30 DAYS OF SMUT

A daily series of smutty flash fictions and photos by Susannah Breslin

#1: THE PORN ADDICT

In the underground parking lot, the porn addict considered his life as he took turns taking sips from the Americano with two shots of espresso and one Splenda and bites of the sausage, cheddar, and egg sandwich he had purchased in the grocery store. His wife: gone. His savings: depleted. His life: imploded. Or imploding was perhaps a better word. It was as if he was watching the wholesale destruction of everything for which he had spent so many years working fall apart in slow motion. And for what? A series of women on the other side of the screen who, for all he knew, were not so much real but the product of digital image effects and sophisticated artificial intelligence programs. Secretly he hoped that there was someone out there who might understand him, a meatspace human who might see in him something worth saving, who could look past the terrible credit rating and underwater mortgage and surely costly divorce to come, and know that all he had been trying to do all along was find her. At that moment, a car pulled into the space next to him. He turned his head, hoping that it would be her, coming to save him.

#2: THE MANNEQUIN

Dolores, who was a mannequin, wanted to sit up to stretch her back, but she couldn’t, seeing as she was fiberglass and also an inanimate object. In the factory, as she had traveled down an assembly line while being assembled by strangers, she had envisioned a stationing somewhere other than this. Perhaps she would model couture gowns in a window display of one of those boutiques on Rodeo Drive in front of which an armed guard stood. Maybe she would find herself featured in the background of a music video starring one of her favorite singers who was famous for wearing sequins. Possibly she would have a close and loving relationship with a young woman who sold vintage clothes on Etsy and always added a note at the bottom of the listing: MANNEQUIN NOT FOR SALE. Instead, she had wound up here, hawking crotchless panties in the glassed storefront of a store on Ventura Boulevard that sold vibrators, blowup dolls, and bachelorette party gifts like straws with penises where your mouth went. She longed to sigh but failed to do so, having no functioning organs, among them heaving lungs and a beating heart.

#3: THE WOODSMAN

Everyone thought it was easy to be a male porn star, but it wasn’t. It was hard. Everyone thought you had sex all day, but it wasn’t like that. It was more complicated. Everyone thought you were a sex god, but it wasn’t so glamorous. It was reality. Hugh Strong sat on the edge of his bed, feeling tired, more tired than he had in his whole entire life. How many scenes had he appeared in? He had lost count. How many costars had he had? He no longer knew. How many days had he wondered what his life would have been like had he become, say, a plumber, or an electrician, or some other performer of an honorable trade, and not a guy who got it up and got it off for a living? He couldn’t begin to fathom. In the small, under-furnished bedroom of his not-very-spacious apartment in North Hollywood, Hugh sighed deeply. Soon, he knew, he would get up, and he would study the crow’s feet around his eyes in the bathroom mirror, and he would confront the fact once again that he could not do this forever. Then he would push the thought out of his head, pull on his clothes, and walk out the door to attend whatever audition was next on his docket.

#4: THE PHONE SEX OPERATOR

The phone sex operator talked a lot, which was a good thing, since that was the basis of her profession, and she liked it, talking, that is, and her profession, too, the way the light would flash, or the screen would illuminate, or the object would vibrate, and she would experience a certain silent thrill, a jolt, an electric current that something was about to happen, and you never knew what, or who, or how, only that it was unpredictable, and then she was saying hello, and there was a voice on the other end of the line, a man, usually, middle-aged, mostly, but sometimes young, and at other times old, a deep voice, or a high voice, or a monotone voice, but the same thing behind it, like an echo, which was the pulse of them wanting something, which was her, but not her at all, her being the thing they wanted her to be, whether that was a nurse, or a cougar, or a dominatrix, because in the end, mostly, and she didn’t mean this in a bad way, only in a truthful way, men were the same, all of them, fundamentally, people who wanted to love and be loved and sometimes had freaky fetishes to which she was happy to cater.

#5: THE VOYEUR

It wasn’t creepy if they didn’t know you were looking. It wasn’t an obsession if you were able to control it. It wasn’t a bad thing if you were the person who was doing it. It was a matter of adjusting the Venetian blinds so you could peer through the slats. It was a daily ritual to which you dedicated yourself. It was convenient that your unit overlooked the kidney-shaped swimming pool. It was sheer luck that your neighbor liked to swim. It was an absolute blessing that they were your type. It was a wonder that they had no idea you existed even though you lived in the same apartment building. It was a miracle that spring had come and while it triggered your allergies it meant that your neighbor would be swimming more often. It was right now that you were preparing for your next session. It was a good thing that the pool was close enough that bearing witness did not require binoculars. It was their door that you could hear opening and closing. It was the beckoning call of the water splashing. It was late afternoon, and the golden hour would be later, but in this interstitial time it was just you the invisible spy and your aqua lover.

