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And when I was bored, I'd write stories about my experiences there, and it just so happens I save this one:
Bloody Hell
It was a normal, blistering hot day in the somewhat rural town of Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. My brother and I were doing our time at my father and stepmother's house, and we were currently two weeks or so into our 'trip'. Trip my ass, it was only a trip if you considered starving yourself and working endless hours trying to dig a goddamn hole for a tree that would never sit straight a trip. Our summers and sometimes winters there were always filled with such and would always be something we never looked forward to. In one of my frequent trips to the bathroom I decided to snoop around in their medicine cabinet, just to see what made them tick. Upon opening it I was greeted with a cup full of tampons, smirking back at me in their glistening packages and casually leaning on the cup's side. They were arranged as a bouquet of flowers would be, in order of color, yellow Tampax first, then blue Tampax, and so on. Though they weren't of great interest to me, somehow I knew that I'd come back to them and they would be of some use, so after closing the door to their sanctuary I kept a mental tab on their whereabouts. Catherine, my stepmother and Mark, my father, announced later that day that they would be going to a party tonight and we were to have a baby sitter. My brother and I groaned knowing that even with a baby sitter here we would be stuck with our step-sister, Louise, and we would be frequently bombarded with the threats of "I'm going to kill you!" Though now we took her threats generally lightly, we still knew to watch our backs. The doorbell rang a short time after the sun set and we gathered around the door to formally greet the only woman or man that would stand between Louise and us, and we hoped that he or she would be a great bodyguard. "Hello there!" a woman in her early twenties said with a naive smile on her face. "I'm your babysitter, Tammy!" "Hello, Tammy," we said as if robots. We got acquainted and tried our best to get Catherine and Mark the hell out of there so we could maybe have some time to ourselves. After instructing her on Louise's various medical and bedtime instructions, they left, leaving us with the babysitter. "Would you guys like to eat?" Tammy asked. We looked at each other with annoyance. What the hell did she think? We were ten pounds lighter than when we had arrived and hadn't had a decent meal since the airplane ride here. "Sure," I said, gesturing her to follow me to the food. I sifted through cabinets and finally decided on a box of macaroni and cheese. Though I had never much cared for the stuff, it was food, and food was good. Eventually we had eaten at least three bowls of mac and cheese each, Louise ate five, and the babysitter, after trying to make petty conversation, decided to put Louise to bed. We thanked God that she decided so, because we knew how long it took, and how it would rid us of any problems we may have with her in our presence. After hearing the echo of shoes clacking against the hardwood floor disappear, I quickly made a b-line to the bathroom; my brother ran to the room containing the television to see if his wrestling show was on. I then stood again in front of The Sanctuary of the Tampons, which I inferred were kept in here because of convenience just in case an 'accident' were to occur. I opened it up again and saw the tampons, still in the same order as I had left them. I had thought it through throughout the day and decided what I would do with these obsessively arranged tampons - they were too perfectly arranged and not only did that tick me off but knowing that they were to be shoved into the most unholy place on the planet I could think of made me want to get rid of them more. I grabbed a handful of them and unwrapped the wrapper on one of them and examined it carefully. Somehow it looked like a syringe and I pushed on it, and it popped out, flew briefly, and landed on the linoleum floor with a silent bump. I smiled and decided that this might be somewhat entertaining. "One tampon," I said, launching another one into the toilet. "Two tampon," and yet another one into the toilet, "Three tampon," this time I bounced it off the wall and it rolled on to the floor close to the first one. I picked the two up and flushed it and it's siblings down and continued into the kitchen. I unwrapped several and prepared to launch them into the trashcan. "Three, two, one, blastoff!" I cried, watching them fly into the trashcan followed by their wrappers, not unlike a group of superheroes. It was one of the most interesting and entertaining experiences I ever had, and sadly, after going through twenty-three tampons, it was over. When our babysitter returned, I had a smile on my face and was actually able to stand watching Friends that night by imagining that I could somehow strap Joey, Chandler, Ross, Rachel, Monica, and Phoebe to tampons and flush them and their horrible talent down the crapper.
It was the very next week and all the sudden, Catherine went running into the house from the pool. My brother and I spent a few seconds speculating on what she might be doing, and then we got our answer. "Oh my god, where did my tampons go?!"
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