“Where do you think these intense phobias of fecal matter started, Miranda?”

“Oh, I can tell you EXACTLY when they started. I was six and out playing with my friend Brian. See, we didn’t live in the cleanest neighborhood with helicopter moms spending a lot of time hovering around us, so we got dirty. In fact, our goal was to get so dirty every day we needed a bath every night. It was a badge of pride between the two of us.

“One day Brian started complaining his asshole was itching after we’d been playing soldiers for the past week, you know, throwing dirt up in the air, mimicking grenade explosions. When he went to the bathroom, he came running out screaming. ‘Worms, worms, worms!’ Turns out, there were parasite eggs in the dirt and Brian had gotten flatworms. He had to go to the doctor and every time he went to the bathroom, he told me dead worms came out of his butt. And they just sat there in his turd and you could see they were dead and white and flat. He shat so many worms. So many. They were like confetti, he said. And the smell was a piece of shit combined with gasoline and, oddly, cupcakes.” Miranda dry heaved, her eyes watering.

“So, it was then you became afraid to defecate and all these phobias started? Because of your friend’s bout with flatworms?”

“I’m pretty sure,” Miranda said.

“Hmm.” The psychologist with hair like a Cockapoo wrote something down on her yellow pad of paper. “Here’s what I want you to do,” she said finally. “For the next week I’m going to have you do a poop journal. Do you know what that is?”

Miranda shook her head, her pallor a sickly green that matched the wallpaper of the psychologist’s office.

“It’s where you monitor your bowel movements on the Bristol stool scale and record each movement —its shape, how dry it is, the color, and the time of day. Maybe, even what you had to eat before the bowel movement. I’ll give you a copy of the scale and you can use it to compare your feces.”

“B-but why do I have to do this? It sounds so gross.” Miranda felt a gag rising in her throat. “Can’t you just hypnotize me so I’m not afraid of going to the bathroom anymore and seeing or smelling my shit? I’ve heard therapists can do that.” She chewed on a hangnail, bouncing one leg on the other.

“I don’t like to hypnotize patients,” the psychologist replied, tucking the pen behind her ear in an officious gesture. “Only as a last resort. I like to exhaust all other methods first.”

Miranda sighed. “Okay. Fine. I’ll do my best. But if I even think about…going…I throw up and avoid using the bathroom. It becomes very uncomfortable. Sometimes I won’t…take a dump…for eight hours or more. I break out in sweats and start hyperventilating just walking past the ladies’ room at work. One time it was so bad I got hives and they had to send me home. I was so embarrassed. I told my supervisor I was allergic to the glue they were using to install the new floor tiles.” Miranda gagged again and lurched to her feet, and just made it to one of the large palms by the window before upchucking into the pot that held it. “I’m so sorry,” she said, mortified. “I’ll pay for the plant.” Vomit dribbled down her chin and onto her white chiffon blouse.

“You have something on your chin.” The psychologist handed her a tissue, not looking Miranda in the eye. The doc made a glug sound, and to Miranda it looked as if she were trying to keep the gorge from rising in her own throat. “Here’s the sheet to go with your homework,” the psychologist finished. “Get yourself a pretty notebook and make this fun. It’ll be okay. I promise.”

***

Miranda went to Walgreens and perused the notebook section while waiting for her prescriptions. Her choices were cactuses, unicorns, or black, navy, or gray chevron. Miranda wasn’t much of a southwest fan and she detested chevron patterns because they gave her raging migraines, but she fondly remembered her schoolgirl days when she had a Trapper Keeper® with a unicorn on it. She bought the unicorn notebook.

***

It was three o’clock in the morning when Miranda woke up, turned on her bedside light, and stared at the happy smiling unicorns. Beads of sweat broke out on her upper lip, and she licked them and tasted salt. Feeling her bowels relaxing, she squeezed her butt cheeks together, hoping to keep the shit inside for another eight hours or more. Soon, she realized it was a no-go.

Her heart revved as she neared the bathroom, clutching the unicorn notebook to her chest. Her skin erupted in tiny goosebumps and her face flushed. She yearned to flee, but stood frozen to the floor. All she could picture was a nest of worms intertwined and wriggling in their own ball of shit. Slimy and shiny and oh god! She was going to barf! The thought was no sooner out then she hurled onto her favorite blue slippers. The warm, gushy vomit slid down her blue and white pajamas, and she fought the urge to pass out.

But Miranda had bigger problems. Her anus was crowning.

She yanked down her pajama pants, and shit exploded from her asshole into the toilet with loud plopping noises. Through the ordeal, she focused on the happy, smiling unicorn notebook.

Dreading what came next, she wiped herself, quadrupling the toilet paper, careful not to taint herself with any of that nasty brown oooh. Then she pulled up her vomit-coated pajama pants and turned to face the bowl. The vomit had pooled in her slippers and was growing cold there, but it was still mushy. Meanwhile it smelled like something died in her toilet. Maybe she shouldn’t have eaten Mexican food on the first day of her poop journal. She’d read there was an entire group of people who shared their poop journals online with one another, and even pictures of their daily bowel movements. God help them. Who knew why?

