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The Delivery (Please help me decide how to end it)
🕑 Added 2022-04-24 20:32:49 +0000 UTCCW: ABDL/Diapers/mild humiliation.
This is a fairly un-kinky story, but I hope you like it!
Note, the ending is a bit abrupt. I’ve tried a few endings to this story, but haven’t found the one I’ve liked. So this post goes up to the parts I know I want to include. There’s like a 40 page version of this, and counting. It could be a novel, but I really wanted to limit it to a short story. Let me know what you think!
Also looking for feedback on the style. The prose is a bit of a unique style, but I really enjoyed writing it so I hope I can actually keep the style but just adapt it if needed.
Glinda (bo-binda) was a woman who lived in a shoddy duplex on the outskirts of Camberville, which she shared with one single Craigslist Specimen. A nocturnal nurse, the specimen was; noisome when finally her circadian rhythm matched the sun, and nosy too. Nosy was the nurse such that:
“Glindy bo-binda, whatcha got there?”
“Glindy Bindy, honey, there’s a package for you.”
“Glindy Linda, just a minute, there’s a package in the kitchen, really heavy, what’s it for?”
Assuredly she would ask the last question, Glinda knew of the nosy nurse. She would want to know, and would not settle for “clothes,” or “oh just clothes,” and certainly, definitely, not “books.” The Specimen would ask to see, even if Glinda lied (would it be a lie?) that the package contained lingerie, she would still ask to see Glinda’s supposed and scandalous undergarments, for the nurse was surely the type to believe that all of womankind’s clothing belonged in shared custody to the rest of womankind. And the nurse would ask to see the Tinder profile of the boyfriend it was for. Glinda knew this, it was doubtless, and it was also such that she did not have a Tinder or any such dating app.
What Glinda did not know was how heavy the package would be. This occupied much of her thoughts. She simply had no experience, but was convinced that whatever box they arrived inside, the nosy nurse and resident Craigslist Specimen (genus; rando) would return in the wee hours with bleary alacrity and declare her discovery “unusual;” that the box’s weight and size would not match, and she would wait all day for Glinda to return home from her more human shift to seek elucidation from Glinda Linda as to its astounding contents. Glinda knew that the nurse would find it interesting, oh, to this as well, there was no doubt!
Another thing Glinda knew was the cost. $36.46. That was the sum total in the cart, pre-tax and shipping, and pre-cart-erasure (with the web history deleted, just to be sure). Glinda took no action until she was sure that she could explain it all to the noisome nurse with the excuse: “clothes,” that a gruff enough, ‘not now’ would at least forestall the nosy nurse long enough to devise a better plan.
Nah, second, tertiary, and quaternary thoughts!
Of course, there were other, pressing questions that festered into further delays. What would a purchase appear like on a credit statement? Would there be some searchable ledger of all her deliveries ever? Would there even be…a concealing cardboard box? Or would the box be a cubic advertisement, unmerciful in its proud bearing of boastful descriptive decals. Televisions and computers come in boxes that describe their contents in detailed specification, don’t they? 4K, 68-inch, LCD, Samsung. Why not this? The world is surely cruel enough, and even if the packaging toted brand alone, Glinda was damned.
Glinda ordered, and managed to not do so on her parents card, which Google desperately tried to sneak into the payment form multiple times during the purchase (Google knew her parent’s card because she once bought plane tickets for the boomers, and knew that using her card and expecting a cashapp reimbursement was counterproductive to overcoming boomeritis). But Glinda successfully bought them on her card and sent them not to anyplace but her sub-sovereign shipping address, in a duplex with a nosy nurse.
Among the things Glinda shared with the noisome nurse, whose name was Nancy, by the way, were the kitchen, the living room, the laundry alcove, a parcel of the duplex’s basement, and, of course, an address. But there were other shared aspects, as expected given her residence in Boston’s People’s Republic of Camberville, such as a front porch. The front porch was raised up from the sidewalk to give access to both doors, and it was owned and used equally by the pairs of tenants who lurked behind each. And it was one day, on this shared landing, stepping up to it after a long day’s work, that Glinda said the following:
“Oh shit!”
