I had wanted to participate in
Tipsy Lit this week, but my first attempt was steering in a more morbid direction than I wanted to go and attempt number two was getting too preachy for my liking so I bailed on this week's prompt.
Instead I'd like to share with you all a little story I submitted to "
Lightspeed" magazine for the "Women Destroy SF" issue. Sadly it was rejected; but as it was my first real rejection letter I was actually quick thrilled about it! As I have no further plans for this story I figured I might as well slap it up for for others to enjoy.
It's more speculative fiction than sci-fi. The intent also was to be satirical but I don't think it swings far enough into the chuckle-realm. If anything it's a cute idea. Enjoy!
"Pooh-Pee Power"
Word Count: 1,034
“Mommy, I have to go to the bathroom!” Annette whined.
“Really Annette?” Jackie whined back. “Can't you hold it?”
“No!” the eight year old declared with a pout.
“Fine,” the frazzled mother sighed, steering her shopping
cart over to the nearest wall, wishing Annette would have waited till they were
home.
Gone were the days when grocery store restrooms were tucked
in the back of the warehouse or in some obscure corner, maintained in
questionable states of cleanliness. Now
every business establishment larger than 5,000 square feet had at least one set
of gloriously clean, publicly accessible restrooms located along every wall.
You no longer needed to leave your cart outside, you could
take right into the stall with you if you so desired. The contents of one's cart was registered by
indifferent scanners before entering and double-checked upon leaving. Contents could shift around in the cart, but
if there was a discrepancy between the two scans, an associate would quickly
come over and ask why something was added or removed. Honestly it was rarely an issue though -
people didn't use bathrooms for nefarious purposes anymore.
Jackie led Annette into the spacious ladies room. She waved her phone over the reader on the
nearest stall door and the girl quickly dashed in, leaving Jackie to park her
cart in a little nook supplied for such purposes. The mother flopped herself down on the plush
couch next to the nook. She noticed from
the lower placement of the doors on the last two stalls in the row that this store
even boasted a couple Eastern-style toilets – nothing more than a hole in the
floor with a textured surface on either side so your feet didn't slip when you
squatted over it. This was reportedly a
healthier way to relieve oneself than sitting on a pot. She sighed at the one-upmanship that
dominated the toilet industry.
“Are you done yet?” she called to her daughter after a few
minutes. Toilets no longer held water so
you couldn't tell if someone was peeing or pooping. Instead, the said waste products were caught
in a beam on the way down and immediately vaporized - turning them into
energy. Yes, the world now ran on “pooh-pee
power” – as it was jokingly referred to.
“Yeah,” Annette replied with a little uncertainty. “There's no toilet paper though.”
Jackie sighed again.
“They're not going to have paper, hon.
There should be a blue button like the bathrooms at school.”
“Found it!”
It was hard for people used to cleaning themselves with
toilet paper to give up the habit – Jackie and her family still used paper at
home. You could chuck anything you
wanted down modern toilets; anything that wasn't human waste (or menstrual
blood) would collect in the bottom of the toilet. In commercial toilets, the contents would be
quietly and instantly incinerated once the stall was vacated – the meager fumes
and smoke gently wafted away by a built-in ventilation system. The collection bucket for home-use toilets
however was removable and had to be emptied by hand. The die-hard toilet paper-users of the world
would have their paper cleaned of poo and damp urine once it passed the beam,
leaving the discarded paper to fall into the collection bucket, perfectly dry –
in theory it was clean enough to use again.
Jackie had never tried that though.
The modern way to clean one's self was to hit a button which
turned the beam upward where it would make quick work of any "remains"
clinging to one's nether regions. There
was an odd tingling sensation when the beam hit something it could dissolve,
but it was deemed safe and no studies had yet to conclusively prove that any
harm came from direct contact with the toilet beam. In fact, Jackie had to reach into a
restaurant toilet once to retrieve her dropped phone with no ill affects to her
hand or the phone.
“Annette!” Jackie warned after a bit more of a wait
“It's still tingly Mommy!” the girl called back cheerily.
Yet another long-suffering sigh escaped her lips. “Open your cheeks a little so it can get
everything.” She actually kind of needed
to go too, but she was going to wait.
Jimmy was away at summer camp so there was one less person using the
toilet at home. The house batteries were
doing fine, but she really hated pulling off the grid any more than they needed
to. She had heard that cases of kidney,
bladder and bowel problems were on the rise because people would only use the
bathroom in specific locations (like home).
“Done!” Annette announced, leaving the stall and returning
to her mother.
“Wash your hands,” Jackie said.
“Why?” the little girl asked, annoyed.
“Because it's a public bathroom; wash you hands!”
Kids weren't even taught hand-washing in school
anymore. There simply wasn't a reason to
since hands never got near excrement.
Jackie was old-fashioned though and always insisted. Sinks were still in bathrooms just in case a
woman got some blood on her hands when changing her tampon. People did still like to wash their hands
before and/or after a meal and food prep workers also still needed to wash their
hands before returning to work – though Jackie had a feeling that law would die
out within the next decade or so.
Once Annette's hands were washed and dried, Jackie retrieved
her cart and returned to her shopping.
The one consolation of the detour was she'd get a small discount on her
purchase. Businesses wanted people to use their restrooms as
the energy produced went straight towards the onsite power. Places that used to post signs sternly
declaring “Restrooms for paying patrons only”, now displayed cheeky invites
like “Get your butt in here”, or “Stop here if you gotta go”, or “We'd love
your business after you do your business”.
To encourage restroom use, businesses almost always offered discounts
for “contributions” – tracked via people’s phones. When Jackie paid for her groceries by waving
her phone over the payment node at the register, Annette’s use of the stall
would take a few cents off Jackie’s total.
Kind of strange how commerce had changed so much because of
pooh.
