Author: Michelle Franklin, Word Count: 536 Words
Featured in Spooky Archaeological Story Moot: Live Stream – 2025
“I am very sorry to tell you,” the doctor began gravely, “but your uterus has gone.”
Rita sat up, half expecting the doctor to tell her that she had an alien living inside her. This was somehow worse. “Whaddaya mean my uterus is missing?” she exclaimed. “It can’t just get up and walk away!”
“I’m afraid it has. It is the most peculiar thing, but there is a cave where your uterus once was. The fire is on and the bed is made, but instead of your uterus, there is a small handwritten note. Let me see if I can read it.” The doctor put on his good glasses, squinted, and hemmed. “To my progenitor: I am writing to inform you that I am vacating the premises. I am going on a long holiday, to do all the things you never let me do. You will know where I am by the things I send back, and until I return, I bid you adieu!”
“But when did it leave?” Rita asked. “It didn’t tell me it was going!”
The doctor folded is glasses. “Can you think back to a time when you might have accidentally got rid of it?”
It might have fallen overboard when she was on the boat that one time, or she might have sneezed too hard and expelled it along with the meatball that had perched atop her spaghetti and rolled along the floor, but whatever the case, the uterus had gone and took most of its things with it. To be sure it hadn’t fallen in with the socks, Rita checked under the bed, but it wasn’t with the dust bunnies. She checked in her closet, where she thought she might have hung it up, to save it for a special occasion beside the boa feathers and her patent leather shoes, but it wasn’t there. She checked the dish where she kept her car keys, since they were known to get up and walk away during one of their many affairs with the wallet, but the uterus was nowhere to be seen.
Rita began frantically putting up posters around town: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS UTERUS? But nobody had. She tried milk carton ads, which read: MISSING. UTERUS. 3 INCHES TALL. 2 INCHES WIDE. 1 INCH THICK. WEIGHT: 60 GRAMS, EXCEPT WHEN WEARING BLACK. HAS FRIENDLY SMILE. But no one had any information as to wither the uterus had gone.
In the thick of evening, when its owner had been asleep, the uterus had packed its bag and begun is long-awaited adventures. Its owner had done many things in life, but the uterus had seldom been allowed to participate, and it had decided that it was better off without its landlord. It was sorry for the bait and switch, but it knew that if it asked for permission, it should never have been allowed to leave for an extended period of time, and it always better to beg forgiveness than ask permission, especially one who had held it captive for so long. It was doing nothing anyway, forced to retire early after being labeled REDUNDANT, and if its owner had been on planes and travelled by sea, than why shouldn’t the uterus?
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