Thereby, the box said, in its own way:
“Glinda Li, 26 Archibald St, Apt 2, Camberville, 02101.”
The goods.
Glinda, who did not yet have the bravery to be observed as flatulent in a work bathroom stall, who had held herself tight through morning coffee, afternoon sync, managerial one-on-one, afternoon tea (earl grey - hot), and the crowded rock and sweat of the evening subway (Redline-late), felt her stymied innards roil, as if a peasant class had taken to pitchfork and square at the imposition of yet another royal levy. She felt herself in sudden need of the contents of the cardboard square below her, and it was a minute before she was fully composed.
There was another box too, placed like a pegged lego in the shared landing. It was the same size, and though Glinda picked up her own only (to find that, in fact, her shipment was of normal weight proximate to its size, which coincidentally she also found suspicious), the other box appeared to be similar in fullness. It did not appear to be one of those empty boxes, like the massive oversized kind Amazon might send for a mere book, nor burgeoning so much at the corners that the overworked driver had heaped duct tape or some other adhesive down to seal the seam against explosion, as well as perhaps the nosy Nancy nurses of the world. There was no mention of brand or contents anywhere on the box’s face, just like her own. Merciful were the Mandarins of logistics, too, who had placed upon her doorstep a bland, brown rectangle with little more than barcodes and ‘this side up’ marked, albeit, upside down. Both boxes were simple, regular boxes, suspicious only in their non-descript regularity. There was but one difference, which was that the other box said, in its own way:
“Dylan Gustave, 26 Archibald St, Apt 1, Camberville, 02101”
For obvious federally protected reasons, Glinda bo-Binda henceforth ignored the shipment to her downstairs neighbor, and directed her thoughts toward the Craigslist Specimen.
Nancy the nurse was making the transition from nocturnal to diurnal, and to do so without any negative experiences, Nancy would have to do so without napping. Glinda knew that, at this stage, Nancy would be nearly nodding, she would see no reason to notice anything outside because for the nurse, blessed nighttime and slumber were approaching. Though she shot for 10pm, Nancy would only achieve 6 or 7pm, a failure aided in part by a friendly Cab-Sav. Until then, Nancy would be like a nebbing drake, a veritable Smaug, lurking among their apartment, teeth stained red with wine and guarding Glinda’s privacy like it was the precious Arkenstone. After then, and significantly after then to be safe…say 10pm, no 11pm, Glinda would scurry down to the shared landing under Nancy’s nose, where she would be none the wiser to Glinda’s acquisition of salacious plunder.
11:15pm came, just to be extra sure that fermented grape juice had completed its sugary missive, and Glinda crept out of her room from where had her own analogue for alcohol; episodes of Friends. She despaired of the gravely tracks that slippers would leave on her room’s rug, but opted to retain her softer inside-footwear to save time at the landing and to make as little noise as possible as she clomped downwards on the inner staircase that was shared by herself and the noisome nurse, and the other tenants, one of them being said Dylan Gustave, owner of the other package she’d seen hours before. No-one must see, no-one must be given the chance to ask. No one would know at all that the box had been consumed, broken down, and tucked outside in the blue recycling bin, as deep as possible beneath the bottles and bags. Glinda absconded, descended, opened the creaky door and reassured herself that her keys were in her hand. Oh, how that would be damning, to lock herself out and ring the doorbell to disturb the noisome nurse at this hour! She was not this foolish, oh no, and she even tested the key in the door to make sure she had the right ones. Not that she had any other keys, as Glinda was far too timid to maintain a personal vehicle in the aggressive avenues of Boston. She’d never even raised a middle finger in jest!
There was the box, just one of them where there had been two, and she took it. She got it through the door and up the stairs with barely a creak on the third step. The door to her apartment was devilishly hard to open sometimes, especially when the temperature dropped, and she had to set it down. It did not land with a thud, it was almost airy, if too big for her to hold in one hand. Glinda did not have a big bottom, but she was no child, after all. Glinda pushed open the door, and a quickening curled in her chest. The noisome nurse was surely there, the wine recalling her to a dark stupor, insomnia of wages earned under mere fluorescence dragging her to proximal vampirism. Glinda, Glindy Bindy in this case, was caught for sure!
