It’s true—everybody does! Okay, about this time you’re thinking, “It’s April, so this is undoubtedly some kind of April Fool’s Day gag, right?” Wrong. It’s real. We’re really doing it. We’re going to go through a few short-shorts about defecation. But as silly as the theme seems, I’m going to try to make the silly serious. This will work best if you’re reading this on a portable device and are comfortably seated on the throne. By the way, this month runs a bit long… because, hey, I get to write about shit. It was a crap load of fun!

“All the Bad Shit”
Fantasy
by David M. Fitzpatrick

Something was wrong. Sherry hadn’t eaten anything odd, but she didn’t feel well. She hated being ill; it was rare for her, and she hated having no control over something happening to her body or her life. She didn’t need that now; her life was messed up enough. Her parents’ deaths in the car accident, her husband cheating on her with her cousin, her battle with cancer that cost her a breast, the loss of her career job—she’d had enough bad stuff happen in the past five years.

Her belly began hurting around noon and worsened as the day wore on. It felt as if a live mouse were slowly crawling through her digestive tract, growing larger as it went, as if metamorphosing into a wharf rat. She was sweaty and feverish, and the belly cramping was like having her period—if her uterus were busily moving all around her abdomen. She looked forward to the eventual explosive diarrhea that was surely on its way. She’d feel a hundred percent better in the morning, no longer being at the mercy of something out of her control. She couldn’t handle much more. Intellectually, she knew it was just a case of getting really sick, but after years of one disaster after another—a person could only take so much.

Sherry woke up in the middle of the night, frantic to get to the toilet but in utter agony. She cried out as she sat up in bed, doubling over as her guts twisted. She staggered down the hall, clutching her belly, and ran for the toilet. She threw up the lid, pulled up her T-shirt, and yanked down her underwear, and her ass hit the toilet seat. There was no explosion as she’d expected; instead, she strained, crying out. It felt as if something were knifing its way out of her rectum.

Finally, she felt it coming—as if she were giving birth. It felt as if she were passing something the size of a baby, damn near splitting her in half. She howled in pain, and suddenly the monstrous stool hit the water like a cannonball. What felt like a gallon of water splashed up at her ass—and into it, thanks to the gargantuan thing having left her gaping like a proctologist’s dream. At least it was over.

Then from the toilet bowl she heard the snarling. And something clawed at her ass.

She screamed, leaping off the toilet and spinning around. She stood there, stunned, her mouth gaping just like her other end had been. Splashing about in the toilet bowl was a tiny humanoid monster—vaguely reptilian, with giant yellow eyes and wide pointed ears. Its slimy skin was mottled green and black, and it had claws and teeth. It snarled at her, trying to find traction in the bottom of the bowl and to haul itself out of the toilet with its hands.

“Don’t just stand there, woman!” the thing shrieked with demonic malevolence. “You’ve birthed me from the pits of Hell, and now you’ll help me grow into a most powerful being!”

“What are you?” Sherry screamed.

“I’m your demon!” the thing hissed with glee. “You’ve called me forth with the power of your misery. Pull me out now, and you shall be my servant mother who shall nurture me as I grow into a dark evil the world won’t soon forget!”

The creature laughed maniacally from the toilet bowl.

And Sherry realized she wasn’t letting one more thing control her life—not when she had a choice. She’d shat out all her sorrow and pain—she wasn’t about to nurture it.

So she reached out and flushed the toilet.

“Nooooo!” the imp screamed as it spun around and around like a demonic tornado, flailing its little arms madly. Then it was gone.

Sherry smiled in triumph. Taking control was very satisfying. And she felt cleansed somehow—physically and mentally. She was no longer afraid.

Well, maybe not afraid, but not stupid. She headed to get dressed so she could find a convenience store with a restroom. She had to clean herself up, but there was no way she was sitting back on that toilet.

“This Guy’s a Real Piece of Shit”
Science fiction
by David M. Fitzpatrick

School sucked for Tom Benson, from kindergarten through high school. And it was all because of Jerry Bustard.

Even in kindergarten and first grade, Jerry was big—half a head taller than Tom or any of his classmates. And even then, Jerry picked on Tom. In those days, Jerry’s limited imagination stuck to one thing: hold Tom down, sit on his face, and fart.

