One minute, you’re pulling down your brand-new panties with a little bow detail at the center, the next, you turn around and see it floating in the toilet bowl. Commingling with urine and one-ply toilet paper so incongruously that it almost makes you wonder if you might be tripping. As though, if not acid, then a Pinterest image search led you to some foul combination of “coquette” meets “drunk girl aesthetic.”

Sabine didn’t usually make it a point to buy what might be classified as “frilly” underwear, but there had been a sale. Capitalism’s most tried-and-true method for keeping the masses allured—on the tit. Sabine was just one such member of the masses being eagerly kept on it. Well, maybe “grudgingly” kept on it was the more accurate word to describe her feelings.  For Sabine wasn’t exactly like the other, more eager participants in the capitalist con. Not to say she thought of herself as being “above” anyone. That, of course, went without thinking or saying; it was a no-brainer, as far as she was concerned. But obviously, she wasn’t that much better, buying a cheapo five-pack of “sexy” women’s bikini briefs. She supposed they were—sexy, that is. In a tween girl sort of way. Like, isn’t this the type of panties that Lolita would wear? That Humbert Humbert would be endlessly titillated by…if they were wrapped around the waist of a preteen girl?

That’s largely why Sabine was hesitant to don them when they arrived two weeks after she ordered the “item(s)” (the weeks-long wait meant she could get free shipping, therefore making it seem like “the deal” that the corporation wanted it to come across as). And yet, she knew she was going to put them on. Of course she was. She had already paid for them, after all. And besides, it was such a hassle trying to return things that were bought online. Sabine could never understand why people said it was “a cinch.” Were these people who actually enjoyed going to the post office to drop off the so-called bounty they had to repackage and send back if they wanted a refund or exchange? Because, if they weren’t post office fetishists, then what the fuck were they talking about?

She didn’t bother to clarify because she damn sure wasn’t going to do it. Going to the post office for any reason was, quite simply, asking for unnecessary abuse and trauma. So she put on one of the fuckin’ pairs of underwear. It was a thin striped pattern that alternated between black and white, and had black lace (more like “lace” made of polyester) cutouts at the sides. At the top center, where the elastic waistband was, there rested a tiny black bow. Dainty and delicate, to be sure. Too dainty and delicate, in fact, to last very long on someone as graceless as Sabine. For, while her name might have radiated a certain “elegance,” Sabine had never been known for being anything close to, shall we say, “diaphanous.”

In spite of being accustomed to her own coarseness, even she couldn’t figure out how the bow had managed to miraculously pop right off her panties barely two hours into wearing them. It happened in a public bathroom, too…so it wasn’t like she could feel all that comfortable trying to fish it out of the toilet bowl, having no idea the extent of its toxicity due to being exposed to so many assholes (literal and figurative). If she had been in the privacy and cleanliness of her own bathroom, she might have tried extracting it somehow, and then sewed it back on (because, yes, Sabine was one of the few women she knew of that actually still had that skill in the “modern world”).

Alas, luck was not on her side in terms of “the scene of the crime.” Or maybe it was if one deems it a sign from the universe to get rid of such affronting, cheaply made underwear. Middle-class underwear, if you will. And like the middle class itself, there could be nothing “sexy” about this underwear, regardless of the use of the word “sexy” in its very product title, and no matter how many “frills” the manufacturer tried to dress up the item in question with. You can’t put lipstick on a pig, as it said.

Besides, it’s not as though the bow actually “did something” for the underwear’s overall look. Why did there even need to be a bow hastily tacked onto it in the first place? It seemed there was no “real” reason, though, apparently, it had intrigued enough other people on the internet for someone to offer the speculation that it was a “holdover” from the proverbial olden days. Back when ribbon was used in lieu of the still uninvented elastic to form a “tightness” at the top of the underwear in question. The bow at the center was, supposedly, where it was tied together to create said tightness—evoking a “pretty package” (an ironic turn of phrase considering women don’t have dicks) while still being functional.

Cut to the modern-day version of this and it was no surprise that, with the norm being that all products are poorly made for the sake of maximum profit, no amount of “homage” to the past was going to spare Sabine’s “sale” underwear from steadfastly deteriorating. The bow was only going to be the start, and now that it had commenced the process of the “bikini’s” rapid decline, it wasn’t going to take long for for the whole thing to fall apart—forcing Sabine to move on to the next pair of ill-crafted undies until, before she knew it, she was out of freshly-bought underwear entirely, made to realize there was undeniable validity to the adage, “You get what you pay for.”

So sure, maybe the steady “unraveling” of her underwear in a public bathroom was some form of “divine intervention.” The universe telling her to spend more money on higher-quality products instead of always resorting to fast fashion—especially since nobody was seeing what underwear she had on these days, giving her all the more reason not to splurge on this particular kind of garment.

Despite the theoretical wake-up call about how much more wasteful it was of her money in the long run to buy cheap underwear, Sabine knew it was unlikely that she was going to change her behavior—to be swayed from the instant gratification of cheapness now, rather than later. She also knew that, because she wasn’t alone in this thinking, they were all fucked. And with that, she flushed the toilet, watching the detached bow make its gradual but sudden journey into the wastewater system.