No, it was merely a manic fancy of the masochistic variety. The living room and television and kitchen were as mellow as Glinda had left them during her slink from Friends to subterfuge just moments ago. Only the hum of the heater glowered at her, cantankerous and grumbling far more than enough to smother any sound Glinda needed to close the front door and bound with the goods to her room in secrecy.
In the room, success!
Glinda stared down at her prize, the regular boring box now on her bed and no longer on the shared landing, in her Amazon cart, or in deleted web history. Ordered, delivered, retrieved. She could apply to the CIA with all this spookery, she was sure. No, that was out, not a single one who’d bought this would be ever qualified for something so conventional. She was out now, weird, strange, perverted, depraved, and decided. Who had harbored dastardly fantasies? Everyone, but who acted upon it? Glinda had, she was one of them. Now and forever. Even if she never opened the box, which, as it turns out, she would not.
A stirring was felt in her, a ravenousness and terror that had not been within her since the night of her prom. Who was it that she’d gone with? This was better, what lay within that box was way more interesting to her now than what had been behind his zipper then. Years removed she knew this fact for sure, that this was better. She might as well be still a virgin, she wasn’t sure she wasn’t. There were some doubts still, such as, she’d waited until 11:15pm, and work loomed on the morrow. Was this a delicious fruit to be saved until tomorrow’s night? No, the nosy nurse Nancy would be synced with other human beings and desiring a partner to imbibe the remainder of the Cab-Sav alongside various cheeses. A torture so undeserved! Work wouldn’t happen tomorrow if that were the case. She’d think of nothing else if she did not try one now. A slave to her loins, who would have thought that for good old Glinda-bo-Binda! So she stepped forward to the package, in the dim light of her room, and fingered her thumb to the taped corner…
The box said, in its own way:
“Dylan Gustave, 26 Archibald St, Apt 1, Camberville, 02101”
The remonstrations of despair-gesticulations of pain and madness, of umbrage and fury toward the Specimen and now her neighbor, toward herself for not braving any confrontation, or Dylan Gustave, the stranger’s, and his blasted and blind dopiness, whomever he was, and once again at herself, for having any such lower bestial notions so twisted as to bind her into such a predicament. These mental punishments were numerous. Pacing manifested, as did the strong desire to set herself on fire like she was a dead ancient Greek royal, another, to open the box anyway to send herself to prison for tampering with another’s mail so that everyone she knew could properly hate her as much as they ought. All of these were just about a third such internal flagellations Glinda’s ego suffered to her.
Perhaps things were not horrible. Dylan would realize his mistake as she had, and he’d return the box to the landing, and pick up his.
And if he didn’t, Glinda? If his thumb or knife got a little deeper before he read the label?
If he didn’t, she would move. That’s what it was. To a new city. Maybe to France, maybe farther. She descended into a dark place, all the more tragic because it had taken the place of her what was perhaps her most erotic moment of her life.
Eventually, Glinda did compose herself, and make the return journey, as silent as she had been before, as dainty and as suspicious of her nosy nurse roommate as she had been before. Back in its place the box went, and back to her bed Glinda went, where she lay awake for hours, falling asleep only when she was too tired to no longer fight her self-assurances that this D.G. guy would replace her box as she had his.
Come the morning, come a furious brushing of her teeth, and come a zombielike consumption of an apple and black coffee, Glinda came upon the shared landing to find that the package situation had indeed matured since her clandestine padding about.
The change was this: there were no packages on the landing.
