Hurricane Diarrhea #1

“ONESHOT ONESHOT ONESHOT ONESHOT!”

Taeyeon grinned as she looked at the gigantic tub of yoghurt in her hand. Her friends were half-drunk and delirious as they chanted on and on and on. They no longer saw any rhyme nor reason and she was quite the same. She looked at her hyper friends, Sunny, Yuri and Yoona and Sooyoung, each friend taller than the one on their left and raised the tub up high.

“ONESHOT!” she yelled and opened wide to gulp the tub of yoghurt.

“YAAAAAAAAY!” cheered her friends as she the last of the yoghurt from her spoon.

Taeyeon raised the empty tub up triumphantly and turned it upside down. She had cleaned it out real good alright. Her friends piled on her and patted her back as they cheered and whooped. The wide grin on her face was practically plastered on and it was getting goofier by the minute but no one laughed at her. No one could laugh at her. Not when she was queen. Queen of the night. The queen who completed her dare with gusto.

All hail the queen.

~

“Cheep, cheep,” went the birds perched on a tree outside her window.

Argh. Somebody needs to shut those birds up. My head is splitting.

Taeyeon grimaced and groaned as her eyes fluttered open. Her head wasn’t the one part of her body giving her problems. Her stomach was churning. Burning. Squeezing. Twisting.

Am I going to die?

She clutched her stomach and turned to look at the clock beside her bed. It said 8am. Gosh. When did she fall asleep? 4am? 5am? She wasn’t sure. Couldn’t be sure. Not with her stomach churning more and more with each passing second. Not with that clenching going on in her stomach. It was tightening. Gah. Something was very wrong with her this morning and she instinctively knew where she was heading when her clenched hard. There was no time to waste.

She rolled to the side and put her left leg down on the floor to stand. Only, it wasn’t the floor her foot landed on. It definitely wasn’t the floor because for one, the floor wasn’t soft and squishy. Neither was it capable of making sounds of discomfort. What in the world?

The object that she was stepping on was Yuri. Yuri’s to be exact. And the sounds of discomfort were coming from Yuri too. The poor girl was groaning in her sleep. Taeyeon shook her head at the sight and regretted it at once. That shake had cost her. Giddiness swamped her and she had to close her eyes and wait for it to pass before finding the real floor and standing up.

There wasn’t much time left. If she didn’t make it to the bathroom in time, she was going to have to deal with an awful mess on the floor and that was the last thing she needed this freaking morning. Move it! She padded across the not-so-squeaky clean floor of her home, her hands already ing and ping her shorts as she moved. She closed the door, dropped her shorts, tugged down her and planted herself on the toilet seat.

“Ah,” she sighed as the unwanted contents of her stomach splattered unceremoniously into her toilet bowl. The stench that wrapped around her like a disgusting cloak made her scrunch up her nose even though this definitely wasn’t the first time she has smelled her own waste. This wasn’t the sort of thing that one would get used to. No matter how many times she has smelled it before, it would still be as pungent the next time she smelled it.

“Mmm!” she went as her eyes squeezed shut, her body tensing to eject the remaining waste that was torturing her innards, and finally relaxing when the last of it left her system. Phew.

Unable to bear the smell any longer, she twisted around to the button that would flush tons of water down her toilet bowl and rid the place of the horrible smell. There was just one problem though. Her diarrhea wasn’t going anywhere. It swirled around, turning the water into a disgusting brownish liquid state but didn’t disappear. Holy crap! What was wrong with her toilet bowl! A second flush did nothing to help, merely reducing the colour intensity of the existing brown liquid, and she knew that she was in trouble.

.

~

“What ty friends I have,” grumbled Taeyeon under her breath as she waved goodbye to her tall friends, Yuri, Yoona and Sooyoung. All of them had pinched their noses as soon as they entered her bathroom and shot her looks of disgust before deciding that they’d better head home to wash up before heading to class. Fortunately for them, home wasn’t so far away. They lived in a nearby apartment that they rented together with another friend who had chosen to stay home to study instead of joining them for the night.

Sunny was her roommate but she wasn’t around to share the misery with her either. That girl had already left the apartment to attend an insanely early lecture–an unexplainable feat in itself. Thank goodness her lectures didn’t start until the next day.

