Mark was already complaining before his ass had even hit the sofa.
“Traffic was hell. Rogers screwed the claim forms again. Open enrollment.”
He cracked his beer, swallowed long.
“Is your son back on my plan, or is Amazon magically giving part-timers benefits these days?”
Another swallow.
“And his piece-of-shit car is leaking oil all over the driveway again. If he’s going to live here rent-free, he could at least…”
I nodded. Or maybe I didn’t. The words washed over me like static.
He thought his day had been bad.
He had no idea, no idea that the son he’d labeled lazy, the one he’d now even quietly pretended wasn’t his at all, had turned the room across the hall into his own filthy empire; no idea strangers were paying five hundred dollars a pop for what poured out of his balls; no idea how bad his day would really become when I finally found the words to tell him.
The rest of the evening slipped by in a blur: muted conversation, tasteless dinner, a show or two I pretended to follow with nods and empty glances. Mark went up at nine, same as always. This time I followed, not because I was tired, but because I couldn’t bear to be downstairs when Paul’s key turned in the lock; I wasn’t ready to see him, didn’t know what I’d say if our eyes met, or whether I could even hold myself together.
Every sentence I shaped in my mind collapsed into something impossible, something no mother should ever have to confront in her own child.
So I slipped upstairs instead, eased the bedroom door closed behind me, and tried to pretend the world outside had simply ceased to exist.
I went through the motions: changed, brushed my teeth, slid into my side of the bed as if nothing had happened. Mark had already dozed off, earbuds lodged in his ears, the same never-ending podcast leaking faint, monotonous voices into the quiet room as his phone glowed softly against the nightstand.
I leaned against the headboard in the dark, staring at the ceiling, trying to summon the disgust I was supposed to feel. I needed to feel sick, I needed rage, horror, nausea; any normal emotion a moment like this demanded of a mother.
I tried to think about grocery lists, tomorrow’s errands, the weather, anything else. But the math shoved everything else aside and started running on its own: twelve trays at $499 each—$5,988. Nearly six grand. Of Paul. Neat, frozen rows of him stacked like gold bars in a dented dorm-room freezer while the man beside me fretted over healthcare premiums and oil stains.
I woke to light cutting through the blinds, the bed beside me already cold. Mark was long gone, out the door by seven like always.
For a few seconds, I kept my eyes shut, praying the whole thing would blur and fade like a dream that loses its edges in daylight.
The memory was still razor-sharp: the trays, the website, that impossible photo, the price tag glowing white on black.
I stayed perfectly still, covers pulled high, listening. Just after ten, the bathroom door at the end of the hall creaked open. Water ran. The toilet flushed. Drawers opened and closed in the same lazy rhythm they always had, normal sounds, Paul’s morning untouched. I didn’t move; I barely breathed. He thudded downstairs. Cupboard. Fridge. The crinkle of a candy bar wrapper. “Later,” he called toward the stairs, casual, the same half-word he’d tossed out every morning for as long as I could remember.
I stayed silent under the blanket, a coward in my own house. The front door opened. Closed. Only then could I exhale.
The next couple of days dissolved into each other like wet paper.
Mornings bled into afternoons without any sharp edges. I lost track of the days entirely. Between ten and five, the house was mine alone; quiet, empty, and haunted by the low, persistent hum of that freezer echoing mercilessly in my head.
I hid from Paul as long as I could. Stayed in the bedroom until his car pulled out of the driveway. Then, when hiding finally became ridiculous, I graduated to brittle small talk in the kitchen: safe, useless words while I wiped counters that were already clean, anything to avoid eye contact.
Every morning, he slung that scuffed backpack over one shoulder and walked out the door like any other kid heading to school or work.
Only now did I know what weighed it down: enough of his own sperm to cover multiple mortgage payments. Freeze-packed, shoved into pilfered Amazon boxes, casually dropped at our local UPS on his way to work, as routine as mailing a belated birthday gift to a cousin he barely remembered.
I tried to outrun everything else, the only way I knew how: laundry was folded and refolded, dishes washed twice, the vacuum dragged over the same patch of carpet until the motor whined. I went to the gym and stayed until my legs shook on the treadmill, waiting for exhaustion to scrub me blank.
The truth settled in layers.
I could never tell Mark.
I didn’t know how to begin, and every hour that passed only widened the distance.
Only another stay-at-home wife who has run out of real things to do could understand how quickly purpose collapses into restlessness, how rearranging the same throw pillows on the couch for the third time in an hour stops feeling like tidying and starts feeling like stalling.
At first, I fought it.
I lasted another day, maybe two.
Ten minutes after his car vanished down the driveway, I was back upstairs, not planning a confrontation with Paul, not figuring out how to tell Mark, just standing in his closet like an overzealous manager, quietly cataloging his empire.
Guilt and shame surged through me with every heartbeat, raw and relentless, a flood of embarrassment and self-loathing that left me paralyzed. Yet I remained rooted, completely unable to walk away.
Bottom: older trays, cloudy, frozen solid.
Top: fresh ones, centers still soft; filled just hours ago, like he was a machine.
New names. Empty slots where yesterday’s batches had been.
The game swallowed me whole.
