Member-only story
The Pissing Chronicles
‘No matter how much you shake, the last drop always ends up in your underwear.’
I used to sleepwalk as a kid. I don’t remember any of it, only glimpses, but my mother used to tell me stories. And any story has a Beginning, Middle, and End.
So here goes.
Beginning
I was ten. We lived in California at the time. My father had just come home from a long study session at Stanford, and my mother returned from an English-language course, which she took for all two years that we lived there and yet, somehow, to this day, never learned to speak English.
Most of my mother’s friends at the time were Koreans whom she’d met at her course who didn’t speak English either. Together, they communicated like cavemen, making glottal, growling, gargling, and guttural sounds for lack of vocabulary, jumping up and down, pointing to objects instead of naming them, and using a wide range of facial expressions to communicate feelings and adjectives.
Both Kate and I are asleep in our adjacent rooms. This was the first time in our lives when we didn’t have to share a bunk bed and had our own rooms. With all the maturity I’ve gained in almost two decades, I can now assure you that mine was better.
