On Monday, I wrote about Disgust, specifically that my students were writing short essays with the sole objective of eliciting disgust in the reader. They were doing so because our class is titled Reading and Writing Horror, and Disgust is a legitimate and important aspect of Horror.
My students rose to the challenge beautifully! They wrote about unclean teeth, toilet cleaning (or not), germy children, all kinds of bugs, childhood accidents, decomposing fish, stale breath, food with hair in it, so on and so forth. When I shared my initial post, several friends reached out with curiosity. They wanted to know what exactly my students had produced.
So, without keeping you in the dark any longer, here are a few of the contributions, presented with permission from ———————————
ONIONS ~ CL
Zoey’s in the outdoor shower, cleaning herself off, and the bucket she just shat in rests at my feet. Locked out of our grandparents’ house, there’s nothing else to do except bury it somewhere deep in their yard.
The smell radiating from the red bucket is worse than I could have imagined. It’s what Zoey had for lunch: a hotdog with chili and french-fries with honey mustard, but there’s another smell, too, that I can’t quite place—maybe it’s the smell of me losing any and all dignity I had in order to bury my little sister’s shit when other people can see me from street.
Zoey had just used the bucket on the beach across the street from us to make sandcastles. I can still see some sand. When I dump it out in the hole I dug in the backyard, it has some of those shapes: starfish, the tower of the castle, brick imprints.
Once I’m done with the burial, there’s brown under my fingernails. I don’t know if it’s dirt or shit. I rinse them off in the shower, where I can smell the onions from Zoey’s chili.
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THE HAIR ~ JANA CARVER
There is a hair in my mouth. It isn’t mine. One moment, I am chewing my pasta—spaghetti—and the next my tongue registers that, among the slippery noodles is something foreign and coarse: something unwelcome. I want to gag. My mouth, which previously watered in anticipation, is now flooding with saliva, encouraging my urge to vomit.
I look up at my date in a panic. I need to hide this. He picked this restaurant, and I don’t want him to feel embarrassed.
Wait for him to look down at his plate, I think, but he doesn’t look away.
The hair is touching the back of my throat and, despite my mental panic, my body wants to swallow. It has held this bite too long, and the habit is engrained.
My eyes start to water.
He looks away.
I discreetly spit the food into my napkin and take a sip of water to erase the feeling of the coiled hair rubbing against my tongue. It doesn’t work, but I offer up a smile when he looks back, anyway.
He doesn’t notice that something is wrong, and he doesn’t notice when I hardly touch the rest of my food.
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TOILET HORROR ~ BELLA
Debbie had never closed at the toy store before, and I was tasked with “training” her on how to clean the bathroom. It’s usually pretty clean because we’re a local store, so we don’t have as many customers as the Walmart next to us. One room, one toilet, one sink (and a stepstool for the kids in our store). Cleaning the bathroom is pretty straight forward, but I at least had to show her which products to use on which appliances.
Via Jasmin Sessler @open_photo_js
“If you want to wear gloves, they’re right here.” I pointed to the box of gloves in the back room. She didn’t. We walked to the bathroom, and I explained that we spray the paper towel with the 409 solution and wipe the toilet seat.
“What?” she asked, surprised. “Now I see why you wear gloves.”
I responded with a puzzled look.
“At home,” she explained, “after I clean the toilet bowl, I use the brush to clean the toilet seat.”
I swore to never let Debbie clean the bathroom.
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MINT ~ JOE BOWLING
Sam reaches for the bottle of Dr. Pepper in the cupholder between the driver and passenger seat, unscrews the cap, and takes a giant gulp.
Via Phillip Larking @phillip_larking
The liquid on her tongue is not fizzy. It's slimy and warm and she can smell a waft of sour spearmint coming up from the open bottle.
Sam processes the thought that she's just swallowed her stepdad's chewing tobacco spit.
The gag begins from her diaphragm and works its way up. Bottom of the throat. Back of the tongue. Her stomach muscles tighten. She sees him look back at her with that disgusting lump in his lower lip. The bottle smells like bad breath and chewing gum.