Glinda could not even think about how this could be, though it came to her in a meeting (of which she could not recall a solitary detail) that it was obviously the case that Dylan, this rather accidental doofus like man he must be, her unneighborly neighbor, had simply observed his name on a package, forgotten that trucks never arrive in the wee hours and therefore not realized that this package could not be brand new, and heaved it on inside his landing with no consideration of yesterday’s mix-up. Very reasonable, perhaps he was a regular with packages, an Amazon Primer and a Hello Fresh meal club member, and in groggy pre-commute pre-coffee stupor had simply vacated last evenings memories from his brain. The notion that he had opened Glinda’s box was a torture, a torture she agonized and paced over in the minimal space afforded to her on subways and at her open-concept desk. No, impossible. He would have called the cops on her. He would have dumped out the contents on the landing so that someone so perverse and shameful would be rightfully run out (or run herself out) as she should be. She did not consider that Dylan had opened the package by accident to his shame, and hadn’t quite figured a way to broach the topic to his neighbor. Instead, she settled on an even more reasonable outcome; that the packages were stacked up, unopened, by the door…doofishly uninvestigated and unconsidered. Hers would be returned to the landing promptly when the mixup occurred.
It was not returned that day, it was not sitting there after Glinda came home from work.
“Glindy Lindy, lemme see you,” the nosy nurse said that evening, now on days for the foreseeable future (nurse schedules have short eyesight, however). “You’ve been in your room all day.” A falsehood, and very understandable given circumstances, albeit, circumstances that the noisome nurse could under no circumstances understand.
“Heyo, I was just about to make dinner.” She said, knowing that prolonged reclusiveness brought more inspection upon her than facing the nosiness head on.
Nancy was not interested in this, truly. She had other plans and approached them in her nebbling way. “There you are. Say, whattya doing next Friday?”
“Nothing,” Glinda proffered, her guard up.
“Fantastic. I’m going to have some friends over and they’d love to meet you.”
Ah, baited. Glindy Bindy was on the hook now and there was no way about it. “Awesome!” Also, what is the nomenclature for Craigslist Specimen Rando’s friends?
“It’ll be great. It’s just two people. We’ll make dinner. Do you like quiche?”
“For dinner?”
“It’ll be a ball, Glindy,”
Sure.
Balls.
D.G made no appearance that evening, with no delivery. Nor did he on Saturday or Sunday, and again nothing on Monday morning. Glinda was bereft. A weekend of wondrous discovery, sojourning in her room with the door locked in a state she had only dreamed of…stolen. Literally stolen. Actual factual larceny, her on her doorstep, unreported due to cataclysmic shame.
“Um, ma’am, could you list the contents of the aforementioned package?”
“Nevermind, I’m moving to Sparta.”
Glinda couldn’t countenance it, she just couldn’t. She thought, perhaps, she could order again. That’d do it for her personal reasons. It was, perhaps, the boldest thing she’d ever considered, in light of the current situation. But she nixed it. She was sitting on a timebomb, if she ever did run into this bumbling D.G. He’d know all about her.
Her next idea, less bold than ordering again, was to dumpster dive. Brilliant. So she did, that Monday afternoon. And for the first time since moving into the People’s Republic, she lingered outside of her apartment for a bit. She walked around to the alley, a steaming open-air crypt and nursery for rats, and slinked and sidled to the blue-ist of bins, the one with the triangle of arrows where, if this D.G. was half responsible (no counting on that he was), he would have tossed the detritus of Glinda’s package. At least she’d know if she needed to book her plane tickets.
She lifted the lid of the blue bin, crackling with ice and smelling just as much as the rancid dumpster beside it, and observed with fearful dread the first thing that appeared to her:
It said: “Glinda Li, 26 Archibald St, Apt 2, Camberville, 02101.”
Formerly, the goods.
Doom, the trickster god Loki, old salty Murphy and his law, and probably her parents, laughed in the ether around her. Dissembled and disposed of, her package was. Opened and pilfered, her name tied to it, and D.G. the culprit. The goods, in a museum of mockery. Here lie the proclivities of one diminutive neighbor. On that note, there was no sign of them; the goods were gone. Not even in the dumpster, and she sustained her nostrils for a tip-toe peak. They could be buried, naturally, not all was lost. But omens were horrendous.
Things got worse.
