Drink your juice.

This morning I received a

phone call, voicemail, and email from my mother, all stating that something urgent had happened and I needed to call her ASAP. 

Assuming that someone had died, I tried her back on her cellphone as I’d been instructed.

It was off.

Now I was convinced someone had died. Brat that I am, I was frustrated at how inconvenient this death would have been to me. How the person could have had the decency to die last week when I’d been visiting home so as not to necessitate two separate trips.

I continued tumbling and wrote up a video of a dog who likes taking baths, took a shower, and ate an egg. 

On my way to the subway to head into the office, I tried her again — this time on the house phone. 

It rang an ominous five or six times, so I assumed I’d be hit with an answering machine, when she abruptly answered with, “Hey you! How are you?”

It was borderline flirtatious — like, weirdly happy to see me on the caller ID — so clearly no one had died.

Was she abusing her “urgent” privileges?

“I need Christmas present ideas” is not urgent, mother. “I can’t remember my Netflix password” is not urgent.

“So what is this pressing thing?” I’d asked, audibly irritated. 

“Oh,” she’d said. And there was this pause. This pause like a loaded spring where she just sat on the backs of her heels not knowing how to say whatever the fuck she needed to say.

“Mom. Hi. Go.” 

“Did you leave a… um… a pleasure item here while you were home for Thanksgiving?”

I think it’s important to know that this is the most sexually repressed woman I’ve ever met. At twenty five, after overhearing the word “boner” used at the coffee machine at her job, she’d called my father up to ask him what it meant. This is not the woman you want to talk about hypothetical dildos with on the phone. Also, I did not leave a “pleasure item” in their home. 

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Well, I was just cleaning up around the kitchen and found this… thing… on the countertop, and I was just wondering if maybe you left it.”

“What is it?”

“A… sex toy.”

She then went on to say that she didn’t know whose it could be if not mine. I asked her if she was sure it was a sex toy (because who just brings a vibrator into someone’s kitchen and leaves it there?) and she said no, she was not, but that she was pretty sure it must be. 

“Well what is it? A dildo? A vibrator? What about it says ‘sex toy’?”

“It just— it just is, Christine. I don’t know if it vibrates, I don’t want to investigate.”

By this point I’d reached the subway and needed to go underground, so I told her I had to hang up.

No worries though, cause I’ve texted my sister about it, so hopefully this is just chapter one.

Fingers crossed it’s like… a flashlight. Some kind of large glue stuck.