Butt Stuff
—for Willy Woodcock
THE BEGINNING: MEETING W
SPD (shits per day): 4-5
I might’ve been wiping my ass and watching a film from the Criterion Collection on my phone when I first matched with him. W. That’s not how they all start. There are others. But he was special. Is. Thin eyebrows that signaled indecisiveness. Slutty forearms. Played Magic. Wasn’t sure if he wished to sire a screaming child into the dying earth. The whole nine yards.
Fast forward. Deal with it. I’d ate NothingSpecial the day of our first date, to see Oldboy on re-release, how romantic. Of course my stomach hurt. I’m always in pain. During the date, my bathroom escape wasn’t as intricately-woven as Oh Dae-su’s revenge plan, which is to say, nonexistent. It was a nice date though. When W put his too-long arm around me when Oh Dae-su cut his tongue out, my nerves liquified into a warm paste over the gargling, stolid body trapped under protective layer of white boy gangle. Nice date.
We went to a park and laid in a hammock and he fingered me in the hammock. I wasn’t ashamed yet. I had to laugh. You owe a guy more than a mint. Yawping behind us floated the rompered pirates of the Moshulu. They reminded me of the bachelorettes in Nashville, yassing to a godless sky. Love new and newly slipped away.
One time he put his finger by the wrong hole. One time I got up from the hammock and fell and dropped Spikey the toy dinosaur. A plastic toy, like cheap love, lasting forever.
“Your blood.”
W calmly wiping the blood off my knee with a tissue from I don’t know where. W offering the tissue back to me, as Spikey uprose from his back. Magic. The whole thing a reverse-offering, mild hesitation inflecting the outskirts of his voice, like he was saying “good boy” to a dog nearby for not attacking him.
TON DEPAR (SPD 4 to 5 to 6)
I was scared to go to W’s house because every girl has to be scared of getting raped or being gaslit about some smaller issue when entering a young man’s Private-With-Four-Roomate Domicile. But more than being raped I was scared of shitting at his house. I was pooping too many times a day. At my parents’ house when Veep was on, it was okay, but it wouldn’t be okay with House of 1000 Corpses blaring and the techies leering.
To be comfortable having sex and shitting in the strange homes of strangers, we must economize our vulnerabilities. Spoon feed them to each other in digestible packets in order to jumpstart trust, which will eventually, yet hopefully sooner-than-normal give way to comfort and acceptance within and between both parties, and Florence can both shit and be fucked by William comfortably, excepting other bodily insecurities and latent sexual hangups. Yes.
In the common living area room, there was a bike, small couch, cardboard box for the cat he was supposed to watch but the friend had done something else with the cat. “It’s lovely.” My stomach hurt. I felt hot and nauseated. I felt exhaustion and pain all over.
We played Mortal Kombat 2 sober. Later. A little tipsy. Pretending to fall in the cat box. He lifted me up, kissed me. Read to me in the hammock. Still sick but couldn’t’ve been happier. This deck wasn’t fratty or too dad-y either. I relate to this character. Are you my girlfriend?
When my body stops burning we can go to Antarctica and see that that one type of penguin isn’t really extinct. Life flourishes, people rot.
AW. What are your kinks?
BF. What are your values?
“One time me and my buddy were going on a drive and I asked if we could stop at Walmart. He asked me what I needed at Walmart. ‘Hemorrhoid cream’ I said,” he said, trapping my hands in his Von Erick-coveted one.
“I don’t have hemorrhoids, by the way.” He chuckled.
He valued honesty.
Don’t bring up banal choking. You don’t want to be Iron Clawed on accident. Have Been Conditioned to Like It. Reminded of the Pincher, who wanted to have the hands of a boxing Irish poet, you said to W all you wanted was him not to hurt you unless you wanted him to. All you, in place of anyone, can ask for.
“Okay. Scout’s honor.”
A value statement and a warning, not really for him, for your Future Self. Can’t be ashamed of what you want. Endurance is the consequence of instigation. I’d never thought about it in those terms.
When he asked me if I’d come later, it was like I was an obstinate though well meaning child who hadn’t completed the homework. I was sweating fever buckets on his gray futon. I was wearing his shirt. F_eli_g Lu_ky! A futon and he was a consultant.
