It was only supposed to be a few months. That’s what we agreed on when Paul dropped out of college, when he came home with that stiff little smile and duffel bag half-zipped, shrugging like it wasn’t a big deal.
“It’s just not for me, Mom.” That’s all he said—no meltdown, no excuses, just… done. College, apparently, wasn’t what he thought it would be.
But Amazon wasn’t the answer either. He slipped into the job like it had been waiting for him: part-time, daylight shifts only, assuming it would tide him over until something better came along.
A year later, he hadn’t left.
Still in the same bedroom, still sleeping until ten, drifting in and out like the house was his and the fridge stocked itself.
Mark never tried to hide how he felt—he thought Paul was taking advantage. He didn’t need to say it outright; I could hear it in every little jab: “That hot water isn’t free,” or “Think he’s planning to pitch in for groceries this week?”
He didn’t get it. He didn’t feel it—that mother thing, that stubborn protective instinct.
I couldn’t just throw him out. I kept telling Mark it was temporary, even after I stopped believing it myself.
The house no longer felt empty the way it had last year, when Paul first left for college. Back then, the silence felt earned. Mornings were mine alone. I drifted from room to room without anyone needing me. Laundry stayed folded. I joined a gym. I met friends for coffee and remembered who I used to be before I was only “Mom.”
Now it was like someone had pressed rewind: Paul was back, along with the dishes in the sink, the shoes kicked off by the door, the towel left crumpled on the bathroom floor. I had slipped right back into that rhythm of motherhood without even realizing it—at least that’s what I told myself that morning, the morning it all started, when I wandered into his room just after he left for work.
I wasn’t snooping. We had a quiet, mutual understanding: his room was off-limits now—he wasn’t a kid anymore, and I’d trained myself to respect the closed door. But motherhood doesn’t retire; it just waits for a weak moment. That morning, the understanding was lost. I drifted in, drawn by the same current that had always pulled me in to check for monsters under the bed. In one quiet sweep—tugging the comforter smooth, collecting scattered energy drink cans, snatching the hoodie off the floor—I ran through nineteen years of reflex in ten seconds of muscle memory. Just being his mom, nothing more, I told myself.
I opened the closet expecting the usual chaos of a teenager’s life: crumpled jeans, dirty sneakers, maybe the battered duffel bag he’d dragged home from freshman year. That was all. Or so I thought.
Behind a pile of laundry sat the dented mini-freezer he’d hauled back from college, the one I was dead certain we’d rolled to the curb for bulk pickup the day he returned. Same scuffs. Same crooked handle. Same faded skateboard stickers from back in the day: Tony Hawk, Alien Workshop, Element logos half-peeled and curling at the edges like they’d been frozen in time. And all around it, dozens of small Amazon boxes, flaps folded but never taped—the type he delivered by the hundreds every day.
I shouldn’t have opened it, but curiosity got the better of me. The second the latch released, a rush of cold air poured out around my legs, carrying with it a sharp, musky whiff that hit me like a wave.
Inside were trays—ice trays—rows of them stacked perfectly on the wire shelves: pale blue silicone, soft-looking, almost medical in their precision. Each tray had eight large compartments, all of them completely full. Whatever occupied them wasn’t ice. It was cloudy, thick, and off-white, almost viscous. Some compartments sat level and even, but others bulged over the edges, the frozen substance swollen slightly at the top as if forced in under pressure.
Every tray had a name scrawled along its side in black marker. Paul’s handwriting, unmistakable. First names only: Michelle, Beth, Shelly, Brad, Cassie, Mike. A dozen of them. No last names. No explanations.
The front door thunked open downstairs and Paul’s voice boomed up:
“Yo, I’m home!”
The same careless shout I’d heard a thousand times.
My pulse spiked—I slapped the freezer shut, yanked the closet door closed, and slipped out on silent feet just as his sneakers started thumping up the steps—“Hey sweetie,” I called back, calm and easy, smiling like I hadn’t just discovered something I was probably never meant to find.
That night, sleep didn’t even knock. Mark was out by nine, same as always: phone face-down, some mind-numbing insurance podcast murmuring through his earbuds—the man who sold policies all day so I could stay home pretending I still had a purpose.
