While most people, for whatever reason, are quite comfortable displaying their sonic prowess in the toilette, Anna was a woman who absolutely could not “release” in such a way if she knew there was anyone whatsoever in the near vicinity. Call it an “idiosyncrasy” or a “character quirk” if you must, but it simply was what it was and there could be no changing it. That is, until Anna was forced into the harsh reality of sharing a living space after she moved out of her parents’ abode. An abode that had, for so long, afforded her the luxury of a private bathroom all to herself. Far out of the earshot of anyone. Which meant she could shit and fart without a care in the world. With no concern at all as to whether someone might hear her. But oh, how the times had changed. 

Changed so much that she rued the day she had ever believed it was prudent to leave her parents’ house. And for what? Just so she could feel “good” about adhering to the societal norm that was only really “normal” in America? Plenty of “adult children” lived with their parents well after eighteen in most other countries, and you didn’t see them being harshly judged for it. Now, here Anna was, forced to live with some garden-variety miscreants. Or maybe they were perfectly fine…to someone with a higher threshold level for human interaction. But Anna’s was too low to bother “getting to know them.” That would only make it worse, in the end, if “something slipped out” while she was on the can. Which she had to make absolutely certain that it never did.

This became one of her key goals in life, tragically. Especially since she had so many other goals she could be focusing on while at home. Like the writing career she was supposedly meant to be pursuing. But with AI taking over that too, she supposed she figured: what was really the point? If only AI could actually do something truly useful for humanity, like eliminate the need to shit. Or at least eliminate the sounds that resulted from it. 

There were so few moments when she found herself in the three-bedroom apartment alone that she had taken to shitting in public toilets for the most part. And even there, she was what could be described as a “quiet shitter.” Always waiting to “drop it” until someone else flushed the toilet in the stall next to her, or flushing her own to mitigate the sound. Then there was the tried-and-true (even if highly environmentally-unfriendly—but then, what isn’t when it comes to all things bathroom-related?) method of wadding up a few toilet seat covers and tossing them into the bowl so that when the shit moved out of her, it couldn’t make that hideous plopping sound it always does when it hits water. The paper attenuated any such sound. Or, at best, made a noise that wasn’t so pinpointable…so haunting.

Anna couldn’t even begin to count the number of times she had come across people who had no consideration at all for those who might hear what they were doing in a public bathroom. And sure, the very nature of the word “public” seems to suggest to the masses that they can do whatever they want (and that that’s somehow less the case in private). But anyone with, let’s just say it, a “good sense of breeding,” knew better. Would never dare to do such things in a place where they knew others could hear. Perhaps, worse still, see. Because yes, many a person had no qualms about leaving behind…remnants. On the seat or in the bowl itself. It should have been enough to put Anna off using a public bathroom forever, and yet, nothing was more abhorrent to her than the idea of someone in her “own home” (as if) being able to hear the noises she made while taking a shit. 

No, no. She would much prefer to risk having total strangers walk in on her potentially making an untoward sound with her anus. That was far more manageable than running into one of her degenerate roommates in the hallway after “releasing” and having them look at her and think, “Damn, this girl is gross.” Or, moreover, saying to themselves that they would never have imagined someone so waiflike to make such “dude noises” in the bathroom. The more she thought about it (and obviously, she thought about it a lot), the more she realized that what she hated most regarding the idea of being heard “that way” is that it meant there was yet another aspect of herself she couldn’t control. You know, in terms of how she was perceived.

Anna had “a thing” about being perceived in general. And sure, maybe we all do. But not like this. Anna probably had such a level of contempt for being perceived that it could probably be classified as “a condition.” Because, really, who else would go to such lengths—go out of their way to be so uncomfortable—just to avoid anyone hearing them do what everyone else did every day? Sometimes multiple times a day (that is, if you were “regular,” therefore “healthy”). On a side note, they say that those who don’t shit at least once a day are likelier to get dementia. In other words, those who don’t “let loose” often enough have a “seventy-three percent higher risk of subjective cognitive decline.” Well, if that were genuinely the case, then Anna was due for a trip down Dementia Drive any day now. 

After all, she took great pains to shit as little as possible. And her highly specialized eating habits reflected that. It was in this regard that she wondered if “peasantry” didn’t have its benefits. Sure, you smelled piss and shit on the streets where the unhoused set up their camps, but think how much worse the smell would be if they actually ate and drank with the same frequency as a bourgeois. Despite her best attempts at anorexia, however, Anna still couldn’t avoid the inevitable: shitting. It was driving her to madness. She was having anxiety-driven, feces-coated nightmares that, one morning, actually found her waking up in her own excrement. An event that itself created the problem of how to get her sheets out of the apartment (because no, she would not be washing them, she would be throwing them in the dumpster and maybe setting it on fire) without the smell attracting attention. 

Anna waited for hours in a room that now reeked of her bowels just so that the apartment was finally as empty as her intestines. The moment she heard her second roommate leave, Anna practically sprinted toward the door with her shit-smeared sheets wrapped in a giant ball. A ball that was bounced right back into her face when the roommate immediately returned, swinging the door open and knocking Anna to the ground, causing the sheets to open up right onto her chest and face. 

The roommate couldn’t believe what he was seeing, only barely mustering the strength to say, “Um, I…forgot something.” He then ran to his room, grabbed whatever he had left behind and disappeared with more stealth than Houdini. 

Anna, too, ended up disappearing in a similarly spectral fashion. For, after that humiliating day, she decided that, as previously surmised, she was not a functioning member of American society, and should no longer pretend to be. She would move back in with her parents, where she could shit in peace and to her heart’s content. All without anyone else in the household being the wiser.