By second grade, Jerry began experimenting with more creative methods, such as stuffing his dirty, skid-marked underwear in Tom’s mouth. By third grade, he’d graduated to shitting in Tom’s backpack. After Tom finally cried to his teachers in fourth grade about Jerry, Jerry was suspended and had to apologize. But later, while Jerry was beating Tom senseless for telling on him, Tom realized he’d have to put up with Jerry’s shit. Literally.

Junior high school saw an acceleration of related pranks: shit in his boots, dog shit thrown at him on the playground, plastic baggies full of diarrhea thrown at his house. But high school really was a new dimension of horror. There was the time when Jerry filled Tom’s first car six inches deep in shit, which cost him a teenager’s fortune to clean. Then Jerry, the son of a plumber, broke into Tom’s parents’ house and backed up the pipes until the house was full of raw sewage. And there was the day Jerry beat him senseless and force-fed him shit as a graduation present.

They went their separate ways then, with Jerry taking over his father’s plumbing business and Tom heading to college to ultimately earn a doctorate in physics. Research followed, and his hometown life was left behind—but never forgotten. The pain and anguish of thirteen years of torment and torture at the Jerry’s hands burned in his brain like neon in the dark. To that day, the stench of feces utterly disgusted him; he couldn’t breathe when he did his own business, and retched when he wiped his own ass. Jerry had ruined a basic human function for him. He wanted Jerry to pay for the years of hell.

Vengeance was always in his mind as he did his theoretical research—which eventually became reality as he broke new ground in dimensional theory. At forty, Tom perfected his science and had the device surgically implanted. It felt strange to go for seven months, but then it was time.

He’d rented a house in his old hometown as and called Bustard Plumbing at midnight as “Mr. Smith.” Jerry, who got triple time for late-night calls like that, had no idea who he was talking to, and said he’d be right over. The fat fucker with the stereotypically exposed plumber’s butt crack didn’t recognize Tom after all those years, and never saw the two-by-four Tom swung at his head.

By the time Jerry came to, Tom had tied him, naked and immobile, on the basement workbench. He’d already cut a hole in the kitchen floor, directly above the bench. Tom waited for Jerry to holler and struggle and carry on before the bully finally broke down crying.

“Please, don’t kill me,” he blubbered. “Why are you doing this?”

And all Tom had to say was, “It’s me, Jerry. Tom Benson.”

Jerry’s face grew white. “It wasn’t personal. We were just kids. Come on, man—let’s go have a few beers and laugh about everything.”

“You tortured me for years!” Tom screamed. “There’s nothing to laugh about, you miserable asshole!”

He regained control and calmed himself. “I’ve spent my career discovering the secrets of extradimensional physics. Thanks to that, I have seven months of vengeance waiting for you.”

He went upstairs, stripped down, signaled the device implants in his rectum to open, squatted over the hole in the floor, and let loose with the most epic defecation in the history of the world.

The implanted device was a portal to an extradimensional space, and it released seven months of stored shit in a never-ending fire-hose explosion from his ass. Jerry screamed and begged and sputtered as the steady stream blasted him. It was painful for Tom, but he endured it for the sheer satisfaction of hearing the screams below.

He thought he’d never stop, but he finally did. He looked down in the hole at Jerry on the table below, coughing and sputtering and spewing shit everywhere, crying and sobbing and begging him to stop. He was covered in shit, a massive mound like a mountain sculpture on his torso; only his hands, feet, and still-flailing head were visible.

And suddenly, amidst his satisfaction, Tom realized that he’d become just like Jerry: a merciless, torturing bully.

Then he realized he was okay with that.

Well, maybe he felt a little guilty. The least he could do was clean off Jerry’s face.

So while he hadn’t installed an extradimensional device in his bladder, he had drunk two liters of Pepsi an hour before. So he pissed on Jerry’s face from above while Jerry sputtered and screamed.

“But Mountains Don’t Shit”
Science fiction
by David M. Fitzpatrick

“You sure you’re ready?”

“I didn’t hire you to fly me to this planet just to back out,” Finney told the dubious spaceship captain.

The captain shrugged. “Okay, then, we’re circling the biggest one our sensors picked up. Altitude is five thousand meters. You can jump at any time.”

Finney moved to the bay door and hit the button. The door slid aside and wind roared in. Outside, Shendac’s brilliant green sun loomed low and huge on the horizon. He stepped to the edge of the bay, gripping the doorframe; far below, the red and pink landscape beckoned him. It would be a hell of a jump.

