Early this morning I walked into the bathroom and found it on the floor. My heart slammed against my ribs the second I saw it. A twisted, dried, alien-looking thing rested on the cold tiles, staring back in awful silence. Every possibility that flashed through my mind was worse than the last—each more grotesque, more intimate, more wrong. I could not look away. I could not breathe. It sat there small enough to ignore yet horrifying enough to consume every thought. I circled it for minutes that felt like hours, afraid to touch it and equally afraid not to.

Was it an organ? Some kind of parasite? Something dropped, discarded, half-alive? The internet offered nothing but more dread. The cat prowling nearby turned the whole room into a crime scene that did not yet make sense. I stood frozen between curiosity and revulsion, the ordinary bathroom suddenly charged with the feeling that something private and terrible had been revealed.