Wild Fiction

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She closed the cabinet and stepped back knocking over the wastebasket in the process. Cotton wool swabs, used tissues, strands of tangled dental floss, and an empty tube of toothpaste lay scattered across the floor. In the midst of this maelstrom of bathroom refuse lay a white and blue foil wrapper. Poking out of the end of it was a plastic stick with a small grooved grip. Rebecca picked up the foil wrapper and looked at it. On the front, it read: PREGGIES MIDSTREAM ONE STEP URINE PREGNANCY TEST. She turned it over. There were five diagrams showing the five steps to using the test. The final diagram, had two pictures side by side. They were the windows of the test result. The window on the left showed a single vertical pink line. Underneath it were the words: If only one pink line appears in the window, you can assume that you are not pregnant. The right hand diagram showed the same window but with two vertical pink lines. Written underneath this it read: If two pink lines appear in the window, you can assume that you are pregnant.
Rebecca grasped the plastic thumb grip and pulled the test stick out of the foil. The result window showed two parallel pink lines.
‘The author’s going to be a father,’ she whispered quietly staring at the little window in the plastic stick. She smiled at the thought. Instinctively she pulled her head away as she caught a faint whiff of urine from the exposed absorbent tip of the stick. She shoved the test stick back in the foil and dropped it into the bottom of the wastebasket. She refilled the wastebasket and returned the bathroom to its original state, eradicating all signs of her presence. She then washed her hands and went in search of the father-to-be. She found him in his study shuffling papers on his desk and muttering to himself.
‘So, what do you think of being a father?’ she asked him.
He looked up at her quizzically. ‘Not much,’ he replied. ‘I loathe children. I don’t have any and never will.’
‘Well, what if there was an accident, you know, a slip and you became a father without intention?’
‘It isn’t possible. I made sure about that five years ago. I had the snip, and believe me I won’t forget that. My testicles were blue for two weeks after that little operation.’
‘You had a vasectomy?’ Rebecca’s eyes opened wide.
‘Yes, the deed is done, and I made sure it was one of those irreversible ones.’
‘Sometimes they join up again so you could still become a father.’
‘Not in this case. I went back to the surgery six months after the operation for a check-up. They confirmed that it was irreversible. I also provided them with a sample, and they confirmed that there was zero motility. Which is precisely what I wanted to hear.’

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