Doughnut and John Hurt's Detachable Genitals

This doughnut has bled onto my jeans. I have, of course, hastily swept the gluey bead up from my thigh with my finger. I’ve then, of course, swung that finger into my mouth and sucked down the syrupy glob. But in its wake it’s left a dark shadow which I know will harden and scab. I’m still drawing up any leftover sweetness from under my nail, any traces of sugar that might be embedded in my index fingerprint, like gunshot residue, and all the time thinking about my rules.

My rules include not eating publicly. The doughnut is my attempt to disrupt the rules; I think I’d like to be the type of person who can unveil a tuna sandwich in an enclosed train carriage and not give a hoot. I really do – this isn’t some thinly veiled criticism of the onion-crisp-egg-roll-pasta-leftover-patrons of the public transport system. I do want to be you! But still. No eating publicly – the doughnut examination seals the deal.

On my walk to work I pass through a graveyard. I’m not allowed to read the same headstone twice. When I know I’m passing Elizabeth Bardsley, 1889 – 1958, Beloved Mother and Grandmother, I’ll count three, four, five graves, until I’ve got a newie. Hello, Gene Bridgewater, and your wife Susan ‘Susie’. It’s not fair to read the same one every time, although I couldn’t propose it’s something I do out of respect for the dead. I know absolutely that the persons named on those headstones have been resolutely digested by one-hundred worms and shat out of their worm arseholes for the dirt to suckle on, then bleached by pesticides and then you’re no longer useful to anyone. So it’s just a rule.

Right in the centre of the spot, doughnut splotch is beginning to stale. I think I’ll never wash it off because I might try and eat publicly again if I forget this.

It’s hardly public though. I’m on my own in the breakroom. It establishes itself as a bleak limbo, funeral office-esque in its off-white strip lighting and felt chairs sporting inexact dark stains. A blue flylight buzzes, mounted next to the window extractor fan, a small white box. Despite the adjacent trap, it’s populated by a smattering of tiny black insects, all dismembered and broken-bodied in the humming wake of the battle between bot and bug. Tim Graham has entered the breakroom. Tim Graham is probably pushing forty and refers to himself as Tim-bo, visually shrunk by the fact it has yet to catch on. He’s holding a wrapped BLT and comes to sit opposite me. This is a big supermarket and the breakroom is adequately sized. There are probably five or six big tables. So why Tim Graham sits opposite me and my doughnut escapes me. I watch his fingers clumsily fold down the edges of the cardboard wrapper and create a makeshift plate. I think about whether he has satisfied a woman this year. I think about how often he satisfies himself. I decide too often.

‘Mm-hmm,’ he begins, nodding, as if he was about to say something amazing. ‘Racked away 4 cages already.’

‘Nice one.’

‘Mmmh,’ this is an agreeing, low, long noise, and I despair at the thought of Tim Graham making it whilst wanking. If I fucked him I’d have to smell his skin and look at the moles on his pink arms and chest. Repulsed, I turn my attention back to doughnut. My rules include the notion that I should fantasise about every new man I meet. It’s tiresome and I sometimes think about how much better I’d feel if I could bypass the rule and instead wear my vagina like an accessory. Like an elaborate plaster-cast costume for a practical-effects horror movie. I could take it off and put it away. A prosthetic attachment used tactically and mathematically. Like in Alien, you know, when John Hurt starts going fucking crazy and then the little yellow alien bursts from his chest – then Ridley Scott says nice job, John, and John gets up and leaves his bloody torso for studio-hands to clean up. Doughnut Splodge crystallises.