The time: noon. The place: my apartment on grocery day. The characters: my friend, Greg, myself and a malicious entity about to transform our lives forever—a tampon.
It rolled across the floor. Greg let out a blood-curdling scream. I dove to save him. But it was too late. The two touched. Greg was tainted with its sinister cottonyness forever.
A few hours later as we were watching television in my apartment, nursing Greg’s wounds, I decided it was time to resolve his tampon phobia once and for all. I excused myself, returning with the ghastly object in my hand.
“What are you doing with that?” Greg asked, inching away.
“Take it,” I said.
“No,” he winced.
“Just touch it.”
“Uh-uh.”
“Please?”
“No,” he said, resolve breaking and tears forming.
“One finger touch?”
“Oh my God, fine. Just give it,” he said, snatching it out of my hand. His expression quickly softened. He looked at me, pleadingly, for instructions.
“Go ahead, open it.”
He slowly stripped the plastic wrapper off the tampon and held the pink applicator apprehensively in his hand, as if it might suddenly spring to life and suck out all his testosterone.
“How does it work?” he asked, becoming more curious than disgusted. I grabbed a slice of Swiss cheese out of the fridge.
“So this is the vagina, all right?”
“O…K…” I slipped the applicator through the cheese’s largest hole and pushed until the cotton tampon slipped out the other side.
Greg’s expression brightened. “That was kind of cool,” he said. “Can I… see it?”
Greg examined the empty applicator in one hand and the cheesy cotton tampon in the other.
Overcoming his original anguish, he was free to examine them more closely.
He discovered, contrary to what one might think, tampons actually have a very pleasant odor. The smooth plastic and fluffy cotton feel very soothing against the skin, and the prongs of the applicator can be sculpted into a very beautiful plastic flower.
Satisfied Greg had sufficiently experienced the tampon, I snatched it from the coffee table vase where he displayed his flower.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m gonna throw it out. Unless you need it for something…”
“Well, I guess I don’t need it.”
“Do you want me to leave it here?” I asked.
“I mean, if you want. Yeah. I guess that would be cool,” he said.
Now I had something else to worry about—finding disfigured tampons all over my apartment.
Two-and-a-half hours later, when Greg was ready to say goodbye, the three of us (Greg, myself and the tampon) walked into the bathroom. I let Greg do the honors of dropping the tampon into the toilet. We watched it quickly expand in the water, and then flushed it away. Greg gave it a little sailor’s salute.
“Now I’ll show you how I shave my legs,” I told him. He eyed the razor on my bathroom sink with a little too much enthusiasm.
“Actually,” I said. “Maybe we should take this one step at a time.”
If you’d like to obtain a bouquet of tampon-applicator flowers, e-mail Kiera at wiatrak@wisc.edu, she’ll be happy to forward your request.
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