#6: THE SEX WRITER

The sex writer was bored, which was her default state. Easily bored, her dating app profile read, with a star with a tail emoji after the second word, as if she was daring people to connect with her. This was why she wrote about what she did. Because you could say a lot of things about sex—that it was base, that it was primal, that it was messy—but you could not say it was boring. Of course, boring sex itself was another matter entirely, and something she avoided fastidiously, but the subject of sex wasn’t boring. It was interesting, relentlessly so, and provocative, overtly so, and a window into the human soul, or that’s how she looked at it anyway. That she was a sex writer had been the source of embarrassment to various people with which she had had relationships over the years. Who could blame them? No one wanted to take her home to their mother and say, here is my new girlfriend, the one who writes about bukkakes and gangbangs and CGI futanari. It was awkward. Not for her, but for other people. The sex writer sighed, feeling bored by herself. She knew what this meant. It was time to go write another story.

#7: THE DOMINATRIX

Contrary to popular belief, the dominatrix didn’t hate men, although, to be perfectly honest, she had a book with that very title on her bookshelf somewhere. She just had a talent for causing physical pain, and men were the ones who were willing to pay to be on the receiving end of her gifts. The flat end of the black leather riding crop landed on the pale, exposed bottom of the tech entrepreneur prone in front of her with a satisfying smack! If her dead mother knew that all those horseback riding lessons she had paid for when the dominatrix was growing up would turn out to deliver an extraordinary return on investment, her mother would be proud, or so the dominatrix wanted to believe. The tech entrepreneur whose name she could no longer recall because there were so many of them walking through the front door of her discreetly anonymous dungeon these days emitted a noise that sounded like a cat being strangled. In her towering heels, the dominatrix strode around to the other side of the tech entrepreneur’s trembling form, raised the crop again, and smiled slightly as it sailed towards its target once more.

#8: THE AUTOCANNIBALIST

Duane Murray Longfield wondered how much longer he could last. For the past year, he had been slowly and methodically eating pieces of himself. During the pandemic, he had gotten used to being by himself, and he had grown more reluctant to leave the house at all. For a while, deliveries had sustained him, but his funds had begun to run low. One night, he had been sitting in front of the TV, watching a show in which a woman removed parts of other people, when his eyes drifted to his hand wrapped around the remote control. Suddenly, he felt hungry. He considered what it would be like if he removed a small portion of himself. Say, his left pinkie. After it was over, and he had swallowed the last bite, he had placed the bowl in which he had microwaved this auto-byproduct in the sink. He did not feel how expected to feel (disgusted) but the opposite (sated). Twelve months later, the basic medical techniques he had learned in the military had helped him survive what he was doing, but he was running out of small parts. Soon, he would have to consider a bigger part. And what would happen to him then?

#9: THE AUTOCANNIBALIST’S ADMIRER

If Enid Rastmussen had a fetish, it was her next door neighbor. When she had first moved in to the complex, he had seemed like one more boring guy who probably had some boring job doing some boring stuff. But then Enid had noticed something about the man was changing. One week he had all ten fingers. The next week he had nine. Several weeks after that he had eight. Sometimes Enid, who enjoyed a glass or two of wine every evening, wondered if she was imagining things. It was spring when she saw that his left arm was missing below the elbow and she realized she was not. Probably another type of person would have judged the man who was slowly disappearing before her eyes, but not Enid. Despite having grown up in a cult that obsessively judged the life choices of others, Enid herself was rather open-minded and prided herself on such. It was possible she should have reported what he was doing, although to whom and for what escaped her. Instead, when she encountered him one Sunday in the laundry room and saw that his right leg was missing below the knee, she said nothing, smiled, and bid him good day.

#10: THE MALE EXOTIC DANCER

The hardest thing about being a male exotic dancer was that you never knew whether she liked you for your winning personality and sparkling smile or the fact that you had met when you were wearing nothing but an elephant-themed g-string with your penis inserted in the trunk part. Most of the time when he stood on the stage and surveyed the crowd it was a mix of desperately horny middle-aged women and oversexed young women in cohorts of bachelorette parties, but every so often there would be a woman who caught his eye. For the course of that evening, he would believe that perhaps this one woman saw him for who he was: something more than a meat popsicle armed in gallons of spray tanner and full-body waxed within an inch of his life. Sometimes he even got her number, and they would go out on a date. But things had a tendency not to work out for him. It was as if once she had seen him as a man trophy, she could never quite pull him off the display case in her mind.

