It was another late night at work eating mushy capellini puttanesca from a foil container. “Executive Dining Club my ass," I muttered, anticipating oddly a different sort of problem. As I got up to toss the refuse, I felt an unusual rumbling in my nether regions.
“Errr, sorry. . . Did I just fart?” There was no doubt that I did. Quite boisterously. But, I didn’t know how else to acknowledge it since I wasn’t alone in the office. Thank goodness it was just Waldorf in the next cube. While we were laughing it off, I suddenly felt another rumble and a warm sensation from under my skirt—something oozing down my inner thigh.
Was it that time again? And what was that smell? Three seconds and a sprint to the lav later, I discovered that my colon was a veritable faucet of oil—orange and unctuous. Oh god. My insides were melting. Those years of naughty eating had finally caught up with me. I pictured myself fitted with a colostomy bag.
I tossed out the oil-soaked underpants and plugged my ass-crack with wadded up Corporate-Express® paper towels. I tried to keep from crying.
I waddled back to my cubicle and typed three keywords into Google: rectum...oily...discharge , expecting this all to lead to colon cancer. But what caught my eye several entries down was the Digestive & Bowel Disorders Forum.
Apparently, the culprit was the Escolar (a.k.a Butterfish, White Tuna, Ex-Lax Fish, Rudderfish) from dinner the previous night, which, in large enough doses, can cause quite a messy event. I scrolled through scores of mortifying stories of asses exploding at inopportune moments, dripping and staining everything in its path. Stories like Nagi who had to explain to her boyfriend, on whose lap she was sitting, where the orange oil came from—or, Sterneesh who had to drive home from an important business meeting, sitting on a stack of newspapers—lessened the isolation and the shame from my rectal misery. I don’t know how people used to live before the development of the online community.
*Term coined by Violet.
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