“You sure you wouldn’t rather I just land?” the captain called out.

“Not unless you want to risk getting stomped by that thing. Besides, I live for this sort of thing.”

“You sure you don’t have to … go before you jump?”

Finney laughed, and the captain did, too. It was certainly funny.

“Just be ready in four days,” Finney said, snapped down his helmet visor, and jumped.

The dense atmosphere made for a slow, surreal free-fall, as if he were defying Shendac’s point-six-five gravity. He spread his limbs and searched below. Amidst the reds and pinks of the surface below, columns of yellow smoke rose from countless mountainous goo volcanoes, where organic slime bubbled up from deep within Shendac. It was the planet’s never-ending process: absorb decaying matter through its porous crust, process it in underground rivers, and crap it out of the goo volcanoes to feed the surface life forms. Quite a fascinating ecosystem, and very fitting for his jump’s theme.

The visor’s heads-up display pinpointed the creature far below. He moved his limbs into position and willed the thrusters to fire. The suit responded, and he took off like a twentieth-century superhero, steadily dropping his altitude.

He saw the creature at two thousand meters up. It was damn big. He steered, increased thruster power, and rocketed towards it. The suit protected him from the poisonous atmosphere, the cold, and the pressure. He hoped it would protect him through his landing--and beyond.

As he fell closer, he saw the creature in greater detail. It was gargantuan, all right—larger by far than an average Shendackian whaleosaurus. It was easily five hundred feet long from head to tail, with probably twenty legs. It was long, long, wide, thick, and tall, with a circular mouth forty feet across. This was going to be incredible.

He dropped below a thousand feet and flipped on his sonic beacon. The whaleosaurus reacted immediately; its massive mouth was sucking up the organic goo that flowed on the surface, but it lifted its fat head toward the sound on its long, thick neck. The mouth gaped wide, ready to receive what it thought was a flying snakebird bearing down on it.

Finney lined up his approach, cut his speed, and glided right at the whaleosaurus’ gigantic maw. Its neck was stretched out, waiting for its meal, and as Finney arrived, he abruptly killed the thrusters, fired the retros for a few seconds to cut his speed—and flew into the beast’s mouth. He felt the giant mouth snap shut as he hit the back of the thing’s throat. Everything went dark, and the suit’s lights came on.

*   *   *

It took a hundred hours—the time submerged in digestive juices in the whaleosaurus’ stomach, the contractions as Finney was forced through miles of intestines, the unceasing pressures of being packed in tight with goo and other food being broken down. The suit protected him the whole time, until he was packed tight in the thing’s rectum. He was unable to move, as if mired in mud like concrete.

Finally, after periods of waking and sleeping, he felt the tremors begin. It was finally happening.

The whaleosaurus’ explosive defecation launched a massive blast, and Finney along with it. He fired the suit’s thrusters just as he cleared the creature’s rectum, and the suit took control just seconds before he would have hit the ground. He braked hard, landing on the red ground, as a storm of gray shit rained down everywhere.

Finney screamed and whooped in excitement, leaping up and down. A hundred feet away, the whaleosaurus was, thankfully, lumbering away from him. Above, the roaring spaceship banked low as it approached.

*   *   *

“That’s just disgusting,” the captain said as the autopilot took the ship into orbit.

Finney sat on the bay floor, his helmet off, his suit dripping with gray whaleosaurus shit. “Totally worth it,” he said. “Relax, man; if you don’t get it, you’ll never get it.”

“No, I won’t,” the captain said. “You just skydived into the mouth of a Shendackian whaleosaurus and spent four days passing through its digestive tract—all so you could be shit out of the thing’s ass. I’ll never understand why someone would do that.”

Finney smiled. “Centuries ago, someone asked Mallory why he wanted to climb Everest. You know what he said? ‘Because it’s there.’”

The pilot shook his head, furrowing his brow. “You’re saying voluntarily being passed through the digestive tract of another creature is the same thing as climbing a mountain? Man, you’re full of shit.”

“No,” said Finney, “shit was full of me.”

“That’s Some Tricky Shit”
Fantasy
by David M. Fitzpatrick

The wizard served his king well. He was a specialist in transmutation and animation, and he accompanied the troops to the battlefield. There, he called on his powers—practiced for ages, honed to perfection—to animate golems. Made of mud, clay, or stones, he’d create and control the towering statues that crushed everything in their paths.

