You wake up one morning and there is a $20 bill folded like an accordion in the left side of your vulva, just between your labia majora and labia minora.
You get out of bed and check the windows and the doors, all locked. In the bathroom, you look between your legs with a hand mirror: Not a mark on you. You shower, to feel less strange. You smooth out the bill, spray it with rubbing alcohol, pat it dry, put it in your wallet, get dressed, and go to work.
All day at the office, you respond mechanically to the pings and whooshes of your computer. You are the lead consultant on a big client project. You do what they call knowledge work, which means you use your brain to think about ways to make other people money.
But all you can think about is: How did a $20 bill end up in my pussy?
This is bad for your productivity. You decide to blame yourself for the money’s appearance: For your habit of sleeping naked, and for sometimes sleepwalking. You write off the $20 bill as a sleepwalking misadventure — a slightly perverse, money-origami project completed by your subconscious self.
At lunch time, you turn off your screen and go downstairs to the deli for a salad. You decide to spend the pussy money on your lunch and forget all about it. You make a detour to the bathroom to pee and sitting in your underwear is a $10 bill: Your pussy money has had a baby.
There goes the self-inflicted origami theory, you think.
You are very confused, but you wash the bill with soap and water and dry it with the air dryer. The baby buys your lunch, and the pussy money stays in your wallet.
As you pick through your slightly wilted, pussy-money-baby salad, you do what you always do when you feel vulnerable: Make a plan and armor yourself.
That night, you put on your most complicated underwear, the underwear with straps and clips and buckles, the underwear that makes men very hard but also very frustrated with you, because they never know how to take it off.
No one has gotten past this crazy get-up unless you’ve taken it off yourself.
You wear the matching corset for good measure, double-check all the windows and doors to ensure they are locked, and go to sleep, feeling clever and safe.
In the morning you wake up sore from the outfit, your skin indented by its hardware. But the indentations are worth it: When you check between your legs there’s no money, and you are relieved.
As you wriggle out of the corset, you see a $100 bill flattened onto your right breast, Benjamin Franklin’s face nuzzling your nipple. You sit down to think but can’t make any sense of it: You planned ahead and armored yourself, yet here is more of what you did not want.
You look at Benjamin Franklin’s face and whisper-ask him, What do you know that I don’t know?
But all he does is keep smiling that smug smile of his. You put him in your wallet next to your pussy money and go to work, your face as tight as his smile.
At the office your mind moves quickly, disjointedly. Your confusion is swirled with anger and helplessness.
Can I even be mad? you think. Clearly there is no culprit. And it’s free money.
But when has money ever been free? And why does this money insist on touching the most intimate parts of your body?
You can feel the lower lid of your left eye start to twitch, and you type a little too hard in response to all your computer’s noises. By lunch time you are really angry and really hungry. Then you open your wallet and there is a 500 euro note nestled against Benjamin Franklin and your pussy money.
Your anger diminishes immediately, and the instant appeasement you feel makes you doubt your feminism. Uneasy and ashamed, on your way home you give away the U.S. currency. But you keep the 500 euro note. Your eye may still be twitching, but at least the 500 euros didn’t touch your body.
That night when you go to bed, you wonder if it is useless to fight against this. Maybe you can work with whatever force is exerting itself upon you. You decide to test it and you say out loud, Can you do any better than single bills? Then add: And can you do it without touching me?
You realize it didn’t occur to you to ask it to stop entirely, and again you doubt your feminism: You have to admit that you want the money, and you are willing to make some concessions to get it.
You toss and turn fitfully, because you don’t know if you can trust the thing you are testing, but eventually you fall asleep.
In the morning there are crisp stacks of bills, of all denominations and various currencies, all over your bed. Nothing is touching you. You collect all the money and count it, using currency calculators when you need to, and it amounts to $50,000. You start to laugh, and the eye twitch is nearly imperceptible now. You leave the money on the bed and start to get dressed for work, but with less urgency than ever in your life.
Thanks very much, you say out loud. And on a whim, bordering on flirtation, you ask: What else you got?
A few minutes later, before you leave for work, you check your bank balance, and the number on the screen is $26 million. You drop your phone and feel faint. You are a successful, educated, youngish professional woman living comfortably in a doorman building in one of the most expensive cities in the world, but you would have to work more than 172 years to earn this much money. Fuck-you money. You pick up your phone and type an email to your boss, quitting your job, effective immediately.
You are overwhelmed and spend a few minutes crying, then pull yourself together. You sit down with your laptop. You pay off your student loans. Anonymously, you wire $100,000 to your six closest friends and pay off your parents’ mortgage.
Then you start ordering everything you have ever wanted to buy: Nicer furniture, nicer clothes, a few pieces of art, a few pieces of jewelry, a trendy electric sports car with suicide doors.
Two hours and $750,000 later, you are surprised to have reached the limit of your desire. In fact, you find yourself bored.
You click and scroll listlessly. You briefly consider buying a house in the toniest neighborhood in the city and scheduling plastic surgery, but realize despite regular fantasies about both of these things you don’t actually want either, that all you have ever wanted was to feel safe and like you could have whatever you want. So having this much money means you don’t need the fancy house and you don’t need to be pretty, either.
You feel free of something you hadn’t even realized was oppressing you until you start to think about the unsolved mystery of this money, of its tie to your body. But then you hear a ping.