I suddenly hated myself—a fucking hypocrite. Thirty years ago, I’d found that disgusting Taboo VHS in Mark’s filing cabinet and stood over him like some moral judge, forcing him to trash it, the brother-sister cover I’d called him sick for owning. Now the hypocrisy burned so hot I could barely breathe.
Gym visits and house cleaning vanished overnight, replaced by Reddit in incognito windows, volume muted, laptop searing into my thighs while the washing machine thumped like the last alibi I had left.
The thread never stopped growing; every refresh delivered new hunger. Cassie cradled her tray like contraband gold: “Would pay double. A thousand, easy.” Beth in a minivan selfie, car seats visible: “First cube and I’m ruined!” Others grew even more brazen. BiCuriousBrad confessing my own son may have turned him gay; Maggie showing an empty, still-wet tray and declaring she’d “sell her soul to meet Big Paul in the flesh.”
I read every post twice, my subconscious now matching Reddit usernames to the handwritten labels I’d memorized in the freezer upstairs.
I zoomed in on their photos: wedding rings, cluttered counters, ordinary kitchens lit by the same tired light as my own.
Whenever Paul left with that backpack, the thread came alive a day later with new arrival photos and unboxing shots; junkies announcing their latest tray, whether it was their first or their twentieth. I always knew exactly which batch they cradled in those photos. I’d seen the entire assembly line firsthand: light seeping from under Paul’s door at all hours of the night, the faint musky scent drifting from the freezer, trays soft and gleaming one morning only to crystallize by the next. They got the polished fantasy in discreet packaging. I got the raw, fucked-up process in real time, happening right under my own roof.
That night, long after Mark’s snores had turned deep and mechanical beside me, I remained wide awake, soaked in sweat, sheets clinging like a second skin I couldn’t crawl out of.
I grasped desperately for the anchor of our thirty-year marriage, stepping through it all in my mind like a lifeline: our wedding day under that sticky summer sky. Mark’s nervous grin as he fumbled the ring onto my finger; lazy vacations in the Smokies, all three of us crammed in the old minivan. Paul’s skinny legs kicking the back of my seat, Mark blasting classic rock and promising we’d hit the next Waffle House.
Amazing years.
The kind that should have drowned out everything else.
But Paul’s photo festered. His half-smirk. His ungodly size. And Reddit. Reddit had won. A digital crack pipe I never asked for, one that had quietly taken over my life. Michelle’s comment, the very first I’d read, still burned hottest: “It’s the thirteen inches. That’s why it tastes the way it does.” Over two hundred upvotes. Women just like me, sneaking tastes of my son while scrolling Reddit in the dead of night, husbands sleeping obliviously beside them.
Mark hadn’t done anything wrong. Hell, he’d done everything right: provided steadily, let me stay home all these years, still reached for me once or twice a month even as my looks faded.
But where the fuck did that thing come from?
Not my DNA. And sure as hell not Mark’s. His modest size was the only thing I’d ever known: reliable, familiar, perfectly ordinary after thirty years. Nothing in either of us could explain the obscenity hanging between our son’s legs: a cruel, almost laughable prank nature had played on a lazy nineteen-year-old who’d never once emptied the dishwasher or taken out the trash.
Thoughts of our marriage weren’t enough to stop my mind from slipping to the one place it had no business going.
Against my control, the details assembled themselves in the dark.
Pre-labeled trays stacked three or four deep on his bed—no guesswork needed anymore. Paul working through the night like a cyborg, coaxing thirty or forty massive ropes, fueled by nothing but energy drinks and whatever junk food he’d scavenged from our kitchen. Each shot landed with practiced precision in its compartment as he hovered above the ice tray on all fours, aiming that Pringles-can-sized sausage like a gunslinger methodically picking off targets in a shooting gallery. Then collapsing for barely two hours of sleep before dragging himself up at ten, heading out to the part-time job that served as little more than a thin cover for his real empire. And the worst of it was that I couldn’t stop picturing it, couldn’t stop the images from looping over and over in my mind while Mark slept beside me, trusting and peaceful. Every detail I forced myself to imagine made me feel more like a traitor, more like someone who had no right to call herself a mother anymore.
I woke to the familiar slice of light through the blinds, the bed beside me already cold, Mark long gone.
For a few seconds, I lay there, eyes pinched tight, pretending the fever from last night had broken; that I could erase the end-to-end process I’d conjured in my head and obsessed over half the night, that the poison had finally drained away while I slept.
I went through the motions on autopilot: robe on, teeth brushed, a half-cup of coffee I couldn’t taste.
Paul shuffled downstairs around ten, hair messy, work uniform already on. We traded the usual brittle small talk in the kitchen, safe words that filled the air without touching anything real. He grabbed a candy bar, muttered his casual “Later,” and was gone.
Ten minutes later, I was upstairs again, drawn back like every other day, another ordinary morning in this endless loop, feet carrying me to his room before my mind could protest.
I opened the freezer.
The usual trays were there, stacked in neat rows: women whose names I now knew like old friends from Reddit.
But off to the side, deliberately apart from the careful grid of strangers sat a single new tray. The contents still syrupy in the center, soft and unset.
I stared at the label.
One word.
His handwriting.
“Mom“.