Spill Your Guts

by Casey Clough

As a rule, Lydia did not shit on first dates. She waited until the second or the third or the fourth. In fact, she had gone through an entire six month relationship - more of a situationship, really - where she did not shit at all. At least, not at his house. 

But this morning she’d had fiber for breakfast. A dense bean salad for lunch. Espresso martinis after dinner, the caffeine loosening her bowels like the liquor had loosened her tongue. 

It was going well, but then somewhere in the conversation, she began to become aware of her asshole. The clenching of it. The way it breathed in and out as she did. 

He invited her back to his place to watch a movie - clearly the date had gone well, she had passed some kind of test - and it was once she was inside, shoes off, having ridden in his car and left hers parked on a street outside the bar, that she realized it was like the tide. Inevitable, the movements impossible to stop unless one suspended gravity, pulled the moon down from the sky. She was going to have to shit in his toilet. 

“Excuse me,” she said, and she kept her voice sexy, she thought she kept it sexy, she winked and took it back in the same instant, so that it must have seemed like something was in her eye. And then she took a breath and went into the bathroom.  And thought about, but did not turn on, the fan. The roar of the fan’s motor would have been a dead giveaway. She might as well have sent him a text that said, “I’m taking a shit in here.” 

She sat down and braced her belly, tightened her core like in Pilates class. Please, she thought, come out quietly, and then there was a terrible pain, and a loud splash, and she felt empty and sore and relieved until she remembered the splash and wondered if he could hear her from outside. Immediately, she began to brainstorm ways she could test if the sound of a splash into the toilet was audible from the living room. Could she rig something up to fall into it when she closed the door? What could she leave that would make a similar sound but would not leave a trace of something weird for him to discover later? Then there was another wave of pain. Sweat and spasms rippling down her abdomen. It felt like she was pushing out one massive turd that spanned the entire length of her body. When would it end? She contracted again. 

Still it emerged like an unholy push pop. Still there was more to bite down and bear. Until finally she could feel it disgorge, like giving birth from her ass.

She wiped and saw blood. Or no, it wasn’t blood. 

The dense bean salad was full of beets. It was just beets. 

Right? 

The whole thing was a sickly pinkish-gray color. The fecal infant she had just delivered. It was almost beautiful, in a way. Shiny. Gummy. Full of what looked like veins but must have been undigested stalks of kale.

Doubled over, she reached for the corroded silver handle of the toilet, eager to offer her sins up to the sewer and go back out to watch the movie. The mouth of the toilet seemed to gag, retching up the mass of slimy pink matter. 

Half digested memories floated up, got stuck. Sick days at school, twisting and spitting like a trapped animal, mother coaxing violently pink bubblegum amoxicillin down her throat. 

The load did not go down, but was instead pulled into the inner workings of the toilet. Sucked down and cemented into the opening of it, so that the water began to bubble up and surge towards the lip of the bowl. Lydia searched the room for a plunger. Frantic eyes roving over every surface. Frantic hands prying open cabinets and drawers. 

But there was nothing. Not even a toilet brush. 

She would have to attempt to unlodge the mass with her hands. That was the only way. Certainly she wasn’t going to stick her head out of the bathroom door and ask him for a plunger. That would be humiliating. 

She stuffed her fingers down the throat of the toilet. Where she had expected a soft, crumbling texture, the feeling of wet sand between her fingers, there was something fleshy. Bouncy. With little give. 

It felt like skin, almost. Like the smooth insides of her mouth. She closed her fingers around the fleshy snake of it and pulled. And pulled. And pulled. Wet fist over wet fist, like a magician pulling handkerchiefs from a sleeve. 

Taptaptap, his knuckles at the door. Are you okay in there? 

Was she? Yes. Surely it was nothing. Surely it was fine. She was going to tell him it was fine. I’m fine! Be out in a sec. 

It was the time for decisive action. She had to be out in a sec. She’d just committed to that timeline. 

What a freak he must think she was, lingering in his bathroom for what must have been half an hour. 

She slithered the tights from her feet. Dropped her panties to the ground. Straddled the toilet in an exaggerated squat and spit on her fingers, held her asshole apart with one hand and began to work the bubble gum ropes of her guts back in with the other. The end of them went back up with a relieved sort of slurp. She flushed down the nothing that remained. 

She washed her hands and righted herself. Walked back out to watch the movie. Saying nothing. Hoping he’d still deign to have sex with someone he had to check on in the bathroom. He did. They did. Mediocre at best. 

Later, she would tell her friends he rearranged her guts. A secret, sick joke to herself. 

Casey Clough is a video game marketer by day, selling visions of Hell and cartoon violence. By night, she writes, hoping to atone for her daytime sins by putting something beautiful into the world. Casey’s work has been published in the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. She is a winner of the 2024 UCLA Kirkwood Prize.