Glinda, now trembling, now peering and glancing at the windows of D.G.’s, her shambling neighbor’s apartment, which blazed in the early evening dark from the first floor, right above her, knew not what to do. So much so was she lost, so much so was she receded into her fears that the stink of the dumpster had all but vanished, that the cold biting at her ears and cheeks had all but dissipated to dull nothingness, that the very sidewalk and staircase to the landing where once her package sat beside Gustaves fell away. They fell away into the chest and side of a man, walking and bundled, going briskly, his feet crunching on the crackled ice and sprinkled road salt.
“Whoah there,” he said, sliding a few feet. He spread his arms to catch Glinda. Glinda managed nothing but a dissociated grunt.
“You alright?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Sorry, distracted.” She looked up at the man, he was tall, though most men to her were rather tall. She was Glindy Bindy, after all, shorter even then one Nancy, the Specimen. He wore jeans, he wore a sweater and a long coat, and a scarf. He was a Boston man, and a foot of his was on the first concrete step that gave passage to Glinda’s shoddy half of the duplex.
“Do you live here?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“In the upstairs unit?”
“Yeah,” she said, finding no more words.
He held out a hand. “Dylan, I live there alone,” he said.
Glinda, in a trance, met him. “Glinda.”
His eyes registered nothing in her name. Instead he steeled himself against a gust of wind, and eyed her. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Well it’s nice to meet you. I think I saw you move here in September, but you seemed busy, and then I guess our paths never crossed.”
Didn’t they?
Glinda repeated her refrain. “Yeah.”
“Well, it’s cold, and I didn’t really eat lunch. You know how it goes.” Glinda said what she had been saying.
“Hope to see you soon!” he said. Then he turned, made his way up the stairs, his feet still crunching on the concrete.
Glinda spent the evening shocked. Perhaps it was conditioning from living with the noisy nurse, known as Nancy, who had trained her to expect questioning so complete to have expected it there. Hey, you know that package of yours that I stole and opened. Guess what I found! But he didn’t even seem to register her, as he might had he truly been privy to the dark secret of her name. If he had seen the name on the front of the rather predictable passage and laughed fully at the contents.
As it happened, Glinda ran into him again, the very next morning.
“Hey,” he said. “Well look at that. I barely see you for months and now it’s twice in a row!” he laughed.
Glinda’s mouth was already cracking in the dry air. “Sure,” she said. She could think of next to nothing of this man who held her deepest secrets somewhere in his apartment. But next to nothing is not nothing, and somehow, Glinda found herself. This time he was once again crunching, his heavy feet stepping sure on the hazardous pavement below.
“Have you seen a package?” she asked. It was, in fact, the bravest thing she’d said since probably college.
“A package?” he said, wheeling on her.
“Yes,” she said. “Like an Amazon one. A box. Yeigh big,” she held out her arms to demonstrate the approximate dimension of ‘yeigh.’
“For you?” he asked.
Glinda, whose mouth had been bullish until now, had been surprising until now, had been thinking that the Mediterranean weather of Sparta was probably fairly nice even now, who was also considering Zanzibar, if only for the name, who had bravely faced her self-exile like a gladiator to the lion, gave in. She found nothing until once again her mouth, then a steaming train and now a hip-hopping runaway, lurched onto the rails once again.
“No, my roommate,” she said. Somehow this was far easier to say. “Her name is Nancy.”
“Ah,” he said. A certain consideration fell over him. He cocked his head, he looked at his apartment, at the landing, at the rat infested slit between their duplex and the next.
“No, I don’t think I’ve seen it,” he said. And then he was off, on the ice and salt once again.
Later that evening.
“Glindy-bo-binda, honey, do you think you want Quiche for Friday?”
“I thought that was what you were making.” Glinda said. All conversations, including this one, including each one at work, including texting with her family and friends, seemed final. Tomorrow, when this Dylan guy drops the big joke, she’d be gone. Now it was Thailand she’d be off to. Not obscure, but incredibly far. Almost exactly on the other side of the world, in fact.
“Yeah but what do you want,” asked the nosy Nurse.