“No, but I don’t know if I ever have without a vibrator.”
That swung a few degrees right on the great pendulum of truth, all a gurl can do. Next we talked about our greatest fears. “I don’t know,” I said. “Being completely alone or losing a sense of myself. Whatever.”
And then the next three to four seconds passed with him looking at Spikey, unsheltered to the bare flicks of light on the bare dresser. The only moment frozen there ever was, now extinct like the penguins. “That makes sense,” he said. He started looking for my clit again—so he’d believed me. Before.
GETTING WORSE
SPD: I don’t know.
Pause with the blossoming romance. Splaying Arnold Palmer chunks on the sink most days. At my job. At the school. I tried to do more to not feel bad about doing less of everything but pooping and thinking about W. God of the gut, god of my cunt. He’d make me come eventually.
My poops were watery in consistency and temperament. When they came I was unsure out of which end it’d be. My shit was the apotheosis of and my only respite from my thoughts as I scrolled through TikTok and Twitter.
When you’re sick there is no forever, only unbearable nows that stretch longer than forever.
I felt bad when I laughed. When W made me laugh a numbed expression cloaked my face. His jokes were cloaking something too, a windowless shotgun house, light beaming from door to door on the inside. Nowhere to escape.
We didn’t not admit to have certain things in common.
But what of love in this equation?
I think, I think love is the antidote to all pain (paradoxically, even, the pain it causes) if only you pass an unspecified and unforeclosed-upon Rubicon of submission, sometimes rooted in submissiveness—willing to give in to the submission—and sometimes not.
A hand over the face, containing your mouth—no need to blurt it out.
LESSONS IN PAIN FROM DR. BEN DOVER
Don’t know what made me do it. If I would have done it Before.
But I’d do it now and it would be my idea, and therein would lie the dignity. Lie under the pretense of truth, wrapped up under its iron blanket.
Aberration 69. In the hardest porn and the softest rom coms, it’s never the girl’s idea. When I brought it up, a little fucked up—where had we come back from? Where had we gone?—half-glazed gazing at my polka dot socks, it was with the hesitantly-eager professionalism of an ancillary character on Succession. The old vanguard. Frank. Carl. Asshole vanguard. My asshole’s vanguard. The lights weren’t fully off. A toy car, a yo–yo, a sake bottle. My dad, was he there?, downstairs watching Veep.
I touched W’s shoulder. Treat the brain like a muscle, tease each muscle like the mind. Progress. Getting what’s coming, deserving it. You deserve every mundane horror you put up with.
“We could try that,” he said in response to my Suggestion, seeing eyes clinging wanly to the bridge of his nose. F present-tense-loves W.
His Consultantspeak was a good signoff on my prurient diseased desires. Off go the lights, ace in the hole. Let him ingratiate something within himself and long outside me. Expurgate my stomach exorcise my spirits. Maybe it was sexual busywork, maybe it was excel. But his black eyes were filled with something I decided to read as hope. Need.
I chugged some of the brandy we’d taken to The Show and made him do the same, but he didn’t drink as much, because he is good, his clever mouth clasping the bottle that was a tollbooth for the thoughts inside, letting maybe 35% through. 65% of W likes 35% of F.
He pivoted me around. Perfunctorily and not over-excitedly, just-the-right to slightly-less-than-right amount excitedly, he smacked on the lube we’d used on my small tits before, when I was on the rag—this.
Insert tweet about guys who like small tits.
He took now to perfect slime frugality. The surprise of the century. And yet the pain really was. I’d never shit again. I’d never shit again! Had Selina Meyer done this?
“Are you okay?”
I was sobbing into my Bear like a PMSing drunk, straight Dostoevsky. I looked at my fat plush unicorn. My bony Ozemtopus. Oh Dae-su eating the octopus, alive. The malleability and shapelessness of his body’s power over me contrasted horribly with the material edges of the daggery pain shooting up my rectum. Too young to have myself torn a new asshole, too young, too young … I almost saw the light, until breaking through to a world of sound—
“You’re my very good girl, F. My very good girl”
“Forever?”
The sycophantic frog of me.
“Forever.”