In your inbox is an invitation for a trip to the Galapagos Islands on Grace Kelly’s former yacht, sent by a rich-people travel newsletter you’ve never heard of. There is one cabin left, and it costs $285,000 for the week, not including airfare. The limits of your desire briefly expand. You click Book Trip and go to bed.
The next morning you feel a familiar pressure on your perineum and realize you’ve not had a bowel movement since this all started. An hour later, after the most painful straining of your life, you have passed eighteen one-kilogram gold bars.
Your hair is soaked with your sweat, and your bathroom wall is covered in your vomit. You lie on the bathroom floor and press your cheek against the cold tile. You’re all alone and there’s no one to tell, so all you can do is catch your breath. Then you get up, put on dishwashing gloves, and clean up your mess.
You gently transfer the gold bars from the toilet to the bathtub, where they glimmer like immobile, rectangular koi fish in a pond of disinfectant, and when you look at them your heart fills with a warmth and tenderness you have not known before, each bar something like a baby.
It’s true that part of you feels nostalgic for the $20 that was secretly and painlessly tucked in your vulva just a few days ago. But technically nothing is touching your body anymore; your body has produced these eighteen gold bars, which are worth more than a million dollars, making the profuse rectal bleeding as good as painless.
And the pain in your ass is a welcome distraction from the persistent twitch in your eye, which waxes and wanes unpredictably.
A week passes, during which you pass a solid gold bar every single day, sometimes two or three, and your body has learned to expect them, so they don’t hurt nearly as much as they did at first.
You learn some tricks: Lining your rectum with petroleum jelly so the bars pass easily, and taking magnesium glycinate so your bowel movements are regular. Your body will never produce actual feces again in your life, and you know this intuitively. You embrace your singular reality with the loving resignation of a new mother. You put your gold-bar babies in a closet and most of your millions of dollars in a brokerage account.
It’s time now to go on your trip to the Galapagos. You have a moment of insecurity at the thought of being surrounded by mega-wealthy people, and you briefly consider buying a whole new wardrobe of even nicer clothes than you bought in your first shopping spree. But you decide against it, determined to dress as you would on any vacation, but with the full confidence of a woman who knows she shits gold.
The Galapagos Islands are beautiful. More beautiful than you could ever imagine. The water sparkles like a million diamonds and the tortoises crawl around regally, as slow and unbothered as you feel. The whole week is a dream, and you have several billionaires enamored with you, because despite your being a decidedly average-looking woman, your confidence makes you look amazing and your eyes shine with the bright hope of a future in which everything you can imagine is possible.
There’s just one problem: It’s the end of the week and the yacht has docked, and now you have to figure out how to get the dozen or so gold bars produced by you on this trip through customs so you can fly home.
You discreetly ask one of the billionaires, the most avuncular one, the only one who doesn’t seem interested in you, how to move valuables through customs, and he doesn’t even blink.
Asshole money? he asks, and you nod, surprised. Me too, he says, as he gestures for you to follow him to his cabin.
You don’t want to give him the wrong idea, so you step inside just long enough for him to show you a trunk at the foot of his bed, filled with gold bars.
The asshole money is the best kind of dividend because it’s all tax-free, he chuckles.
The avuncular billionaire offers you a ride on his private jet, so you can avoid customs entirely, and when he sees you hesitate slightly he tells you, No pressure.
At the final group dinner on the yacht that night he talks a lot about his wife and children, and how excited he is about being launched into space soon. Later you tell him you would appreciate that ride on his jet.
The next morning, you glide through the airport to the tarmac and get in a limousine that takes you to the plane. On the plane, the billionaire excuses himself and goes to the back to make some calls about his impending space travel. And you fall asleep peaceful and content, wrapped in a cashmere blanket.
A few hours later you wake up slowly to a soft stroking on your cheek. The avuncular billionaire is rubbing his half-erect penis on your face. You freeze for a moment, and look up at him. He smiles down at you, his face beatific, as though he is the Pope blessing you with his pastoral staff.
You smile back at him, and at the same time reach for your handbag and swing it as hard as you can against his head. He falls to the ground and swears at you.
Try it again and you’ll really be sorry, you say. It’s full of asshole money.
His head is bleeding. He crawls to the back of the plane in a rage and says something you can’t hear to the flight attendant, a tall, blonde, Scandinavian woman who looks like a retired supermodel.
She grabs you by the arm, pulls you out of your seat roughly, and says under her breath, Let’s put on a show and I’ll help you get out of here.
She drags you to a bathroom and locks you inside it. When you land, you hear her soothing the billionaire as he leaves the plane.
Make her pay, he tells her, and you wonder what it is he thinks you owe him, and you don’t even feel bitter, just amused. You realize for the first time that your eye is not twitching now, not even a little bit.
A minute later, the flight attendant unlocks the door, and you point to the toilet. You’ve produced three gold bars from all the stress, and you want her to have them.
She looks at you with very kind eyes and says, Thank you, but there’s not enough time to sanitize them, and I’ve had enough asshole money for a lifetime, so there’s really no need.
She wraps you in a fur blanket and tells you to climb into a trunk. Your whole body begins to shake as you start to cry.
He’s going to kill you, there’s no other way this will play out, but she says, No, now you will be safe, and I will see to it.
And as though she has done this a thousand other times for a thousand other women, she gently closes the lid of the trunk so strong men you don’t know can carry you off the plane and put you in a car, so that she can take you home and have you sign an NDA.
Whoa! Loved this. Lots of sly wordplay and just an incredibly clever and arresting story overall!! Kudos.