Breasts Hurt During Global Warming

When I was in fourth grade, our school bully drowned in his family’s pool because his parents left the menace unsupervised in the water.

Had he lived, he probably would have ended up working at a McDonalds or Burger King, if I’m being completely honest. I would be pulling up to the drive-thru window in my Porsche, and I would order two McDoubles and two McChickens, one for me and one for my wife, of each, respectively, or whatever way makes sense to say that.

The neckbeard would gawk at my success, his eyes soyfacing at the hotness of my life partner and vehicle.

“Oh my god, Matthew Goldin,” he’d say. “How have you been, man?”

I’d squint and then recognize him. “Aren’t you that douchecanoe who used to push people around just to stroke your own ego?”

“Yeah. Fat lot of good that did me,” he’d say, gesturing to the McDonalds window now framing him. “What do you do now?”

“I’m a fabulist,” I’d say. “I write short tales, mostly darkly humorous in nature.”

“I like to write sometimes myself,” he’d say. “Maybe we can exchange contact info. I’d love to send you something and see what you think—and of course read your short fiction as well.”

My life partner would sigh, getting hangry. She’d be texting her friend to see what she was doing tonight.

“Nothing,” her friend would text back. “Let’s cheat on our husbands tonight.”

“Perhaps,” my life partner would reply. “Or perhaps not.”

Her friend would laugh. She would have just been kidding about the cheating thing. But she didn’t like me, that’s for sure.

Just to be polite, I’d give the school bully my email address and invite him to send me something he was proud of. Embarrassingly soon after the encounter, he’d follow through. The result—an annoying piece that clearly aped my style—is as follows:

Meanwhile, on the other side of the city, my corrupt doctor’s wife Rachel snorted another line with her old college friend Jen.

“My breasts hurt,” said Jen seriously. Ever since she’d gotten pregnant, her big breasts had just been getting bigger. It was a different sort of pain, but they (the breasts) hurt almost as much as something terrible that had once happened to me or my brother, I forget which.

“Not a problem,” said Rachel. “I’ll get my unscrupulous hubby to prescribe you something.”

Jen bent down to do a line, revealing her steep cleavage to Rachel.

“If I were a heterosexual teenage boy, or even a heterosexual 31 year old man, this would be quite an awesome sight,” thought Rachel.

Jen jerked up from the line, making her big painful breasts bounce.

“Incredible stuff,” said Jen. “Dulls the pain in my titties.”

“Pregnant idiot,” thought my doctor’s wife Rachel. “Now she’s gonna want to snort all my coke.”

While all this was happening, my doctor was in his study going down a Wikipedia black hole. He knew his wife was out doing coke with Jen. He perused the wiki for coke to see if he had anything to worry about. It seemed he did. Then one click led to another, and pretty soon he was freaking out – because global warming, it turned out, was a thing. A big thing.

The world was getting hotter. Jen’s breasts were getting heavier. Rachel’s coke problem was sustainable but not without risks. And I was becoming increasingly disenchanted with my life in general.

As Jen rambled on about breasts, Rachel became more and more annoyed. “How’d you get pregnant, anyway?” she asked.

“A man in my home,” said Jen, her eyes glazing over at the memory.

Was it me? Likely not… I’d never met either of them and never would.

“We should put on some music or something,” said Jen.

“My thoughts exactly,” said Rachel, turning on the Roku and scrolling to the Spotify app, where she hesitated. “Or should we watch something?”

“Sure,” said Jen. “We can also watch something, I suppose.”

My characters were bored, obviously, and from that I could only conclude that they were boring. Or perhaps I was. Did I have anything to say about all this—about them? What did they reveal about me except a desire to keep the language moving and an equally strong desire to avoid saying anything at all?

I wished they could chill without having to express me.

The Netflix logo glowed red and reflected misogynistically off of Jen’s cleavage. The women looked like devils for a moment as the app booted up. They talked excitedly about TV generally as they flipped through the options for an hour or so. At no point did they watch any more than 2 minutes of a show or movie. The idea of being immersed in anything in particular was too much, each story a prison. But from the outside, to Rachel and Jen in their fuzzy freedom, each prison represented a limitless world of possibilities. Or at least served as fodder for conversation.

