Even as a child, I couldn’t understand why anyone would admire my father for rolling around in fecal slime. Being a little brat, I didn’t grasp what that slightly brownish, glistening, strange-smelling aspic was for—the stuff he always brought home in jars. He would carefully smear it on a patch of the floor, strip naked, lie down in it, and just lounge there in the puddle of secretion like some grotesquely oversized toad, eyes closed, as if meditating. Try talking to him then—pointless.
All I knew was, the floor constantly slicked under my feet from that stinking gelatinous muck that appeared in every corner of the apartment. It was as if the residence itself were sweating slippery, liquid shit. So we mostly crawled around on all fours from room to room, just to avoid slipping and breaking our necks.
Yes, my father was a fisting grease fakir. While other self-mortifying performers walk on burning coals or lie on beds of nails, he reclined in lubricant scooped from the anuses of fisted porn stars. I couldn’t see what the big trick was—after all, wallowing in fisting grease doesn’t hurt one bit. But for my father, it wasn’t about overcoming physical pain. It was about mental strength. Most people wouldn’t lie in fisting grease—especially not used grease reeking of rectal mucus and smeared feces—because their stomachs would instantly turn. But my father? It didn’t faze him at all.
“An innate gift,” he once said, gazing dreamily, twirling his mustache perpetually clumped together with intestinal slime.
According to him, when he was born, my grandmother pushed too hard, and the moment he came into the world she immediately shat all over his head. Even though she’d received an enema beforehand—like most women when they go into labor—years of eating plum jam made from Panyolai “Who Knows What” plums had given her a notoriously overactive metabolism. Long story short, the jam she’d smuggled into the hospital resulted in such watery diarrhea that my father, as a newborn, was instantly covered in it—so much so that he slipped right out of the obstetrician’s hands and hit the floor with a thud.
But my, he didn’t cry.
He just lay there on the cold hospital tiles, in a puddle of amniotic fluid, shit, and vaginal mucus, with some kind of serene, all-knowing smile on his tiny lips. The doctors stood around him in awe. The infant’s joy was so beautiful, so otherworldly, that they left him on the floor for days. Even the head physician came to marvel at the little three-kilogram mucus-Buddha, writhing there like a plucked chicken in the stinking puddle.
That was the beginning of my father’s career.
That was when the mystical talent took root in him: the ability to lie calmly in any kind of filth.
***
When I was a teen, everyone looked straight through me. I didn’t have any friends, but by then I at least knew what fisting was—the sexual act of someone forcing one’s entire fist up someone’s ass. And of course I also knew what fisting grease was—the lubricant that makes the act possible. But I had come to understand something else, as well. Namely, that I did not want to follow in my father’s footsteps. Or rather, lie down in his puddle.I never went to a single one of the old man’s performances. Not that there were many. At first, sure, he had an audience—after all, it’s not an everyday spectacle, someone so determinedly wallowing in intestinal slime. But once people realized that my dad was a one-trick pony, they stopped inviting him to demonstrate his talent.
Did it bother him? Of course. But if you asked why he didn’t come up with something new—why he didn’t, say, lie on nails like any normal fakir—he’d just say: “Are you stupid, son? That would fucking hurt!”
So he kept lying there in the living room, in intestinal mucus smuggled home from porn shoots, without an audience, claiming that the performance was never the point anyway. Well, without an audience is not entirely true. I was there, after all—I couldn’t exactly avoid looking.
“Why are you standing there with that sour face?” he’d grumble. “Come on, lie down next to your old man in the fisting grease! It’s already nice and body-warm!”
“No thanks,” I said, flicking a fly away from my nose then slipping out of the apartment on all fours.
***
The years went by, and we slowly ran out of money. But one thing we never ran out of was fisting grease. Of that, we had plenty. My father took a side job cleaning porn film sets. Wiping sweat, dried semen, and vaginal discharge off black faux-leather couches is the kind of work few people volunteer for. Unless, of course, your hobby is scraping up leftover fisting grease from the floor and depositing it into little jars. The porn crews had their laughs, naturally, because my father didn’t ask for anything in return for his work—except that he be allowed to take home the leaked lubricant.“You could at least ask for some money, for fuck’s sake!” I snapped at him one day, slamming the door to the empty fridge. “What are we supposed to eat? Fisting grease sandwiches?”
“As long as there’s lubrication, there’s everything,” he muttered mysteriously.
In reality, we had nothing. So I decided I’d get a job myself.
But it was no use. Prospective employers looked right through me. As if I wasn’t even there. Because they must have known my father.
