has been breaking out and seeing his family again and he can’t think about it anymore, when it will happen or not. He’s been putting together his childhood memory by memory. One shot comes close, bounces high off the back of the rim and nearly hits one of many spinning fans. The guard looking in shakes his head and blows on his lips.
When Pants McDonovan was a child he didn’t use toilet paper.He’d pull his underpants up, and using three fingers, wiggle them into the fabric, into his ass, and once there, curl-pick his fingers until assumed clean. In his bedroom, he’d take the underwear off and roll the soiled pair into a tube he hid in a dresser drawer. This continued until Mom noticed his lack of underwear in the laundry. She walked into his bedroom late one night with an armful of clean laundry and opened the bottom dresser drawer and found fourteen perfectly aligned rolls of dirty underwear. When she picked one roll up she noticed another beneath. The smell was so strong she thought Pants would wake, so she hurried from the room and into the bathroom where she unfolded the underwear revealing a wide splotch of dried shit in the shape of a hammered butterfly. She turned the sink on, let them soak in hot water, and tried not to feel that she had done something irreversibly wrong as a mother. She would confront him in the morning. She wouldn’t sleep that night.
He said he didn’t know why he did what he did, but boy it felt good, toilet paper was rough and sometimes didn’t flush because the water pressure was so weak in their house. Their plumbing is city plumbing a hundred years ago. This is something the city knows and makes fun of. Men in city bars like to talk about how dirty the villagers are. It’s another reason why the city should continue building. Just look at them, men in city bars say. They don’t shower. They lie in rocks and mud and make babies in the mud. They don’t worship a god. Mom said none of that mattered because what he did was wrong and it had to stop.
Dad couldn’t look him in the eyes. He let Mom deal out the punishment. Grounded for a week. No play time in the mine with Remy. Also, forced to wash all his underwear to an insane brand new clean. The task taught him how to do laundry better than all, something he was strangely proud of but didn’t tell anyone else about until the prison. But the punishment didn’t work because Pants continued the habit and found new places to hide his dirty underwear: between his mattress and bedspring,between the window and screen with the blinds drawn, in a shoebox kept in the closet, behind the YCL generator in the basement, and finally, and best, behind his dresser.
He skipped school once a week to make the trip – a somewhat long walk from one side of the village to the other – to get the same kind of underwear his Mom bought with a matching design consisting of a red elastic band and bubble-words written across the crotch and backside that said WINNER. CHAMPION. VICTORY. They were different because they came from the city, traded for crystals curious city-folk displayed in their homes or taken from Mob of Mary’s who always had a steady supply. He used these pairs not to wear, but to throw into the dirty laundry after he purposefully dropped them on the ground, dragging them through dirt and weeds.
But the room took on the bottom-drawer smell. The bright yellow paint above the dresser turned to the shade of straw. At first Mom blamed the moon, an unusual lighting effect caused the paint to look that way, but the smell couldn’t be ignored and her denial wasn’t strong enough. She wanted to believe that her words, her punishment, had been received and she was not only a good mother but an effective one who was developing her son to be a greater person than her and Dad. Again, she went into his room, this time when he was at school. She opened each drawer before pulling the dresser from the wall where a heap of underwear spilled to the
When Pants McDonovan was a child he didn’t use toilet paper.He’d pull his underpants up, and using three fingers, wiggle them into the fabric, into his ass, and once there, curl-pick his fingers until assumed clean. In his bedroom, he’d take the underwear off and roll the soiled pair into a tube he hid in a dresser drawer. This continued until Mom noticed his lack of underwear in the laundry. She walked into his bedroom late one night with an armful of clean laundry and opened the bottom dresser drawer and found fourteen perfectly aligned rolls of dirty underwear. When she picked one roll up she noticed another beneath. The smell was so strong she thought Pants would wake, so she hurried from the room and into the bathroom where she unfolded the underwear revealing a wide splotch of dried shit in the shape of a hammered butterfly. She turned the sink on, let them soak in hot water, and tried not to feel that she had done something irreversibly wrong as a mother. She would confront him in the morning. She wouldn’t sleep that night.
He said he didn’t know why he did what he did, but boy it felt good, toilet paper was rough and sometimes didn’t flush because the water pressure was so weak in their house. Their plumbing is city plumbing a hundred years ago. This is something the city knows and makes fun of. Men in city bars like to talk about how dirty the villagers are. It’s another reason why the city should continue building. Just look at them, men in city bars say. They don’t shower. They lie in rocks and mud and make babies in the mud. They don’t worship a god. Mom said none of that mattered because what he did was wrong and it had to stop.
Dad couldn’t look him in the eyes. He let Mom deal out the punishment. Grounded for a week. No play time in the mine with Remy. Also, forced to wash all his underwear to an insane brand new clean. The task taught him how to do laundry better than all, something he was strangely proud of but didn’t tell anyone else about until the prison. But the punishment didn’t work because Pants continued the habit and found new places to hide his dirty underwear: between his mattress and bedspring,between the window and screen with the blinds drawn, in a shoebox kept in the closet, behind the YCL generator in the basement, and finally, and best, behind his dresser.
He skipped school once a week to make the trip – a somewhat long walk from one side of the village to the other – to get the same kind of underwear his Mom bought with a matching design consisting of a red elastic band and bubble-words written across the crotch and backside that said WINNER. CHAMPION. VICTORY. They were different because they came from the city, traded for crystals curious city-folk displayed in their homes or taken from Mob of Mary’s who always had a steady supply. He used these pairs not to wear, but to throw into the dirty laundry after he purposefully dropped them on the ground, dragging them through dirt and weeds.
But the room took on the bottom-drawer smell. The bright yellow paint above the dresser turned to the shade of straw. At first Mom blamed the moon, an unusual lighting effect caused the paint to look that way, but the smell couldn’t be ignored and her denial wasn’t strong enough. She wanted to believe that her words, her punishment, had been received and she was not only a good mother but an effective one who was developing her son to be a greater person than her and Dad. Again, she went into his room, this time when he was at school. She opened each drawer before pulling the dresser from the wall where a heap of underwear spilled to the
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