I sat wide-eyed in the dark, the freezer seared into the backs of my eyelids. Trays in perfect rows. Names in black marker. That off-white color that now felt like a stain I’d never scrub out. My mind ran in circles, trying to make sense of it.
Drugs. It had to be drugs: liquid pills, some new synthetic, packaged and shipped right out of our house.
I pictured raids, sirens, Paul in cuffs on the driveway, mugshots, courtrooms, jail. What if someone was already watching? What if just opening that freezer had made me complicit?
Then I thought of Mark, what he’d say, what he’d yell, and how fast it would all land on me. I was the one who’d insisted Paul come home. I was the one who’d promised “it’s only temporary.” I could already feel the resentment rising like floodwater.
The truth was, I didn’t even know what I’d found, but it felt enormous.
Morning came fast. Mark was gone before seven, same quiet routine: coffee, keys, door. I stayed in bed, robe still on, gym bag untouched—I didn’t shower, didn’t eat, just waited.
Just after ten, Paul shuffled out in his usual wrinkled polo, sleeves shoved to the elbows, the Amazon logo already faded from too many washes. The same scuffed backpack hung off one shoulder, as if it had become permanent, part of the uniform now. He looked half-dead, muttered “Later” without looking up, grabbed a granola bar, and was gone.
The house went still again. I watched through the front window as his car backed out of the driveway and disappeared down the street. I gave it five minutes—maybe ten—until the sound of the engine faded completely. Then I climbed the stairs like a spy in my own house.
His room. The closet. The freezer. Something had changed. The trays had shifted. Some of the names I remembered, Beth, Brad, and Cassie, were gone. Replaced by new ones I hadn’t seen the day before: Liv, Derek, Sadie. Others were still there—rearranged.
I stared at the blue grid of trays, stacked row by row like files in a cabinet. Each one labeled, each one full.
I didn’t know what I was looking for—only that I was terrified of what I might find.
My hand hovered above the top tray, fingertips already numb from the cold seeping through the silicone, breath snagged in my throat.
I lifted it.
Denise.
The tray was cool and heavier than it looked. Some compartments were still soft in the center, the contents dense and syrupy, not yet fully frozen. Under the dim closet bulb, the surface gleamed slick, almost guilty. I turned it slowly, revealing a faint droplet-shaped mold on the side and raised letters inside that only caught the light when I angled it just right.
“BP.”
Something in my head clicked—or maybe snapped. I stared a split second longer, thumb grazing the drop like it might scorch me—then shoved the tray back, flicked the rows straight, slammed the freezer shut, and ran.
For the next hour, I played housewife on autopilot: wiped spotless counters, sorted junk mail, swept an already-clean floor. But my mind remained upstairs, pinned to that logo, looping over and over—a whisper that wouldn’t stop. I tried to push it away, but the house stayed perfectly quiet, as if it were holding its breath with me.
The laptop sat where it always lived, on the arm of the couch, lid closed, waiting like it already knew I was coming for it. I sank into the sofa, cushions swallowing my body while my heart hammered in my ears—with fingers that no longer felt like mine, I opened the lid and—for the first time ever—entered incognito mode.
The dark bar appeared across the top of the screen, staring back at me like a sudden disguise I desperately needed: a shameful shield between me and a search history I could never allow to exist.
I started small, fingers shaking. “BP silicone tray.” Nothing. “Blue silicone tray drugs.” Nothing real. “Blue silicone ice tray droplet logo.” Still nothing. Every clean, innocent result felt like the internet laughing at me.
Until, without warning, I landed on Reddit—a site most women my age had only ever heard mentioned on the news or from their kids: no friendly front page, no recipes, no cute dog videos. Just a plain warning: “This community contains adult content. Confirm you’re over 18.”
My finger moved on its own as the screen filled with threads I didn’t know how to follow, nothing but cryptic usernames, a place that felt built for people half my age, not for a mother who still thought “Reddit” sounded like some kind of fad diet. I was completely out of my depth, and the page knew it.
And there it was.
The logo.
A single drop. Sharp. Clean.
“BP.”
A digital version of the one molded into the trays in the freezer upstairs.
I stopped scrolling. Then I didn’t. The thread looked busy. I didn’t fully understand what I was looking at; just rows of comments, indented replies underneath, some stacked five or six deep. Little arrows beside them, numbers I guessed were upvotes. Enough to know people cared.
