my roommate rants about microplastics while I do the dishes
plates & polymers | flash fiction
I read somewhere that pruney fingers are a million-year-old gift—they’re our skin squeezing our blood vessels to help us grip slick rocks and petulant fish. When I stand at the sink, I think of my ancestors’ hominoid digits pruning into ten puckering buttholes and how, with this sponge and this water, my hands will become theirs. Or at least, I would be thinking about it if it weren’t for my roommate:
“Did you know they found microplastics in twenty-two out of twenty-five brands of sea salt?”
I set a wine glass mouth down and glance at him. He’s in the doorway, arms folded, barefoot—an AirPod slug burrowing into his left ear. This is his kink—leaning in doorways and delivering sermons—diarrheal amalgams rooted in niche “documentaries” and netizen brainrot. He’s looking at his foot, watching his big toe prod Milk-Bone crumbs. I grab a plate from the stack.
“…they found ‘em in breastmilk and testicles too…”
I scrape at week-old egg yolk. The sponge disintegrates in my palm, shedding eensy polymers down the drain. So I guess I’m part of the problem now? Is that what this is? An intervention?
I abandon the sponge and peck at the egg goo with my fingernail, wincing as the greasy blips crawl into my nailbed. I imagine these waters ferrying my yellow into a new mom’s tit. I see her son latch on, sucking the tainted white, using my sponge to make his eyes.
“…literally embedded in the fucking tissue! Right there in the dude’s balls!”
My fingers smell like eggs now, and they will for days. Maybe my plastics will be in the boy’s first ejaculate, waving out like painted townsfolk in a snowglobe, suspended in warm bellybutton jelly. Perhaps I’ll be the buttertongued shard red pilling his pancreas into cancer or the bumpkin acrylic taking rumspringa in his brain—there’s something unifying about all this. Something powerful in knowing what I’ve touched is everywhere.
“…even placentas aren’t safe. HUMAN placentas!”
The water’s suddenly scalding and I flinch. I used to study too hard. Mom would catch me dozing at dinner, pounding Monsters to stay upright. “Listen to your body,” she’d say. “Nature knows best.” If Mother Nature is so gung-ho about feeding the next generation plastic before they taste air or see the sun or pet a dog, who the hell am I to question her?
I try to stack a fork, but nothing ever stacks right and it keels over. I wipe my brow with my forearm and glimpse my hands. I smile at the skin tightening around my blood vessels. Tightening? Your butthole tightens in a jumpscare; your knuckles tighten around the wheel in a downpour…are my fingers scared? Bracing for something? Scrambling for purchase? For whatever’s left? Even if it’s only the scent of old pennies and sour garlic?
“Yeah, they’re saying we absorb them through our clothes…”
On cue, I squeeze the sponge too hard. A warm jet of dishwater explodes onto my shirt, blossoming out in a gut-shot blotch. I had a feeling. I knew the back-to-school clothes Mom busted her back for were nails in my coffin. How long has this been happening? Did she know? Whose sponge was in my first cum puddle?
“What if it’s making us biologically different without us knowing?”
I wipe my hands on the dish towel and peel the wet T-shirt off my belly. I nod and watch his yellow-horned toe pidgeon-poke the crumbs, head-screaming my new mantra: GOD WILLING, GOD WILLING, GOD WILLING…
I think I'm gonna read this out loud to my husband (from the doorway, while prodding crumbs) as he washes the dishes. Just seems like the right thing to do.
This was so good. I’m grossed out and laughing.