***
As we sank deeper into poverty, we both lost quite a bit of weight. My father, though, lost far more than me. At first, I thought he suffered from depression for the lack of performances. But it turned out, he had a tumor. Colorectal cancer, diagnosed through a colonoscopy. It wasn’t an easy procedure to perform on him—the old man kept stealing the lubricant off the scope, and it took several attempts to push the tube up his ass. But when the camera finally slid in, something very ugly appeared on the small screen.Inoperable, they said. So chemo it was. His hair fell out. Even his mustache, the adornment of his greatest pride, withered and fell away. But still, he lay on the floor in that shitty fisting grease, despite all efforts on my part to order him into bed. Just lying there, bald, dying in a mucus puddle, that same faint, transcendent half-smile hovering on his face.
“You’re going to die,” I told him. “Why the fuck doesn’t that bother you?”
He stammered: “You still don’t get it, do you? The true essence of my act? If you lie down in shit of your own accord, life can’t force you into it.”
“No wonder Mom left you,” I snapped.
His emaciated, naked body swimming in goo, he raised his dark gaze to me. “Who said she left?” he replied. “I’m lying here with her.”
The room spun around me.
With the faraway look of a man recalling a romance of the ages, he told the story of how I came to be. When he was younger, he lucked into a batch of used fisting grease that contained an egg cell. After all, it’s not just asses that get fisted, but vaginas too.
“And someone must’ve reached a little too deep,” my bald father chuckled. “And I was young back then. Many wet dreams. Long story short—as I lay there in the fisting grease, you were conceived. And there you grew. Like some little cyst in the slime, in that silicone amniotic fluid. After nine months, I lifted you out and washed the shit off you, and you cried. It was the proudest day of my life.”
“The fisting grease…is my mother?” I stammered.
“Have you never noticed that you’re transparent?” the old man asked, incredulous. “That people don’t see you?”
“I thought they acted like that because…because my father’s a fucking fisting grease fakir!”
If I hurt him, he didn’t show it. He only replied: “If people don’t notice you, it’s your doing, son—not because of others. But look at it another way!” His sunken face stretched into a wide grin. “You are the messiah of fisting grease, and great things await you!”
***
No great things awaited me. Just a funeral. One I couldn’t arrange myself—because, in case you didn’t know, I’m a transparent fisting-grease progeny that people look straight through. But I was there to say goodbye.My father lay ruined in the coffin like a broken scarecrow. His face, a scorched wasteland. I gently lifted his light, twig-like body to drizzle a bit of lubricant onto the pillow beneath his head. Let him be buried with it.
And then—I swear, I’m not lying—his lips turned up at the corners, ever so slightly, as if a trace of that transcendent smile returned to his dead, statue-like face.
***
Now I’m home, staring at the slimy, glistening patch on the floor where the old man will never lie down again. The guy who came into the world with shit covering his head spent his entire life lying in fecal mucus—steadfastly, faithfully, because that’s what he knew.I suppose I should clean up the filth. But instead, I reach for a stain, and the word slips from my mouth.
“Mother.”
It can’t be her, I tell myself. Impossible that this is the exact patch of grease I was conceived in. But this uncertainty doesn’t change the essence of the feeling. I am the child of fisting grease.
I lie down in the fecal sludge, and the silicone cells of my half–fisting-grease body begin to resonate with the lubricant. Sprawled across this liquid maternal altar, a kind of amniotic bliss settles into me.
“Don’t be afraid, my little son,” murmurs the shit-aspic that once seeped from the backsides of porn stars. “If the world fists your ass, I am here to ease your pain. Relax—I’ll graze you across gentle fields of protective anal wax, little lamb. This riverbed of filth will rock you into sweet dreams.”
My gelatinous lips curl into a smile. I will stay here, hidden from the world that never notices me. Because Mother Rectal-Gel sees me—and loves me. She breaks off a crust from heaven, spreads it with fisting grease, and offers it to me.
I almost succumb to it. To her.
But something, the glimmer of a thought hatches in my mind. I see myself decades from now, becoming my father. Spending my days in silence, wallowing in shit-aspic.
“I have to go,” I say, standing. The lubricant bursts with bubbles.
“Where would you go?” it asks. “You have no other home.”
“I’ll find one,” I insist. “I’ll explore the world. Or let it discover me. Because existence isn’t just bitter sludge and cunt-brine. Whoever lives cannot be a ghost.”
For the first time, I feel something strong within me, and I realize what it is.
Willpower.
In the periphery I hear Mother answer—to protest, or wish me well—but I’ll never know what she said. Because the door flies open.
And there stands a cleaner, come to tidy up my dead father’s apartment, now claimed by the state—since no one knows about me. The old cleaning woman snorts at the sight of the massive smear of fisting grease on the floor. The one I’m lying in. The one I am.
“The ugly filth people leave behind these days,” she grumbles.
Then she hauls in the bucket.
And with her mop, she wipes my mother—and me—out of the world forever.
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