A year later, grade two, I had to take a shit in the middle of a spelling test. Mrs. Legault was at the front of the room reciting words that we had to write down on a sheet of foolscap. “Toboggan. Saskatchewan. Tornado.” I couldn’t just get up in the middle of the test or I would fail. Moreover I realized it felt good. The pressure of it. The fullness. I held the turd in. Basked in the sensation of it. The euphoric pressing of the vagus nerve. I stuck a finger up there and prodded it. Mrs. Legault was pacing around the classroom making sure no one was cheating. As she came up to my desk she stopped, sniffed the air, and in a stage whisper asked: “Do I smell poop?” Her eyes turned to me. I wanted to bury myself in the little slot in my desk. She bent down, grabbed my hand, and noticed my shit-caked fingernail. Before I could open my mouth she yanked me up by the arm and marched me down to the office. She didn’t say a word during my walk of shame. But then, what was there to say? Shit defied words. To touch shit was to touch death.

Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit — cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, “I” is expelled.

— Julia Kristeva

I sat in the office waiting room as they called you, staring at my shoes red-faced. Sublime disgrace. I’m not sure what you and Mrs. Legault talked about, but you didn’t come to the school that afternoon to pick me up. And you didn’t bring it up with me that night over dinner. Or ever, for that matter.

One morning when I was twelve I woke with the sun on my face and languished in my sheets, rolling around in them like a rhinoceros in the dust until I came for the first time. I didn’t yet equate the sensation with sex. For some reason it reminded me of drinking a glass of milk. The way milk felt coating my mouth and my throat. I thought about melting into the sheets and becoming indistinguishable from them. I wanted to provoke this feeling as much as possible and assumed the only way to do this was by rolling and rolling and rolling around my bedsheets, basking in the warmth of the morning light. A special, time-of-day-contingent ritual. If only my theatre school teachers could have seen me as a child. Living deep within my body. When did that stop? When did shame push me into my head?