My face melted off into lavender non-futon. Wipe off it into the pine-needle-smelling Kleenex. Until he pulled out. A constellation of shit sparkled the empty condom. Why did you rub your shit over the condom? I wanted to scream at his dead-alive face. I wanted to scream. You put me through all that pain and you didn’t come. My pain would never bring him enough pleasure.
Well then it was over. I told him it was worse than losing my v-card. Physically if not psychologically. He didn’t play soccer or smoke weed.
“I care about you so much,” I said hugging him downstairs when we didn’t gawk over Oliver Stone, we were mostly silent.
“I care about you too,” he said. “Maybe this is it. Maybe you’ve had two thirds too many.”
“Uh-uh.”
The next morning, diving class was held in the acid pool of my stomach. Blood in my reverse-stool. I cried and told him my asshole was bleeding.
“Hemorrhoids?”
“Could … be.”
IN WHICH THE CAMERA ENTERS MY ASS
The only way.
The first eight ounces of The Solution slipped down my gullet and out my asshole with a relatively non-violent, partially solid demeanor. I watched an early Jeff Goldblum film because its plot surrounding a small Chicago newspaper vaguely interested me, and because the way Jeff’s eyebrows looked in it vaguely reminded me of how W’s eyebrows looked. Pussy eyebrows. What if I had cancer?
What would happen when I erupted? When the shit and the Solution became One?
It didn’t even seem worth it to not eat solid foods for a day to know if I had cancer. To have to deal with this Solution that tasted like Gary Busey’s asshole. To sate the inchoate hunger and get rid of the taste, like desire in August I let the bomb pop, rarefied medium-rare filet of the liquid diet, melt in my mouth. Thank you sir, may I have another. And another and another.
Forever Gatorade Blue.
Survived till seven o’clock. Then things took a turn for the worse. Why did I think that I could beat this law, that after languishing wouldn’t come perishing. That Oneness doesn’t find itself. All things give in eventually. Most things are forgotten before they die. “Oh boy.” I ran. Gatorade blue geyser, turgid, erupting from my butt. I cried at the sight. SPH, for the next couple hours, up to four. If you could call these things shits, and not an act of nature wreaked upon the body.
“Mom, can we get Slurpees after this?“
I made it into my bed eventually.
But woke up at 4:30 for more of the Solution. I tried to chug all 32 ounces down, like the brandy, quickly, a twenty-two year old freshman, and this was my pink whitney. Too young. Everywhere, except the body, I’ve been a bit faster than normal.
My mouth was a geyser, amorphous. The worse pain, discomfort, and annihilating self-debasement I’d felt in quite some time. retching like a cannibalized lamb possessed by the spirit more befitting a black goat.
Pure hell and then it was over. Then it was over. I slept a wink more before the procedure. My dad woke me up. He was taking me. W wasn’t there. W had gone to Antarctica to be with the penguins. To leave me, time to leave. I turned away but told him not to leave the room. Stay with me here. A few more minutes, a few more forevers. One more now. A little bit more than nothing.
Mini-interview with Florence Fishburne
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
FF: To quote the legendary extra from my sometimes-favorite film Amadeus, I was essentially told that I was using “too many notes.” Writers are bad at math, but we must know economy. When the editor told me that in college, I thought my life was over. Well, I am still here, sometimes even happily. I think about that guy a lot, who else he might have saved from the lethal combination of young ego and hundred-year-old thesaurus.
HFR: What are you reading?
FF: Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “Butt Stuff”?
FF: Of course, this is the life I’ve asked for. I guess I’m a victim of the Discourse on Shame that percolates both alt and normie (forgive me) lit, since-abandoned grad school theses, and since-deleted Twitter threads. I wanted to be able to write about difficult and taboo things in a way that I found funny because I think that is freeing, both for me personally and for, like, women in general, not that I’m their spokesperson or anything.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
FF: I recently returned to the novel I abandoned like an outgrown puppy at page eighty-three. It’s a coming-of-age book, written in a bit of a surrealist way, for people who watched Heathers too much.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
FF: I’m twenty-two so I want to gatekeep my world wisdom until after the frontal lobe’s fully developed. But one thing I do try to believe is, even if you’re in pain now, if there is love in your heart, you can outlive the things that haunt you.
Florence Fishburne is a multi-hyphenate of singular dog petting abilities based out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. You can reach her at florencefishburne@gmail.com.
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