BP. Big Paul.
Not only a nickname.
A brand.
Our nineteen-year-old son.
“It’s the thirteen inches,” said Michelle, a username followed by a mess of random numbers. “That’s why it tastes the way it does.”
Over two hundred upvotes.
Just below it:
“Just got mine!” Shelly wrote, along with a photo.
A woman about my age, with the same faint crow’s-feet around her eyes that stared back at me in the mirror every morning, grinning as if she’d just hit the lottery, proudly holding up the exact pale-blue tray I’d slid back into the freezer barely fifteen minutes earlier.
“My boyfriend thinks it’s frozen soup,” another user replied; Cassie, with a laughing emoji at the end.
I was already sick. I should’ve shut the laptop, pretended I hadn’t seen any of it—drugs would’ve been easier, easier to explain, easier to confront. There’s a script for that: rehab, charges, apologies. Something human. But this?
Comment after comment. Photo after photo scrolled past: men and women, from Paul’s age to mine, perfect tens with influencers smiles and awkward twos who looked shocked to be holding something so coveted.
Some hoisted the tray overhead like a championship belt while others cradled it close, possessive, reverent—every face wearing the same dazed, triumphant grin.
Then a comment appeared from someone new, grasping for a way in: Emily. “How do I get in on this?” The reply sat below—no words. Just a link.
I hesitated as everything in me screamed, “Don’t.”
And then I clicked.
The page was almost empty: just a stark black screen with the BP logo tucked in the corner. No header. No menu. Nothing else at that moment.
The URL was nonsense. A jumble of letters and numbers, meaningless on its own. Not something you could memorize. Not something you’d ever type by mistake. This wasn’t a site you found. Someone had to send you here.
The page stayed blank for one heartbeat, long enough for a voice in my head to beg: close it, close it now, and you can still pretend this never happened.
I couldn’t move as the image loaded top-down, each new line a fresh wound.
Paul’s face first: calm, half-smirk, and the new haircut he’d come home with barely a week ago. Short on the sides, tight fade, a sharp break from the messy bush he’d hidden under for years. Then his arms came into view. Long and wiry on a six-foot-four frame that had always been more coat-hanger than linebacker. Hands laced behind his head, elbows flared, hairless armpits exposed, casual and cocky like he was posing for some magazine I’d never allow in the house.
His chest came next: narrow, bird-boned, ribs faintly visible under pale skin, the way they’d been his entire life, but now held with a new, quiet arrogance. A thin pink scar, still healing and raw at the edges, slashed across the inside of his left forearm, fresh from the skateboard wipeout three weeks earlier. The background sharpened: his closet, and hanging right there beside him was the same gray hoodie I’d put away only yesterday.
My hand shot toward the lid the instant the bottom of the frame began to appear, some last shred of motherly instinct screaming to make it stop. It froze halfway—because what slid into view looked fake, wrong, impossible.
A fucking Pringles can made of flesh grafted onto my son’s body—it jutting straight out, thick and rigid, so heavy it drooped under its own impossible weight. The gigantic mushroom head flared obscenely wide, its rim ridged and bloated beyond anything I’d ever seen in my life. Veins pulsed across the shaft like a roadmap of swollen rivers, turning Paul into something less human and more like a grotesque farm animal. Below it, his balls hung low and swollen beyond reason—each the size of a ripe avocado, skin stretched glossy and drum-tight with a fullness that screamed deformity.
My lungs seized. This wasn’t some stranger. This was my son—turned into something no mother should ever have to see. I tried again to slam the laptop lid, but my arm wouldn’t obey. My pulse was a jackhammer behind my ribs, so loud I could barely hear my own breath. I couldn’t look away. The words sat there in stark white text on black, just below that impossible image:
PREMIUM SEMEN filled directly from a thirteen-inch cock. Raw. Real. Frozen. Tastes like nothing else.
Then the price hit me, blunt as a slap:
$499
Freeze-packed. Discreet. Priority overnight.
Below it, the button pulsed in bright blue—ORDER NOW—the same one every woman on that Reddit thread had mashed over and over.
Then the Ring chime shattered the silence like a gunshot.
Front door: Mark.
I killed the tab, slammed the laptop shut, and slid it back onto the armrest—just as the doorknob turned and the front door swung open.