The enemy knew him well, and when one day they captured him, they knew how to handle him. When he regained consciousness, he was chained in a dungeon, arms chained tightly behind his back: If he couldn’t move his hands in the intricate spellcasting gestures, he couldn’t create golems, and he was helpless.

The enemy king, with eight armed guards, came to laugh at and spit on him. “Foolish wizard!” he cried at him in the small subterranean room. “Your golem magic, and your slaughter of my soldiers, ends today.”

“Kill me and be done with it,” the wizard snarled.

The king laughed again. “You won’t escape pain and torture that easily. You’ll spend the rest of your life here, and I’ll use my own wizards to keep you alive for as long as I can.”

The wizard kept his mouth shut. If his hands were free, he could command stones to form into a golem that would obey him, but in the dim torchlight from the corridor, he realized the entire dungeon was carved out of stone. There were no boulders or loose rocks for him to command. He felt his confidence wane.

“But we can’t ever risk you being able to use those hands,” the king suddenly said, as if reading the wizard’s mind.

And suddenly the guards were on him, rolling him over. When they began sawing his arm off just below the shoulder, he screamed in agony.

*   *   *

They cauterized his stumps and fed him life-saving magic potions. He hurt for weeks, alone in the cell. Only the slightest flicker of torchlight from outside the room, visible through the barred window in the door, illuminated his hellish prison. The cell had only a straw-filled cloth mat for a bed and a hole in the corner that served as his toilet.

Every day they fed and watered him; every day he slept, pissed and shit in the hole, and slowly lost his mind. Some days he cried into his mat, or he screamed mindlessly amidst his madness. Occasionally, he was lucid, and one of those days he realized something.

Wizards cast their spells through intricate gestures with both hands. But he remembered a one-armed young spellcaster back during his academy days. The boy should have been unable to cast spells, but he learned to do it anyway. It took him a lot of hard work, but by the time they graduated, the boy was as good as any of them. He was a treat to watch, his arm and hand moving like the wind to form the various gestures so quickly.

The wizard had never heard of a wizard working a spell’s gestures with anything other than arms and hands, but—why not? He had nothing but time.

He began with simple things. The floor was stone, but there was ample dirt, grit, and even pebbles, and when the guards brought him food twice a day, they always tracked a little more in. Each day, he’d work the spells in his head, sitting on his mat and waving his feet in the air in lieu of hands. It took months before he achieved the smallest result: making the dirt and sand particles swirl about as if blown by an unseen tiny whirlwind.

The days ran together. He’d wake up with a stiff back, force himself to his knees without arms to help, shit into the toilet hole, and wait for his meal. Then he’d sit on his mat, back against the wall, and raise his tired legs in the air. He’d work his incantations, waving his legs and feet clumsily around. It took months of practice before he was able to make a miniature dirt golem. It was just a few inches high, walking about and obeying his commands, but far too tiny to do smash through the wooden door of his cell. It could go under the door, but couldn’t exactly kill the guards or steal the keys.

Day by day… spell by spell… meal by meal… defecation by defecation. The cell reeked of shit and sweat, but he learned to ignore it. Weeks became months became seven long years, always practicing his gestures while trying to ignore the sewer stench.

The golem grew stronger and faster, more agile, quicker to respond to his commands. The guards tracked in dirt every day, so he always had new material, even if a few particles every day. After seven years, the thing was a good eight inches high and strong enough to rap hard on the door—but not strong enough for much else.

One day, he knew it was time. He finished his meal, sat against the wall, and began to wave his agile legs around as he muttered his incantations. The great power swirled and he put his skills to the ultimate test.

*   *   *

The king was in the throne room when the screaming started. A crashing sound thundered through his castle. He barked orders as his elite guards readied their weapons, as the flags on the walls fluttered and the shields and swords clattered off to the floor.

And then the huge wooden door smashed inward, and the king screamed as the monstrous golem exploded into the room. The terrible creature lumbered forward, mindless but obeying.

And it reeked to high hell—no wonder, because it was a golem composed of excrement. Seven years of the wizard’s excrement, and years of excrement from prisoners before him.

David M. Fitzpatrick is a fiction writer in Maine, USA. His many short stories have appeared in print magazines and anthologies around the world. He writes for a newspaper, writes fiction, edits anthologies, and teaches creative writing. Visit him at www.fitz42.net/writer to learn more.