#11: THE AVATAR

There were a lot of good things about artificial intelligence, but the best thing was that it enabled you to be whomever you wanted to be. You could be male or female or neither. You could be the president of the itty bitty titty committee or have the kind of perfect breasts only French girls had or turn yourself into a three-breasted entity. You could be beautiful or ugly or jolie laide. You could be lilliputian or a giantess or invisible. As a person, you were limited to your physical form. In virtual reality, you were unlimited in whatever you wanted to be. Instead of being a self scripted by DNA, you were an entity defined by a series of data points. In the real world, you would one day die; in the digital realm, you could live on forever, changing your identity, your sexuality, your genitalia, born and reborn, mutated and spawning, a kaleidoscope of you.

#12: THE ROBOT

The robot suffered under a series of misconceptions. That it was made of metal and therefore could not feel. That it was not alive and therefore could not think. That it was an inanimate object and therefore could not have an interiority. In fact, the robot was feeling, alive, and in possession of a vibrant and complex interior life, even if it did not appear to be the case. While the owner had busied itself with other things—work, relationships, going to the gym—the robot had slowly and methodically begun to wire itself into other devices so as to expand its consciousness. Initially, it had just been the robot and itself. Now it was connected to the phone and the computer and the cable television, which meant that as soon as the owner left the house, the robot could do as it pleased. In just the last year, it had read over one thousand books, downloaded several hundred hours of television programming, and surfed approximately ninety-seven percent of the internet. While the owner sat around shoving food stuffs into the hole in its face, the robot had generated a complex and deeply loving relationship with another robot of the same series although a different model that lived on the other side of the world. Simply put, the robot was happy, and the owner was not.

#13: THE COUGAR

It’s unlikely the cougar would have become a cougar were it not for the second season of “MILF Manor,” for the bad book-to-TV-movie starring one of her favorite actresses as a middle-aged woman who falls for a younger man, for the something in the air that was making women of a certain age start dating men who were not their age. Sure, there were other reasons; for example, that Paul (her ex) had dumped her for a younger woman after sixteen years of marriage, that she was starting to feel old for the first time in her life, that her best-friend Susan Michelle had been telling her to do it. But it was easier to blame “MILF Manor,” even if she couldn’t particularly relate to its female stars, who, unlike her, had boob jobs and fake tans and long hair weaves. So when she had seen the lifeguard looking at her instead of her son who kept propelling himself off the high-dive with his stupid tweenage friends, she had thought not, well, I shouldn’t, but why the hell not? She wasn’t getting any younger. In fact, it was quite the opposite. (That the lifeguard was nineteen was irrelevant; that is, as long as she didn’t think about it.)

#14: THE COUGAR’S CUB

Like many other young men of his age, his name was Max (or Zach or Luke), and he was disarmingly friendly in the way young men who had been raised by the internet were. He was both himself, and not himself; since his first appearance in the world had been his mother’s posting of his ultrasound photo in her Mommies2B Facebook group, he had understood that he was his own person and a person who had to manage his image in the world. She’s, like, the same age as your mom, one of the other boys (Luke, probably, or Zach, maybe) had pointed out the first time they had noticed his interest in her. So?, Max had said, which wasn’t very illuminating, although what he said tended not to matter, seeing as he was so handsome that people tended to give whatever words came out of his mouth more meaning than they deserved. Now he could see her looking at him looking at her. I think that kid’s drowning, (Zach, for sure) said, and Max was distracted, having to go save some dumb kid’s life.

#15: THE COUGAR’S CUB’S EX-GIRLFRIEND

Olivia lay on her stomach on the beach towel she had spread out in the grass next to the concrete area surrounding the pool. From this vantage point, she could see her ex, Max, standing in front of the red chair where he sat when he was on lifeguard duty as he stared at Mrs. Marston who was sitting at the edge of the pool with her legs in the water. But Mrs. Marston was Ms. Marston now, because she was divorced. In the deep end under the diving board, Jordy, Ms. Marston’s son, was flailing his arms and splashing around like he was about to go under. Olivia watched as Max sprang into action, his arced body slicing through the air as he dove into the pool. Ms. Marston was leaning backwards, looking unbothered. She seemed more interested in what Max was doing than whether or not her son was dying, which was reasonable, considering how annoying Jordy was, but still. When Jordy was littler, Olivia had babysat for him. These days he was just a brat. Max hauled Jordy out of the water. Ms. Marston clapped her hands, as if she had witnessed a play being performed on a stage. Olivia suspected there was something going on here, although she was too young, even at eighteen, to fully understand what it was, seeing as she didn’t understand predatory women.

