Sadie Kaye
Daddy had salmonella poisoning, but he didn’t know it. The explosive effects of the condition had left him sore, dehydrated and waiting to see our annoyingly upbeat GP. With clenched and scalded buttocks, Daddy sat in a crowded waiting room the colour of sadness. He dared not look at the receptionist, the passing nurses or any of the other waiting patients — three days of violent diarrhoea doesn’t instil you with much social confidence. For a while, Daddy sat on his hands, an attempt at keeping his abused ring-piece off the hard plastic chair, then, bored, he sent me a DM: At the docs — wish me luck!
Eventually, Daddy’s name was called. Daddy stood up. Immediately, everyone looked at Daddy and tried to guess what he was in for. The receptionist looked smug because she already knew. Smug and disgusted. Daddy took a deep breath and mustering as much dignity as he could manage, waddled across the waiting room.
Daddy described to the GP his symptoms. She smiled but didn’t shake Daddy’s hand. A few minutes later, she passed across a small tube and asked Daddy to “step outside”, so he could fill it. Daddy must’ve looked slightly shocked.
“I’m afraid we’ll have to take a stool sample!” she beamed.
Daddy held up the tiny see-through container. “In this?” he gasped.
“Yes!” she chortled.
Daddy searched the doctor’s face for signs she was joking, but it was clear she was serious. The diameter and length of the tube were not best suited for the collection of normal stools, let alone unstoppable splattering pints of hot liquid shit.
“You want me to fill this?” Daddy clarified.
“If you can!” the doctor smiled.
If I can? Daddy thought to himself. If I could “aim”, I could fill this a hundred times over in a tenth of a second. “May I have a glove, please?” he asked.
“Of course,” she chuckled. “Take two!”
The toilet was adjacent to the waiting room, so Daddy palmed the tube and, trying to appear normal, he waddled back past the waiting area and slipped inside. Daddy was acutely aware that he could hear the patients waiting and whispering outside. He could hear the rustle of magazines and the coughs. He could hear the receptionist’s bangles jangling. He could hear the crease of legs folding and unfolding. He could hear everything.
Daddy needed to be careful.
Sighing, he rolled down his jeans and went to sit down. Then stopped. There was a hornet in the toilet. It looked dead, but to be certain Daddy flushed again. He held his breath but after the water had settled, there it was, still floating on the surface. As hornets go, it was quite big and Daddy stared at it nervously for a good thirty seconds before, satisfied it must be dead, he lowered himself over the bowl. I’m sure it’s not just Daddy, but he has a real problem with hornets near his danglies.
Put him in trousers and he’ll happily fight most living creatures, but exposed, he feels far too vulnerable for any form of combat. “I think I would rather fight blindfolded and fully clothed against two silverbacks and an angry beaver than naked against a small ferret,” Daddy had once confessed to me.
It’s his Achilles ballbag.
As Daddy gingerly lowered himself down on to the seat, he could hear the coughs and sniffles outside the door. He couldn’t help but think that people were listening. You may think Daddy paranoid but if it were Daddy outside, he knew he’d be listening. Minutes passed and nothing happened. Daddy just couldn’t let it go. It’s very difficult to let nature take its course when you have a big hornet near your nads.
Daddy thought of the smiling doctor waiting in the adjacent room. He looked around the cubicle — but there was no reading material. Even if there had been, it would’ve been tough to read. Don’t forget Daddy was doing this one handed. His other hand, double gloved, was poised to collect “the sample”. Time passed.
Having sat there in a trance for a good ten minutes, pondering the horrors of being stung on the balls by a massive hornet, Daddy finally plucked up the courage to let himself go. His crap tube was filled within a tenth of a second. Suddenly, he heard a loud buzzing noise. BZZZZZZZZ!
THE HORNET WAS ALIVE!
“JESUS, SHIT!” Daddy yelled and leapt up, throwing the tube’s hot liquid contents around the cubicle in his panic to pull his pants up and protect his jewels.
It had gone very quiet outside the door. The fact that Daddy had just bellowed “JESUS, SHIT!” in a toilet next to a silent waiting room hit him. It also occurred to him that the doctor had probably heard him shout this after ten minutes of trying to fill his crap tube.
JESUS, SHIT!??
Daddy looked down and the hornet still lay there, apparently still drowned in pints of hot liquid shit. If it had been alive, it was a bad way to go. Daddy looked in horror around the cubicle. It looked like there’d been an explosion in a molasses factory.
BZZZZZZZZ the noise went again, which is when Daddy remembered that his phone was set on vibrate and in the pocket of his jeans around his ankles.
Daddy reached into his jeans pocket and saw the reply from me. It read: Good luck, Daddy!
Sadie Kaye is a writer & performer from Hong Kong. Her humour, fiction, rants & reviews have appeared in the South China Morning Post, Cha, The Hooghly Review and various anthologies. She’s a writer & producer for Contro Vento Films and Art Editor for The Apostrophe. She can be found at https://sadiekaye.tv.
Featured photo by Eric Poussin (Pexels)
