LOM Chapter 4: A “sample”

I set the sample cup on the counter in my bathroom, so it would be handy when I woke up the next morning to go to the bathroom. A copious piss had always been the first step in my morning routine, although when I was younger or tireder I just went in the shower. Now my initial trip to the toilet also meant a crap, so I pulled down my boxers and sat. I took the cup from the counter, uncapped it, and reached it around my buttocks and under my anus. My bladder emptied into the bowl while my first spurts plopped into the plastic cup. It was awkward but seemed to work, at least until an explosive pocket of gas splattered my hands with poop. I yanked my hand out from beneath my butt, but dropped the cup in the toilet. My hand, now clear of the orifice, shook—just from reflex—like a cocker spaniel after a swim, splattering little blobs of poop across the walls of my bathroom.

“Shit,” I groaned. The sample was now contaminated with urine and toilet water, and the toilet had all that and poop in it, too. Maybe I could get another cup, but I could not flush the one that was already in there. Plus, there was poop on the walls.

I reached into the toilet with my dirty hand and grabbed the lip of the cup. With my clean hand I flushed the toilet, and still holding the cup watched the fouled water swirl away, and the clear water rinse my cup clean of poop and urine. I guessed it was still probably contaminated at the microscopic level, however.

I opened the cabinets beneath the sink and found a spray can of bathroom cleaner buried behind a wall of maxi-pads and half-empty shampoo bottles—relics of my older sister, gone to Atlanta for a summer internship. I sprayed cleaner on a rag and wiped off the fecal speckles decorating the walls. Then I rinsed the rag, sprayed on more cleaner, and wiped clean the inside of the cup. Twenty minutes after I started, I was back to square one.

I sat down to finish my bowel movement and did not try this time to capture a specimen. Obviously, I needed a better way to fill the cup—a bigger container. I wiped, flushed, and washed, then headed downstairs to the pantry.

Mom caught me there.

“What are you looking for?”

“A plastic bowl,” I said, looking through the cabinets for a half-used package of plastic bowls I knew to be somewhere in the house.

“Use one of my mixing bowls,” she said. “What’s it for?”

“I need something to poop into.”

“Is your toilet broken? Your father will fix it.”

“No,” I said, “the toilet is fine. Here we go.” I found the package and took a blue bowl from the top of the stack. “I need to use this to collect my stool sample, so I can put it into the cup they gave me.” I turned to go back upstairs.

She called after me, “Why not just do it into the cup?” I pretended not to hear her.

Once upstairs in the bathroom again, I set the bowl down on the counter, next to the cup, and stepped into the shower. The sample would have to wait until after breakfast, when I usually had to take another dump.

Meanwhile, I took a shower. The chemicals in the pool left my hair brittle and dry, so I had to apply conditioner every day. I kept my hair short, but not shorn—too short made it stick up in weird places, so I left enough to run a comb through. My hair, like my eyes, is a light shade of brown too plain to appear anywhere but nature. In the summer the hair at least brightened a little from sun and chlorine. I shaved a couple times a week; I would have preferred a beard but mine came in too thin and patchy to be taken seriously. My legs were plenty hairy but that stopped abruptly about mid-thigh. I shaved them all the way to my ankles in water polo season, but only on game days. The only hair above my thighs and below my chin was in my groin, my armpits, and my forearms, and none of it particularly dense. It was all the same color as the hair on my head, except that my pubic hair had a reddish tint to it when it was dry. Despite being seventeen years old, I still had only a few stray chest hairs, and though hairless chests were in fashion, I still couldn’t help feeling insecure.

I was, however, proud of my physique—at least a little, but probably more than anyone else thought justified. I wasn’t beefed like the college guys at the pool, and I didn’t work out just to watch myself frown in the mirror. I lifted weights for water polo, which added several pounds of muscle to an otherwise skinny frame. I was taut and firm, but not bulky or ungainly. Too much brawn was a disadvantage in the pool; muscle sinks. After the shower I toweled off and looked at myself in the mirror. The five pounds I had lost was mostly fat, because the only trace of it was slightly better muscle definition. That was not a bad thing, but I would want that fat for water polo. I figured I would have to let myself go a little, maybe hit the donuts and milkshakes pretty hard for a while before season started.

Once I was dry, I went back to my room and got dressed. Dressing for work meant wearing the pool’s lifeguard t-shirt, a pair of red swim trunks, sandals, and sunblock. With that on I went downstairs for breakfast. I had noticed that my stomach stayed better longer on the days I ate a lighter breakfast, so I had reduced my morning meal to a couple pieces of toast, banana, and a cup of coffee. I compensated by eating more in the evenings, which probably explained the need for double bowel movements in the mornings. Of course, once I finished my toast, banana, and coffee, it was time for another trip upstairs.

The plastic bowl was a lot easier to keep in place without getting poop on my hands, and in a minute I had enough to put me past the line in the cup. I folded the bowl to give it sort of a spout, and poured the sample into the cup. I capped the cup and tossed the bowl into the trash can, then finished emptying my bowels and flushed. I took the cup with me when I left and dropped it off at the medical center before heading into work.

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League of Mortals by Duncan Cross is licensed under a
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