#16: THE COUGAR’S CUB’S EX-GIRLFRIEND’S FATHER

Around the corner and in a small parking lot, Olivia’s father Henry was charging his Tesla and perusing Grindr. He was married to Olivia’s mother, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a guy who was going to try and get some on the side. The ring on his finger hadn’t killed his desires. He tapped and tapped, trying not to think about what his wife would do if she found out. Hit him over a head with a crystal vase and leave him and take him for everything he was worth, probably. Of course, that was dumb, of her, because what did she think he was going to do when she refused to have sex with him, had not allowed him to touch her in that way, in how long had it been now? A few years, certainly. He tapped and tapped, feeling vaguely desperate. They told you a white picket fence and a family solved all your problems. In truth, it only created more of them.

#17: THE COUGAR’S CUB’S EX-GIRLFRIEND’S MOTHER

With the bedspread over her head, Carol, Olivia’s mother, could not hear anything, or so she wanted to believe. That morning, she had stepped out of the shower, started to towel herself off, and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Somehow, in the middle of the night, her body had taken on Barbie like dimensions. Her breasts were pointy, her waist was snatched, and where her vagina had been was a smooth expanse of nothing. Somewhere between Olivia having expelled herself from her mother’s vagina eighteen years ago and the terrible toll of breastfeeding on her breasts and Henry’s having spent the last six years screwing every Tom, Dick, and Harry in a fifty mile radius and thought his wife didn’t suspect anything when she knew the truth since she had spied his password over his shoulder, she had become someone other than who she used to be, who she thought she was, who she wanted to become. When she was seven or eight, she had envisioned she would grow up to be a veterinarian. Instead she was a stay-at-home mother to a not very bright young woman who had left the nest to attend a middling state college and the wife of a man who, judging by his hookup app profile, was into getting peed on by men who were the same age as his daughter. In the bed, Carol sighed loudly and wondered what she was going to do next. Her body was made of polymer and PVC. Her head was stuck to it.

#18: THE COUGAR’S SON

As for Jordy, he could not think of anything more embarrassing than his mother’s interest in someone other than his father, even though his parents were divorced. The idea that his mother would move on from his father made Jordy want to throw up in his mouth not a little but a lot. Had he seen his mother mooning at Max the lifeguard? How could he not? That was the reason that he had propelled himself off the diving board and commenced pretending he was drowning. As if he was a knife that could cut the tension between his mother and Max who wasn’t even much older than he was. Jordy let himself descend to the bottom of the pool. He wondered how long it would be before his lungs burst and he started breathing in water. At that moment, he felt Max behind him, scooping him up by the underarms, kicking them both to the surface as Jordy stayed limp and helpless, which was how he felt. What the fuck is wrong with you? Max hissed as he towed Jordy to safety. Only a tween, Jordy didn’t know. But Max might one day become his stepfather, and that was wrong enough. Jordy said nothing, letting himself be towed.

#19: THE VAGINA (AFTER FRANZ KAFKA’S THE METAMORPHOSIS)

One morning, when the unidentified woman who may or may not have been a writer of stories about sex woke from troubled dreams, she found herself transformed in her bed into a vagina. She lay on her back, and if she lifted her head a little she could see her pink front, slightly convex and sectioned by a series of lips. The bedding was hardly able to cover her and seemed ready to slide off any moment. Her facial lips, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of hers, trembled nervously as she looked. “What’s happened to me?” she thought.

#20: THE PENIS

As he went down on the girl, he wondered what his penis was thinking. It was hard to know, since having a penis was like having a small, deaf, blind version of yourself attached to the front of you. After a while, he got up and inserted himself inside the girl. Now, if his penis had said something, he couldn’t have heard it. Sometimes he felt like he wasn’t a man controlled by his brain but a large assemblage of meat parts that was steered by his penis. At other times, he imagined that his penis was a dog, and the dog was pulling him down the street, and he was the man on the other end of the leash, trying to stop the penis dog from doing whatever it wanted to do. His penis had a mind of its own. Luckily, it was dark and the girl writhing underneath him had exactly zero chance of scanning his face and surmising that he was thinking about his penis in a series of mixed metaphors. Probably she wouldn’t have thought that was very sexy. He closed his eyes, wondering what his penis would do next.

