The Weird Insights of a Scobberlotcher

One Sounds Red

I was taking a dump. I'd just finished and was leaning forward to look between my legs. Wanted to check my feces. Not all that unusual really. Lots of people do it. MacLean and MacLean even have an explanation for the practice in one of their old comedy routines - pride of ownership. But in my case the doctor insisted I do it religiously after they found a problem with my bile duct. Turned out to be a benign cyst but I had a history of cancer in my family so after the operation he told me to always keep an eye on the color of my stool. Brown was good news. Black or red were bad. White was worse. "You should always check your feces," he said. "Feces are like facts, they should always be checked." That and digging in every now and then with an emaciated Popsicle stick so I could pop a little into an envelope and send it off to a lab for analysis. A skilled trade, I'm told, but pays crap. Anyway, that's why I was craning forward to peer into the bowl. Disgusting on the surface maybe but nothing in the face of mortality.

We're creatures of anticipation as much as habit and I certainly didn't expect to see anything unusual that morning. So I was surprised to see a flashing light. Not directly, although I didn't realize it right away. It was being reflected in an unoccupied section of the toilet water. A flashing red light. It took a minute for the significance of where it was coming from to sink in. After all, there was only one place it could have been coming from and who would have expected that? I stood up and looked back at the deposit but the light was gone. Then I sat down, leaned forward and looked between my legs again. There it was, back pulsing away. I reached behind and hit the flush handle in the preposterously vain hope that it would disappear with the rest. It didn't. When the toilet bowl maelstrom subsided and the surface level rose back to normal it was still there, a red, pulsing light reflected in the water. It wasn't big - maybe an inch or so across - and it wasn't bright - more like light filtering through a layer of tissue. But it was undeniably a light, it was undeniably flashing and it was undeniably red. I hesitated but it screamed for closer inspection.

I cleaned myself as fastidiously as possible. After all, I was 'goin' in', so to speak. Then I grabbed one of my wife's hand mirrors, sat down on the edge of the tub, legs splayed wide, pried open the buttocks and held the mirror's surface up close. There it was, pulsing away to beat the band, a little red light maybe a couple of inches to the right of the sphincter. No, wait, it's a mirror so it was to the left. Anyway, on closer inspection I could see why it had originally appeared diffuse. Rather than being on the surface it looked like it was embedded just beneath the skin. I reached down and touched the spot then pressed down with my finger. There was nothing there, it felt as soft and fleshy as skin normally would even as the light reflected off my fingertip. It seemed to flash at variable intervals. It would pulse every few seconds for what seemed to be exactly the same duration, then start flashing on and off unpredictably at different lengths for a while, and then revert to its regular strobe.

I noticed my face peering down from above reflected in the mirror. It looked dumbfounded. I could understand why. To have a little red light flashing away next to your asshole was clearly unprecedented. At first I didn't know what to think or do that involved being rational. I did have two distinct, initial emotional reactions, though. First, I was glad I was alone. Second, this seemed a frightening confirmation that I actually had gone mad.