Glinda proffered nothing. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s your party. I think you should ask what your friends want to eat.”
“Good thinking, Glindy-wa,” Nancy said. Yes, indeed. “Alright well I’m going out to the store.”
A few minutes after she was gone, there was a knock on their front door. The one that Glinda had slunk through, days ago, with the package that she thought was hers but was actually the doofus D.G.’s package. Glinda opened the door to see none other than the neighborhood fool, the dastardly Dylan, the porch pirate himself.
“Hey,” she said, doing her best to convey none of the incredible fear and loathing she felt in his presence. The man who knew. Thank goodness he happened to arrive when Nancy had swooped out for extra eggs.
“Hey. I was taking a look for that package,” he began. “For your roommate? The one that was missing?”
Glinda had not forgotten her lie. Somehow, this made things easier. “Yeah. Did you find it?”
He stuttered a bit. “Maybe? Not sure. What’s her name?”
Glinda told her, and spelled it out. “Got it, thanks,” was his reply. He seemed in a hurry, and gave her a nod before turning and bounding down the stairs once again. His oddness almost lulled Glinda into her first sense of calmness in almost a week.
Friday evening was fast approaching. Nancy’s friends were going to come to the apartment, oh happy day! Socialization in the darkness of a cold winter! Glinda could only think of it thus; that it was the week’s anniversary of her poached package, her stolen secret, her disastrous dreams. She’d not masturbated once in the passage of time since then, how could she? Little seemed fun with total exposure hanging over her head. She could no longer think of D.G. and what he thought of her, what game he played by coming to her door and asking about Nancy. Glinda had submitted herself, much like she’d submitted herself to all sorts of invasive chicanery when availing the services of Craigslist and bringing upon her the karmic Specimen.
Nancy the noisome nurse, noisome in this case because of a dinner party that Glinda was now essentially lassoed in, sung her way up the stairs.
“Glindy Bindy, will you take a look at this,” she said, as she swung open the door so hard it clanged off the stopper, making a pained buzzing noise. In her hands she held a package, it was a big load for her, larger than it was heavy. It was nondescript, brown, bearing no decals or markings. It seemed like a very appropriate package in every way.
“It says it’s for me,” she proclaimed. Setting it on the kitchen counter. “Though I don’t think I ordered anything.”
Glinda had been reading, and was sitting on her ankles in the chair, savoring the last moments of calm before Quiche preparation, before whatever humans who could be friends with such a nosy Specimen arrived. “Well, I’ll open it later. How are you doing?”
“I’m fine, thank you,” Glinda said.
“That’s great. You know. The other day, I saw a boy dumpster diving. He was practically standing on the dumpster. I think he knocked over the recycling.
Glinda sat up straight. “A boy?”
“I mean a man, kinda cute. Maybe our neighbor, not sure. It was very strange behavior.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“Dearest no, why would I talk to someone going through the trash?” Nancy the nosy nurse answered, clearing the counter of everything to begin her preparations. Everything, save the mysterious package. Glinda, recently an alleyway diver herself, considered this. But more she considered the impossibility of perceiving Nancy as ignoring someone, especially someone doing something suspicious. It was very un-Nancy.
“I guess I was hurrying to the grocery store,” Nancy said, perhaps in a moment of self awareness, aware of herself as a needler, as someone who would let nobody get away without a nose in their business. The nurse opened the fridge and began to pile eggs and milk and other ingredients on the counter, beside the package.
Glinda’s bladder twisted. It twisted like a towel getting wrung. Drippity drop! Where are those things! Dylan has them, Dylan’s planning a big surprise silly Glinda, you big scaredy cat. Now you’ve done it. She recalled that Dylan had knocked on the door right after Nancy had left to get groceries, that he had come to her door soon after…soon after dumpster diving. Diving for what? He asked for her roommate’s name, for Nancy. Glinda had said that the package missing had been Nancy’s. Nancy got a package, sitting there on the table.
Glinda ran to the bathroom and knew not which way to sit. She managed with the trash can.