Vomit fills her mouth and spews onto the floorboard of the car. The smell of her puke is a tiny reprieve from the warmed-over chaw.
The awful minty smell re-enters her nose when she breathes back in.
More vomit.
Her stepdad laughs.
She throws up again.
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BREATH ~ LUKE P
The smell of hard booze tainted his breath, beard, and clothes. The prolonged lack of a combination of clean, hot water and soap crystallized his body odor into an aura of stale piss. A scar ran down his eye, like a basic thug in a bad action move. Another scar ran down his chest, caused by a broken bottle and an angry, neglected wife. Tattoos dotted and filled every part of his body; the largest one was of an Iron Cross.
He spoke with a soothing air of fatherly goodness, and preached virtue and promised heaven. He smiled a lot and had the capacity to be friendly and reasonable. He lived behind a Cluck-U chicken, right next to a highway, and slept on a cardboard box.
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OKINAWA NIGHT ~ KRISTEN DORSEY
Most weekends, Elaine and I explore small Okinawan towns, escaping from the rigors of USMC life.
Via cy.hmfd @cy_shamus
Tonight, we point at menu-pictures of food beside Japanese symbols we can't read. The waitress laughs delightedly and brings whatever we point to, plus tiny cups of warm sake, which tastes like water and makes us giggly.
We link arms and weave to a hotel. The clerk bows and unlocks the door to a room with two small beds. We dump our knapsacks, don nightgowns, and collapse on the beds in drunken laughter. We share bites of our cellophane-wrapped dessert, tossing the remains in the trashcan.
"Kristen!" Elaine's whisper wakes me. "What's that?"
Loud crinkling and rustling sounds fill the pitch-black room. I snap on the lamp. A half-dozen Okinawan-style waterbugs—four-inch long, orange high-riders with waving antennae—rummage through our discarded cake. The light scatters them—but Okinawan cockroaches fly.
They bang around the room—we climb on our beds and scream. The light illuminates our cotton jammies and the roaches try landing on us. One crash-lands on my shin and scuttles up my thigh. I smash down my fist and leap for the door, Elaine shoving me from behind.
The night clerk sniggers as he squashes the bugs and empties the trash. We have deep-purple bruises and nightmares for weeks.
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SLIME ~ EVAN SEAY
via Krzysztof Niewolny @epan5
I am in awe. I had first spied the hundreds of little ground bugs after pulling up this tiny sapling. They were crawling around underground, among the roots, but now they were everywhere. I stare at them for minutes, my eyes glued to their smooth movements and the hundreds of legs, the tangle of their confusion.
My arm itches, and I go to scratch it, but my fingers catch something slimy. Without thinking, I jerk away and grimace. I bring my arm into my vision, and it’s covered with centipedes, ants, and pill bugs. My heart stops and I can’t breathe or move. I feel each of the hundreds of legs tickling my arm.
Somehow, my muscles twitch, and I shake wildly, bugs flying off my arm, wriggling on the ground. I kick some dirt over the hole the sapling made and get back to work. I don’t look
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CHOKE ~ ZACHARY BEEHLER
I never really knew what strep throat was until I got it. It was a slow process, slow enough that I didn't notice I had it until the third day.
Via Ilya Schulte @ilyaa
I woke up to my throat rubbing and clicking against the muscles in my neck. I grabbed an already opened water bottle on my nightstand and tried to drink at all, but my throat had become so enlarged I couldn't push anything through. I was starting to panic.
I rushed to my father, who had already woken up and gone downstairs. I tried to speak but my throat just kept clicking, my voice raspy like gravel on a chalkboard. He asked so many questions, and the more time was spent talking the worse I got.
We decided to go to the hospital when I started to drool. I had a yellow cup in my hand, catching the drool as we arrived and subsequently waited for someone to help. I was trying to swallow as best I could, but my saliva stayed viscous enough for my throat to reject it entirely.
Finally, a doctor came, and in one fell swoop injected a needle deep enough to make me scream. But in an hour my throat had finally shrunk back to normal, and I couldn't help but swallow nothing for some time after, getting used to the motions I had struggled so much to do.
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