Suddenly I noticed an uncomfortable urge to piss. I had just finished the last paragraph. I hadn’t started a new one yet, so this was theoretically a good time for me to pause and head to the bathroom, but I felt like I could hold it in a bit longer and get through this narrative, which I intended to be short anyway, having already basically lost interest, or at least find some emotional core in it that I could expand upon later. I reasoned that if I gave in to the impulse now, I’d probably have to go again soon. That is, if I gave in to piss now, I’d be creating two occasions out of it.

In fact, I had little motivation to finish this story. I would rather have had someone else do it for me. Continuing to work on it was a kind of self-discipline, though whether I was disciplining my bladder or my bladder was disciplining me I didn’t dare ask myself—at this juncture.

My friend called me on the phone. I let it ring.

While writing, I dissociated from the text and became increasingly aware of my body, probably due to the accumulation of urine inside of it. I had the rare sense of “being on the computer.” I looked at the screen, not through it, and saw the little pieces of crust and stains that had slowly accumulated since I first bought the laptop in 2018. I never cleaned my computer. The idea struck me as old-fashioned.

I closed the tab and texted the friend who’d called me. He was going to be in my neighborhood in about an hour, he said, and wanted to know what I was doing. I told him I was chilling basically.

I stood up, opened my bedroom door, and closed it tightly on the way out. The bathroom was at the end of a hall. I had to pass by the bedrooms of two roommates to get there. Their doors were tightly closed as well. I wondered as I passed them if they could hear my footsteps, if they knew I was going for a piss. A portion of the hallway had a rug, which I walked on with relief, feeling a bit like a spy. I heard the My Dinner with Andre soundtrack coming from the bedroom of my most racist roommate.

In the bathroom, I unzipped my fly. I pulled out my penis and willed myself to pee. Doing so involved a combination of letting go, of relaxing something unidentifiable inside me, but also taking decisive action. The pee shot out from the tip of my penis into the porcelain about an inch above the water. I redirected my stream into the water itself. It splashed a little and then quieted down. I felt relaxed and watched the stream.

When it was done, I shook my penis while sort of “pushing.” I did this because I didn’t want any pee dribbling into my underwear. Then I grabbed a square of toilet paper, folded it twice, and pressed it against the tip of my penis. I dropped it into the toilet, and after it had fluttered down I flushed it.

I pulled my underwear over my penis and redid my fly and the top button of my pants. I stepped over to the sink and began to wash my hands, but as I did so I realized I had to shit. I recognized the absurdity of shitting immediately after washing my hands, but staying in here longer would offer me a prime opportunity to check my socials. I hoped any roommates listening in wouldn’t interpret my hand washing or toilet flush as signs that I was done. I knew they’d respect my desire to shit, but I didn’t like the idea of them expectantly hoping I was about to exit the room.

I dropped drawers and planted myself down on the toilet. I didn’t need to do anything. Just the act of sitting there relaxed something unidentifiable in me. A small fart came out. I opened Facebook and scrolled listlessly through the lives of people I once either resented or wanted to fuck.

Soon I was so relaxed that I felt the head of a poop emerge from my anus. Now I had to take action. I looked up from Facebook and squeezed. The poop slid out.

At this point, I felt like I had more in me, but it felt like it was too far up, not yet processed. I set my phone on the sink, grabbed a wad of paper, and wiped from the top of my crack to the base of my penis. I looked at the streaks of feces on the paper. I had yet more to wipe. I repeated this process 3-4 times until the paper looked mostly clean. Then I pulled up my underwear and pants, buttoned up, and washed my hands with soap and water.

I grabbed my phone and examined my face in the mirror before heading out the door to carry on with my story.

Unfortunately for my roommates, I’d made one critical error. I’d forgotten to flush…

As I read this story, my life partner would sigh, growing hangry. She’d be texting her friend to see what she was doing that night. In another room, having finished the story, I’d write a lengthy response to the bully about its merits and shortcomings, reflecting a little on distance and absurdity, and how these can serve as crutches that keep us safe—or, perhaps conversely, because of that, allow us to be more honest. Hm. I’d urge the dead bully to keep the funny but to be himself—something he had, in reality, punished me for doing on many occasions between third and fourth grade.