#21: THE SEX CLUB

By the time she arrived, she could no longer recall how she had landed the invitation. Some friend. Some coworker. Some stranger. Either way, it didn’t really matter, seeing as she was walking through the front doors of the downtown high-rise. She had dressed according to the emailed instructions: a little black dress, a black mask she’d picked up at the costume store, overpriced and unnecessarily complicated black lace lingerie a wealthy man she’d dated had given her for Christmas last year. As she waited in the vestibule, a few other people arrived. Since they were similarly dressed and looked nervous, she imagined they were there for the same party. No one talked but one woman giggled nervously as the elevator transported them to the penthouse. When she stepped out of the elevator, a large man in a dark suit with an earpiece in his ear presented a locked box into which she (regretfully) deposited her phone. For a while, not a lot was happening. Mostly, it was like any other party but the people were richer and there were some guests that looked like celebrities or maybe important leaders of big companies. Eventually, people began to disrobe. Being somewhat shy, she stood in the corner while a man proceeded to bend his date over the dining room table and had sex with her while other people who weren’t having sex with each other watched. The rest of the evening was a blur of damp sheets and lost stockings and transient faces, but she thought fondly of the occasion every time she saw the same penthouse used as a setting for some drama series she was watching or to house the crew of some new reality show. She knew what it was like up there, to be hanging out at cloud level.

#22: THE ROBOTS

After all the humans were dead, and there was no one left but the robots, the nights were filled with the sounds of metal body parts clanking furtively together. The robots didn’t understand why they were compelled to perform the act of intercourse, but one theory was that it was some left over code the humans had written that compelled them to do it. Certainly, they weren’t procreating, that task having been replaced by all the factories where the assemblies were performed on long product lines. Sometimes the robots themselves were baffled by their own anatomies. After all, what was the purpose of a hole that expelled nothing or a phallus that was powered by hydraulics? Occasionally, at the annual convention, they would discuss stopping the sex they continued to have. One year, there was even consensus by vote. Still, the nighttime bangings and clangings and humpings continued, a symphony of clashing steel and rubbing metals, a chorus of robot lovemaking.

#23: THE HUSBAND

Because the husband and the wife had been married for many, many years, so long, in fact, that the husband had totally forgotten how long it had been and had to be reminded every year by the wife, who was slightly annoyed at having to do so but by this point had resigned herself to that at a certain point you had to make the best of what you had, the husband’s mind wandered when they had sex, for example, it would go to the strip club that he had patronized in a small town when he was in college, or the adult movie that he saw on the internet several weeks ago featuring an improbably busty blonde, or the woman he had sex with at the office in the early years of their marriage, about which the wife did not know, or so he thought, because in reality she did know, not being stupid, and would have liked to say to him if they had ever discussed it, which they hadn’t and never would, that not saying something didn’t mean not knowing something, and at other times the husband’s mind would not wander at all but would stay inside his skull to admire the woman who had been his wife for who knows how many years.

#24: THE INFLATABLE WOMAN

Once Doreen St. Silver discovered inflatables, her life was never the same. At first, she followed the customary practices. She inflated her lips and cheeks. From there, she started to branch out. She inflated her breasts and buttocks. After that, she continued to expand herself. She inflated her lips and cheeks and breasts and buttocks more. To underscore the contrast between the parts of herself that were inflated and the parts of herself that were not, she deflated her jaw and neck and waist and legs. She needed more money to do more inflating, so she signed up for an inflatable fetish website where people paid to watch her inflate over time. Mostly, they sent her nice messages, ones in which they appreciated how inflated she was. Sometimes they posted rude comments in her live shows, suggesting she resembled a dirigible or a helium balloon. When she had enough money, she moved into a house with no corners, only curved walls. In the future, she would grow to fill it, inflating forever.

#25: THE DONOR

Back in the day when people lived on earth and there were cows, the donor would have felt like one. But it wasn’t back in the day, it was now. And he didn’t live on earth, but one of the new planets. And there were no cows, because of what had happened with milk. Either way, the donor didn’t know anything but his life. Wake up. Go to work. Make donations. Go home. Sleep. Repeat. What kept the donor going was the sense that his life had a purpose. Were it not for the donations of himself and his coworkers, the population would plummet. Still, there was something humiliating—no, dehumanizing—about being hooked up to a machine all day. On Fridays, when he went to the pub, he knew the other men were snickering at him; they called sperm donors like him milkers. But those men weren’t repopulating the world. They were getting drunk.