After shutting the door, she walked back to her room and as she stood at the door of her bathroom, the wise words of Kwon Yuri rang in her ear.

“Call a plumber, Taeng,” Yuri had so wisely advised before making her escape from the stench.

Pfft. Like she had needed Yuri to tell her that. She knew that she had to call a plumber but she was reluctant to. Calling a plumber cost money that she was running low on. Plumbers did not come cheap. A quick check on Google was all it took to find out that hiring a plumber could easily amount to a hundred dollars. That was a hundred dollars that she did not want to part with. There was no choice, however. The option of not calling a plumber was non-existent. There was no way she could live with a clogged up toilet bowl.

.

~

Ding dong, went the doorbell and Taeyeon got off her stool at once. That must be the plumber.

“Hi! Are you Kim Taeyeon?” chirped a pretty girl with twinkling eyes as soon as the door was opened.

Taeyeon was not sure if this girl was the plumber or something else. She’d never seen female plumbers before. Was she a sales girl? But sales girls didn’t go around selling things at 9.30am, did they?

“I’m here to unclog your toilet,” explained the pretty girl with twinkling eyes as though she knew of her thoughts. Woah. Scary.

“Ah, yes. Please, come on in.” Taeyeon stepped to the side and the pretty girl with twinkling eyes entered.

“Wow, you have a nice apartment.”

Taeyeon smiled politely. The pretty girl with twinkling eyes who claimed to be a plumber didn’t seem to be looking for the toilet. She seemed more interested in looking at the furniture instead. And other than the huge black bag that she was carrying on her shoulder which might contain her plumbing tools, there was no other indication of her occupation.

“Are you really a plumber?” Taeyeon blurted before she could stop herself.

The pretty girl with twinkling eyes let out a small laugh and grinned, revealing a set of neat and tidy pearly whites, before answering, “Technically speaking, I’m not a plumber.”

Taeyeon’s eyes widened at once and she was immediately wary of the girl until she added, “But my father is a plumber and I know all about plumbing because I help him out sometimes.”

“Oh, well, in that case…the toilet is this way.” Taeyeon gestured towards her room and led the plumber’s daughter in. “I’m sorry but it really stinks.”

“Wow, it really does. What did you eat?” asked the plumber’s daughter as she whipped out a face mask from her enormous bag and put it on.

“A tub of yoghurt.”

The plumber’s daughter raised an eyebrow and Taeyeon felt compelled to tell her the full story.

“My friends and I were playing ‘truth or dare’ last night and I picked ‘dare’. They dared me to finish a tub of yoghurt at one go. Yoghurt doesn’t usually give me a tummy ache but one whole tub is probably too much, I guess.”

With that, the plumber’s daughter giggled. “Guess you won’t be eating yoghurt for a while then.”

Taeyeon found herself blushing and shaking her head. “No, definitely not.”

“Right. Work time.”

Taeyeon watched as the plumber’s daughter got to work. She handled her tools efficiently and seemed adept at unclogging the toilet bowl.

“What’s that?” Taeyeon asked when the plumber’s daughter took out a long coil of metallic wire.

“This? My father calls this the electric eel. It’ll clear the clogs that plungers can’t clear.”

“Oh…”

Taeyeon watched in silence for the rest of the time and soon, the problem was solved and her toilet bowl was cleared. However, her embarrassment increased by tenfold when it became obvious that the object that was clogging up her toilet bowl was in fact, a pair of .

The plumber’s daughter looked up at her amusedly.

“Another stupid dare,” Taeyeon hurriedly explained, blushing at the display of stupidity that she and her friends had put up and hating that she was alone to carry the shame of having their antics revealed to a pretty stranger. Change of subject, please!

“Anyway, thank you so much…er…what’s your name?” Taeyeon realized that she hadn’t gotten the plumber’s daughter’s name.

“Well, you know my family name since you called us.”

“Hwang?”

The plumber’s daughter smiled and nodded. “Hwang. Tiffany Hwang is my name.”

“Thank you, Tiffany.”

“You’re welcome. But that will be a hundred bucks, Miss Kim.”

.

~