“Ok, the idea here is that the girls need to get the boys into the toilet bowl” your uncle continued, uttering the phrase with a steadiness you could hardly believe, “the boys will have little paper cutouts of turds with sticky tack on the back, and will be blindfolded, and the girls will give them directions on where to walk to get to the wall. Easy peasy, right? Taryn, the turd cutouts are in the box. Why don’t you hand them out? You’ll probably have the most fun,” Uncle James finished as he took a few chairs from the dining room and scattered them around the empty space between the rest of you and the toilet bowl picture.
Taryn got up and walked over to the cardboard box and shuffled through it, laughing as she pulled out a stack of construction paper cutouts, pictures of turds glued on top of them. “Who made these? This one looks just like one of mine…”
“I got photos of everybody’s dumps off their ssocial media pagess…” Carrie mumbles softly, “sso your partner can be realisstic.”
“Alright Freddy, I guess that makes you my hot, sloppy, mess,” Taryn says, handing one of the cutouts to her younger brother “And this looks like you Leah” Taryn said handing another cutout to your cousin beside you on the couch. You can see it as she holds it in her hand. The image showed a large heap of long ropes of shit, splinters and fragments of bone visible throughout, but relatively little that could be identified. Handing it to her partner, Terry took it apprehensively, which was entirely reasonable you felt.
“There’s like a whole fucking skeleton in this one. Alexa?”
“It’s not the whole skeleton, I just have a harder time with the more solid bones,” the tall, busty girl replied, taking the photo and handing it to Bernie, giggling as she did. “look, it’s the photo of Dan I took to send Polly…”
“Ooh, there’s two guys in this pile…”
Giggling, Carrie leaned forward and said, “that’s Lucas and Gerry from Maddie’s first ‘divorce’.”
Laughing, Taryn handed the photo to Rudy, and then another to Harvey. Uncle James stopped and took his as he came back from placing the chairs, and Taryn handed the last one to you before returning to her seat. Glancing down at it, you see a dark brown mound of waste sitting between the roots of a tree, a mix of soft mud and rounded coils, broken by half digested lengths of bone jutting out of the waste; their jagged edges smoothed by Miranda’s digestive acids. The cracked but intact skull of her victim sits at an angle on top of the pile, gaze turned downward and at an angle, the photo positioned so that it nearly seemed to stare outward. At least Carrie hadn’t been so cruel as to pair Harvey with Miranda. You felt bad enough he was taking part in what would be, for him, such a macabre game.
“Ok” Uncle James says, getting back out of his seat as Taryn sits down “here are the blindfolds…” he takes them out of the box, and begins passing them to you and the other boys, before returning to his seat and letting Aunt Sofie tie his on tight.