When she emerged from the bathroom, a bit woozy, the friends of the Specimen, the acquaintances of rando, allies of the be-nosed, stood in the hall-space between the kitchen, kicking off their boots and hanging their scarves and coats.
“Glindy! Meet my friends!” said the nurse. Glinda did not notice that this was the first time only her real name was used since their first meeting a few months ago. “This is Sarah, and this is Jeff. They’re studying at the university.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you both,” Glinda said. Her legs felt like those of a doe, just jettisoned from the womb of her mother and wriggling in the loam and leaves. She could not manage to meet them down the hall, all she could do was bow curtly from the living room, her hands clasped like a monk’s.
The dinner began, at least, the dinner party did. Nancy the nurse was nowhere close to completion of the quiche, but with another Cab-Sav cracked and bleeding into their cups, the partiers were going no-where, fast. Uber would see to their safety, when the streets were nearly clear. Not partial to anything but Moscow Mules, Glinda was forced to imbibe the wine anyway, a tall order considering her prior tri-dimensional evacuation on the toilet. She sipped with languid disinterest on the couch, thankful that it was the nurse, who was partially narcissistic, to whom all attentions would be showered upon during this evening. Yet it would not be so, and Glinda knew it, for there perched the package to Nancy, from where, no-one knew, least of all Nancy, who broached it once or twice as a conversation topic, only to let the notion slip to the whims of the overflowing Cab-Sav.
When the Cab-Sav needed replacement, interest in the package began in earnest.
“Do you think it’s a gift?” Asked Sarah, who was training to be some sort of doctor.
“Do you have a secret admirer?” Jeff asked, who hovered by the tray of carrots and celery in order to deliver as much ranch dressing to his face as could be possibly carried by vegetables.
“What do you think?” asked the nurse, no longer nocturnal, who was now right in Glinda’s face, pouring more Cab-Sav without asking.
“I think it’s probably a mistake.”
Nancy laughed.
“I mean, if you didn’t order it, it’s probably not yours?”
“It has my name on it, Glindy-poo. Just relax. I might have forgotten something that I ordered.”
Jeff piped up, his mouth now full of crackers. “Or, you might have won something.”
Sarah and Nancy opened their mouths in awe at the thought. Glinda trembled.
“You should open it,” Sarah said. “Now. Let’s see!”
“You should send it back,” Glinda pleaded.
“Oh Glinda, nobody cares about some mail. If it’s super valuable and obviously not for me, we’ll send it back. I have every right to open it, it has my name on it.”
Glinda sunk back into her chair, terrified of what would come next.
The scene was surreal and cinematic. Jeff boy-scouted some scissors from a drawer, opening every single one in the kitchen until he found them. He handed them to Sarah who handed them to Nancy, who nosed her way around the box and traced her fingers around the tape.
“Could it be a bomb,” Jeff asked, perhaps mocking Glinda’s concern.
Indeed. It would blow up someone’s social standing.
Nancy, very good with things that were sharp and delicate, sliced like the medical professional that she was, despite the hefty imbibing of Cab-Sav. The sides of it opened, and the trio, removed from Glinda in their inquisitive glee in the kitchen, forgetting Glinda there in the living room, forgetting the quiche baking away, gasped.
“What the…”
“Nancy!”
“I don’t know!” Nancy said.
“You’ve…”
“I swear to god I did not order this.”
“Take it out,” said Jeff. So Nancy reached in and pulled it out. Glinda didn’t ask for what they’d seen. She knew. Her thoughts were elsewhere, on Dylan, on her own shame. Somehow, someway, they’d figure out that Glinda’s hand was in this. They displayed :the goods: on the table like they were on the price is right, picked at the covering with their fingers like it was an exotic pet in an aquarium. Read aloud the disclaimers and instructions, and the brand; again and again did they read the brand, until their sides hurt too much to read it more.
“You need to show us all your present,” Sarah the guest laughed to Nancy the nurse. Nancy, for her part, was loving the strange turn that the evening took, and went on explaining her familiarity with adult diapers, as any nurse might. She’d deduced, at this point, that one of her coworkers had sent this shipment as a joke for some frightful and disgusting night at the ward that she’d probably wish never to remember.
The scissors came out, and one of the items was lifted from its packaging.
“Look at how big it is,” Sarah gasped.
“And the cute designs. Isn’t that strange? Surely this isn’t medical.”
“Oh god no,” Nancy said. “I’d believe that this was fetish. Don’t you think Glindy-poo?”
Glinda’s mouth didn’t work, so she nodded and finished the hefty pour of rotted and sugared fruit punch.
Nancy took the thing, unfolded it, and placed the open end between her legs.
“Do you need help?” Sarah asked, laughing. Nancy wiggled her butt, still well-jeaned, toward Sarah, and Sarah finished the tape job. Jeff procured another, opened it up, and felt it all over. “I bet these can absorb a ton,” he said.
“I think you look sort of cute,” Sarah said to Nancy. “Put it on your pants, Jeff.”
“Perhaps it’s good for halloween! A little late but youknow.”
They laughed and giggled. Jeff never put his on his crotch, instead it made its way to his head, where it remained until he almost brushed one of the kitchen headlamps straight off its wire. Then it went on Sarah’s head, where it did not long remain. When there was little kitchening left to do, experiments on the item's degree or absorbance began in the kitchen sink. Nancy left hers on, and remarked loudly about the crunch, and held court with her guests about which coworker was the culprit, despite none of them, not even Glinda, knowing a single one of her colleagues.
It was then that a knock came on the door. Sarah, the most composed, went to get it, while Jeff and Nancy continued to laugh at the sink. Glinda, long finished with her wine, sat frozen in the living room.
“Nancy, it’s your neighbor,” Sarah called. “Sorry, we’ve been drinking.” This part was quieter, suggesting that she said it to the man at the door, who was obviously Dylan. “Oh,” she said loudly. Glinda leaned forward in her chair, her heart now racing. Sarah, though the most composed, was hardly in possession of her manners, rounded the corner in a manic sprint. “He wants to see if you got our missing package?”
“Who?”
Sarah’s eyes went wide and she turned back down the hall to relay the question. “Nancy’s!” She shouted.
“Well tell him to come in!” Nancy said, heedless of the item still strapped and disheveled around her waist. And so Sarah did, and in walked Dylan, the poor bumbling neighbor who had started it all, and there he became rooted. He stared beneath Nancy’s waist as if he’d never seen a woman before. “What did you say to Sarah about a package?”
“I’d heard that there was a missing package…” he said, after looking around the room for what felt like a minute. He saw the diaper straddling the kitchen sink, and he saw the bag and the dismembered package.
“For me?”
“For a Nancy, yeah.”
Nancy turned to face the expanse between the kitchen and the living room, which felt smaller by the minute. “Glinda?”
Glinda began to sweat, though she’d known this would happen as soon as she heard the knock at the door. Hell, everything was over as soon as the box for Nancy arrived in the apartment. But how!? She looked at Dylan, the bumbling neighbor, whose eyes seemed to be asking the same question. “I told him,” she said. “That there was a package…” she thought for a moment. “For me,” she said.
Nancy’s eyes narrowed and she spoke to Dylan. “You said that the missing package was for me.”
“I think my memory was mistaken,” Dylan said, his throat dry. “I believe that…Glinda, was it?-” While Dylan responded, Nancy returned once more to the box, now separated from its contents. She turned over the empty cardboard and examined it as Glinda and Dylan spoke.
“Yes.”
“-she said that it was hers that was missing, and I am all out of sorts tonight.”
Nancy diverted her attention from the box, and returned her gaze to Glinda. “And what were you missing?”
“Clothes,” Glinda said, her ancient well-practiced excuse coming back to her.
“What kinda clothes, Glindy Bindy?”
“Just fucking clothes, I don’t know. They never showed up so what’s the matter? I’m trying not to think about it.”
Nancy, at her most noisome, was taken aback. She reached for the bag and picked it up and dropped it once again on the table. “So what are these?” she cried.
WHAT DO I DO NEXT???
