Like all problems (and dicks), it started out small. A tiny little drop of oil that spilled on the couch from Adriana’s plate. Most vexing of all was that she wasn’t even sitting on the couch when it happened. No, she was standing just near it. Hovering above the cushion with the plate in her hand that still had an excess of oil on it from the “sprinkling” she had used to put on her vegetables. She was about to walk away from the couch and toward the kitchen when, all at once, the swift movement of her plate caused a splash of the oil to fall smack-dab in the middle of the couch.

Her immediate reaction was one of frozen horror. Then, internal bargaining. Acceptance, however, was never on her list of many reactions to the event that would change the couch forever. Adriana also resented that, of all the people in the household, she should be made out to seem like the pig of the group for creating this stain. Even if it was a stain resulting from vegetables, for fuck’s sake. Not, you know, pizza or potato chips or some such other greasy food. She wasn’t a goddamn swine. Not like the rest of them. So for her to be the responsible party for this was truly abhorrent to her. Utterly unjust.

Worse still, she was usually the most careful out of all of them when it came to keeping the abode in tip-top shape, constantly reminding the other roommates that, one day, they would have to leave the apartment, and she would be damned if they weren’t going to get their entire deposit back. But of course, the warning fell on deaf ears, and now she was left with even less clout and authority than ever after her stain “snafu.” Which, although it might have started out as a snafu without quotation marks quickly became that. More than a “snafu,” actually—a total catastrophe.

Until her last breath, though, Adriana would maintain that the bizarre and unique porousness of the couch’s fabric is what did her wrong in the end. Made her incapable of improving the stain. Instead, it seemed she was only capable of worsening it. In fact, “worsening” was a word that didn’t even begin to cover it. The more accurate term to describe what she had done was: decimate. And all in her fanatical bid to improve the ultimately minuscule stain (none of Edgar Allan Poe’s crazed protagonists had anything on her obsession with it, her constant state of being plagued by it). A drop that slowly grew and grew into stranger and more inexplicable shapes as she kept building on her liquid “remedies” for the stain. Remedies suggested by both the internet and real-life people she consulted with about it. Her first mistake, perhaps, was bothering to talk to anyone “tangible” vis-à-vis “counsel” on how to get rid of the abomination. That was where things started off wrong.

The woman she mentioned it to, Eugenia, was a co-worker at her office. One of those people who seemed like their lives revolved around watching HGTV programming and reading Martha Stewart Living magazine (before it stopped being distributed in print). So surely she must know a thing or two about stains… That’s certainly how she made it seem as she instructed Adriana to use only soap and hot water to scrub out the oil.

Unfortunately, when Adriana took her advice, she didn’t quite grasp that pouring a large amount of water from a cup and onto the couch would result in leaving a mark around the outer edges where it finally dried. For whatever reason, a water stain didn’t occur to Adriana—nor did it seem to occur to Eugenia, who completely failed to warn her about any such after-effect. It was almost like she didn’t really watch HGTV or read Martha Stewart Living at all. And, come to think of it, maybe she didn’t. Maybe Adriana had made that up in her mind about Eugenia simply because she looked like a lady who had cats and did crafts. Such projection was now, more than ever, her bane. Because presently, she was faced with an even larger, more mutant stain than before. The way things stood, the original oil dot was but a nucleus inside the much bigger outer stain. Soap and water, my fuckin’ ass—ya dumb bitch! Adriana wanted to scream at Eugenia the next time she saw her. But Eugenia seemed to have no recollection whatsoever of Adriana even asking about tips for treatment of such a stain. When Adriana brought it up, in fact, all Eugenia could say was, “Oh right, hope it all worked out!”

Adriana didn’t bother telling her that, no, it fucking didn’t all work out. Not by a fucking long shot. It’s not like Eugenia would care either way. Just as Adriana didn’t really care about anything that happened to Eugenia either way. Guess it’s true what they say: you get back the energy you put out. But if that were really true, then why was the couch’s energy being so goddamn hostile toward her? When all she ever wanted was for it to be okay? Had wished nothing but good things for it? In fact, she had been the only one in the household who had ever cared about its well-being, about what happened to it. And this was the thanks she got? A more unsightly stain than the one she started out with?

Of course, in retrospect, Adriana would have given anything to go back to Stain 2.0. That was several iterations before what she now called Stain 7.0, which had evolved (or devolved, if you prefer) into something so grotesque, so unrecognizable from the original stain that neither Adriana nor anyone she lived with could believe it. It was Dylan, her most slovenly roommate, who felt obliged to laugh in that stoner way of his while he stared at it after coming home from his shift as a cashier at Domino’s, noting, “That looks like a giant donkey dick.”

Strangely, rather than being irritated by the comparison of the stain to a donkey’s dick, Adriana was actually more annoyed by Dylan’s need to put the word “giant” in front of it. For it goes without saying that a donkey’s dick is giant. In any case, once Dylan pointed it out to her (and the other three roommates in the apartment), she couldn’t unsee it. And it was driving her crazier than ever before. Yet she kept trying the same methods for stain removal that had led her to this freakish and fugly version of it. That method being to spray a white vinegar-and-water “solution” onto it or mix together water and baking soda to create a “paste” she could then apply to the stain. She probably should have started out with the baking soda method from the get-go and kept it consistent.

But oh no, Eugenia’s advice had to ruin her chances right out the gate. She also fucked up by trying to dry out her various liquid “remedies” with a hair dryer, learning too late that the application of heat to any stain only makes it adhere all the more. Or at least that’s what the internet said. Who the fuck knew what was to be believed and what wasn’t anymore? Adriana was lost in a sea of methods for stain removal that all appeared to be lies—at least based on the results she was getting. Though, again, she probably should have just stuck with one method rather than “toggling between” multiples.

The donkey dick shape manifested, she supposed, by “outlining” (with her various “mixtures”) each new version of the water stain along a perimeter that mimicked the shape of a rainbow. But the end of one side of that “rainbow” (which really just looked like a floppy penis de un burro) had a decided “cap” aesthetic. As in: the kind of cap you see on a penis. She didn’t know how she had managed that, but she reckoned that if anyone kept tinkering with a stain long enough, a donkey dick shape was liable to materialize.

Although she tried to explain this to the landlord the day he came over to inspect the place now that everyone was scattering and going their separate ways, the excuse wasn’t, let’s say, “compelling” enough for him to return their full deposit (he claimed it was going to cost him a pretty penny to get that couch professionally steam cleaned). Just as Adriana had always feared. Though she had never imagined, of all her roommates, that she would be the cause. Or rather, that a formerly tiny drop of oil would be.