She leaned over the toilet, able to see part of her rippled reflection and a bunch of brown pieces of shit, like tiny floating pebbles. She remembered from chemistry class in high school that if they floated, it meant you had more fat in your diet. She opened her notebook and wrote with her quaking left hand, 1)

Small brown pebbles 2)

Easy to pass 3)

Mexican food for dinner

Then she hurriedly flushed the slick, greasy mess, remembering to put the seat down first because she read that if you left the lid up, germs and microscopic bits of fecal matter would spray out of the toilet and settle over everything, including nearby toothbrushes. Brushing her teeth with a poop brush. She gagged as she stripped and headed for the shower.

Freshly cleaned , Miranda went back to bed.

Sometime around four in the morning, a BOOM! shook the house. For a moment, Miranda wondered if Old Man Jack down the block was making his own fireworks again —if so, someone was going to have to call the fire department.

Then her room began to glow a faint purple phosphorescent, pulsing in time like a beating heart. She almost heard it: THUMP-THUMP THUMP-THUMP THUMP-THUMP. And there was an odd metallic taste in her mouth, like when she bit down on aluminum foil or sucked on a penny.

She drew her bathrobe around herself and peered out her bedroom window.

In her backyard, an enormous rock glowing with stardust jutted up from the ground. She squinted, opened her eyes. The rock was still there. It was larger than her Prius, and, she judged, the hole it made was twice as deep as the length of her vehicle.

All around the neighborhood car alarms went off. People wandered out into the street in their bedclothes. Dogs barked. Miranda, normally terrified of anything new and strange, found herself drawn to the pulsing purple boulder. Hurrying down the stairs and out the front door, she approached the object. Maybe, she thought, I’ll be on TV. She’d be famous and wear a piece of galactic rock on a chain around her neck, and everywhere she went she’d be known as the purple rock lady. Miranda could sell chunks of it to tourists and let them come see it for a small price. She’d retire a wealthy woman.

Miranda approached the meteorite —because certainly, she thought, that’s what it is —and touched it. Its surface wasn’t hot as she expected, but icy cold, and the purple phosphorescence rubbed off on her fingers like dust. She held the substance to her nose and inhaled, cautious. It smelled like lilacs and magnolias with a hint of lily. She dabbed the meteor dust behind her ears, wrists, even her cleavage like perfume, then as if applying makeup, she rubbed some on her eyelids, cheeks, and lips. It was such a tantalizing and mesmerizing scent and color; she couldn’t resist the meteorite’s allure.

Then, without questioning why she did so, she went back inside and fell fast asleep.

In the morning she awoke to another traumatic urge to shit and yet another bout of nausea, sweats, and shakes. But, she sensed, something was also staving off the worst of it. The places on her skin where she had applied the rock dust tingled cold and pleasant, and she glanced down at her wrists to find them glowing where she had rubbed on the phosphorescent matter. Carefully, she made her way into the bathroom and sat down on the toilet, evacuating her bowels in a huge SPLOP! SPLOP! SPLUUURT!

When she reached back to wipe her butt, she felt she’d given birth to a baby —she had crapped that much. But no. That couldn’t be. There wasn’t enough room for that much feces in the toilet. A chuckle rose in her throat, surprising her. Maybe, between the stardust, the silly unicorn notebook, and the Bristol chart, she’d get over her phobia after all.

Miranda pulled up her pajama bottoms and looked into the toilet. What she saw dumbfounded her.

“Miranda,” her poop said. It was a brown, goopy mess that jiggled and swayed in the water. “Mi amor. I’ve waited to come to this planet to meet you all these years. Give me a kiss.”

No, no, no. This wasn’t happening. A hallucination. Just another side effect of the phobia. She closed her eyes and counted to five, breathing in, then counted to five again, breathing out. But when she opened her eyes, it was still there —and growing.

As she stared, dumbfounded, the creature’s expanding body filled up the bowl, grew four small arms, and sprouted a head with two tentacles popping out on top. It opened its mouth and spoke to her again.

“What? You don’t believe me? I come all this way to meet the love of my life and you scowl and wrinkle your nose at me in disgust? I insist you kiss me hello as lovers do!”

“NO!” Insanity. Was she really talking to her own shit? “I will NOT kiss you. You smell like ass and you’re… you’re disgusting!”

“Then I will kiss you,” the tiny alien poop-being replied, and stretched its baby arms long enough to wrap them around her neck. Pulling itself up and out of the toilet and dripping with brown sludge, it forced its slimy, mushy, smelling-of-crap tongue into her mouth. She gagged as it drew its entire body into her mouth and squeezed itself down her throat. A brief, desperate image flooded her mind’s eye, of a python swallowing a muskrat. Then, she was overcome with a deep sense of peace.

When Miranda next looked down, there was nothing left in the bowl. It glowed spotless, pristine. She looked up and smiled into the bathroom mirror at the most beautiful face and body she had inhabited in a long time.

Smiling, she reached over and grabbed her toothbrush.

About the Author:
Nora B. Peevy is a submissions reader for JournalStone/Trepidatio Publishing and a reviewer for Hellnotes. She serves as a syndicate author for Thrill Ride eZine and an editor for Baynam Books Press, also narrating their podcast, The Midnight Manuscripts. For the Sake of Brigid, her first novelette, came out in May 2024, and her first short story collection was published in August 2025 from JournalStone/Trepidatio. Her debut novel, Flesh-Eating Turtles!, was published in June 2025 by The Evil Cookie Publishing. Her story, What’s in Her Pimple? made The Best of Carnage House Year One. She also reads scripts for The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival.