an idiot. Pants around his ankles, head in his hands, a throat clearing in the next stall.
“What are your sins, my son?”
“What? Yo, occupied,” Jasen said.
“I know that,” the stranger said. “I’m here to give you absolution, if you so seek it.”
“You a priest?”
“As of today,” the stranger said. “Church of Shite. Mail order thing. Not the same as Shiite, which is a Muslim sect. Just Shite.”
“Man, this shit moves fast. Look man, I don’t talk to guys when I’m in a stall, absolution or no.”
“Just think of the sweet release of unloading your sins while you unload your bowels. It is God’s Will.”
Jasen passed his baggage. He got up post haste and gave only a cursory wipe.
“Look buddy, good luck on your mission here, but someone’s going to call HR.” “Fear not, son,” the stranger said. “It is whence I came.”
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