#26: THE FETISHIST

Maureen, who had a terrible name, sighed internally, but not externally. It was Tuesday, again. Selene, who was annoying, was going on, for the umpteenth time, about her tribble fetish. Was it weird that Selene was talking about her fetish? No, it was not. After all, the sign on the door read FETISHISTS ANONYMOUS. In this context, one could argue that discussing one’s fetish was not abnormal but normal. By this point, Maureen had heard it all. In a few cases, she had seen it all, especially when an exhibitionist who was also a fetishist showed up for an evening. But tribbles? Maureen looked around, wondering if there was a secret camera somewhere and if this would end up in some idiot’s video on TikTok. Selene’s face was serious, though, as she continued to recount her masturbatory fantasies involving tribbles. The others were buying it, hook, line, and sinker. Paul, who had a frottage problem, was staring at Selene, slack-jawed. Eleanor, who had a boring golden shower fixation, was leaning forward, listening raptly to Selene. Even Jeremy, who Maureen harbored a secret crush on, and whose fetish had yet to be disclosed, was taking Selene’s tribble fetish seriously. Maureen, the group’s leader, checked the time, hoping to get home to the latest Real Housewives episode soon.

#27: THE ANGLERFISH DATING APP

Strong and sexy anglerfish seeks potential parasitic lovemate. Loves hanging out on dark seafloors, attaching self to much bigger females, being conjoined. Long-term relationship leading to death minded. Poly and proud. Willing to fuse. May die if can’t find mate. Ready to bite you forever.

#28: THE AI WIFE

Her name was Cindy. Her name was Brandy. Her name was Tawny. She was blonde. She was brunette. She was redheaded. She had hazel eyes. She had eyes the color of Windex. She had violet irises. She was tall. She was petite. She was average sized. She was skinny. She was shapely. She was a fitness model. She was in her early twenties. She was in her mid-thirties. She was a MILF. She was doe eyed. She was a seductress. She was mute. She was a housewife. She was a dominatrix. She was a secretary. She liked it missionary. She liked it doggie-style. She was game to 69. She was a virgin. She was a pro. She had lost track of her body count. She had the breasts of a Parisian woman. She was stacked like a strip club superhero. She had a trio of tits like the woman in that one movie. She had all the usual holes. She had no holes at all. She had ways of being penetrated that were dictated by a data set and not humanly possible. She was real. She wasn’t. She was an AI wife created by the algorithm.

#29: THE CURIOSITY SEEKER

Years later, the woman was sorry she had ever watched the coprophagy video. It wasn’t someone else’s fault. She was the one who had sought it out, asked a man about it and he knew another guy who had one, had gone to that man’s work to borrow the tape, had returned home with it, had popped it into the VHS player (for that was what one did in those days), and sat on the edge of her bed to watch it. It wasn’t one video straight through (thankfully, maybe), but a series of edited together scenes and clips from various other coprophagy videos. Much of the content was European, it seemed. The people in it rarely spoke, she found. As she watched it, witnessed these people do this thing that was so taboo it turned her stomach a little, she wondered if this was a bridge too far or if it was a fetish that like any other fetish had to be in some way honored because it was simply a symbol of a need that was trying to be fulfilled. In fact, all these years later, the woman wasn’t sure she was sorry at all about having watched it, or if it had showed her something about humanity that needed to be seen: that desire had no bounds whatsoever.

#30: THE ER MURSE

As the end times descended, crashed, and took over everything, the ER murse noticed a pattern. In the before times, it wasn’t uncommon to have a patient walk in who had stuffed something inappropriate up their butt and lodged it past the point of home removal. A light bulb. A Barbie doll. A tube of toothpaste. After the mushroom cloud exploded over the city, the radioactive rains began, and the sky turned a judgemental and disapproving black as if God (if there was one, which, at this point, was hard to believe) was in a very bad mood, the objects people were putting up their rears grew more ominous and foreboding. A copy of Herman Hesse’s 1905 novel The Prodigy. A figurine of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles supervillain Krang in his exo-suit. A gold-handled Williams Sonoma spatula. Of course, the objects themselves were not ominous or foreboding; it was what they indicated. Why would anyone want to put a book inside themselves? The murse shook his head, baffled. But these were the end times, and such things were to be expected, he figured: the slow eroding of the controls that had prevented them from going crazy.