Wrappers in a Stairwell
The city officials were notified the very first time it happened. Immediately, they knew their city had changed. A single condom wrapper, left in a stairwell, revealed that things were no longer the same.
They were not of one voice. Some of the officials smiled knowingly. Others were aghast. Still others were curious and wondered what they were going to do that night, and that maybe their lives were not interesting enough to understand such a strange event.
In bigger cities it happened all of the time, where that kind of object indicated perversions worse than an innocuous (but clearly mouth-watering) littering incident.
Action had to be taken. The police were contacted.
At first the police inspectors couldn’t get their heads around the problem. A single thin metallic condom wrapper was found in a stairwell. Big shit. They couldn’t understand why they were being contacted. Of course they took littering seriously, and of course they understood the need to respond unambiguously, even righteously, to give the message that even a small infraction such as this mattered, since it impacted both the physical and moral health of the good citizens of their small town.
But still — a good fuck, surely there’s nothing wrong with that?
But as they investigated and started speaking to the inhabitants of the apartment building whose stairwell had been the scene of the illicit affair — that’s when they began to take it seriously and to state unambiguously that nobody should be doing that sort of thing in a stairwell. Clearly, only depraved lovers do this, people who don’t and can’t control their urges, people who are dangerously irresponsible and therefore criminals. The message they sent was clear and direct. It appeared on local television and was posted on every wall of every store and establishment, and lavishly displayed in every stairwell of the small suddenly troubled town.
But the wrapper wasn’t the point. Was it? It was the act. The lovely act, as one inspector described it. Her name was Louise.
Louise was a woman in her thirties who had never had the occasion to use a condom because she loved only women. She asked her superiors if she could lead the investigation and that she’d like to work alone, except: she’d need some help from one of the city officials who were equally concerned by the obvious moral decrepitude taking over their village.
She had, of course, only one city official in mind: Councilwoman Brenda, her most recent lover.
Louise and Brenda thus took up a cause that gave them the opportunity to be openly together without anyone knowing they were lovers.
Stairwells, the inspector wondered — What’s the big deal? I mean, Why is it such a shock? People in love do all sorts of things.
But she wondered: What’s it like to do that? There?
She and Brenda decided that they would need to go on site and see what hidden clues and unknown witnesses they could discover. When they arrived they kept a professional face but looked at each other much longer than would warrant a professional partnership.
Some could say that them working together was irresponsible, as unreasonable as fucking in a stairwell. But it was a small indiscretion that would not impact their objectivity in finding the culprits. It was only when Louise suggested they try to imagine themselves committing the crime, so as to find the more sinister hidden clues that lay beneath the surface, that Brenda smiled knowingly and finally understood.
Louise was aware of Brenda’s weakness for the promise of sex. Brenda only needed to be taken by the hand by her inspector-lover to go to the scene of the crime that very night and to lower her pants, raise one of her legs to expose her delicious desire to such a hungry police officer’s own yearnings. Two pairs of lips, one feverishly tasting, licking up every last humid drip of the other’s joy, lips to lips, face to lips, fingers digging in. Louise could not stop, it was so good, and Brenda had lost any sense of reasonableness.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to these two lovers, the original couple was currently going at it furiously in another empty stairwell, this time all the way on a top floor of an abandoned apartment. No chance they’d be discovered. Yet they were careful to leave their mark — this time, though, 2 wrappers, since they had the time for a second one, the second one even slower than the first.
And why not? They were proud to have started an epidemic. You see, now they were not the only couple fucking in stairwells. There were others.
It was a few days later they found the second and third wrappers and it was only a few days after that other wrappers appeared. All forces went on the alert. At one point, they were sure to have found the couple. They had nearly caught them in the act. The young couple were in their early 20s, soon to be married. Many thought it was probably ethically permissible for this couple to be doing this, but the couple was nonetheless booked with a crime, to set an example of proper living in their town. They were sent off to jail.
Except that .. well .. another wrapper appeared the next day, this time with a bit of the love still spread on it, still wet, thus indicating that the wrong couple was in jail. The real couple was still out there.
Only Louise had seen the engraving on the wall. It was recent. And still dripping.
Z + A = 😋
She told nobody. She spoke in whispers to Brenda as they dusted and grinded away looking for further signs of Z + A’s naughty behavior.
Wrappers began to show up all over, seemingly in every stairwell. Citizen task forces were put on the case, pairing off to stay in nearly every stairwell, and yet surprisingly, wrappers kept showing up even in the stairwells they so closely monitored. That’s when the police and city officials forbid the pairings of women and men in these task forces, but still wrappers showed up, and so the only explanation would be men with other men .. which was possible but not in such numbers, unless .. well, not to overlook anything, they decided that only women would keep an eye on the stairwells. This solved most of the problems, but wrappers still showed up.
Let’s not, at this point, forget Louise and Brenda. They had never solved the case.
Oddly, everything in the town began to change. People were working harder, craft workers were creating artwork instead of baskets, butchers were going vegetarian, and athletes were breaking local records.
One runner broke an international record, and this is what many consider to be the start of how the world changed.
When news broke out that a particular world record for speed was broken not by milliseconds, as is usual, but by a whole 12 seconds, journalists came in droves. Before long, the epidemic of wrappers took over the headlines and spread across the globe. Many see this as the beginning of the next epoch of mankind.
But who was the very first couple? Who started it all? This became the question of many generations to follow. While it was indeed a single couple, it was hard to know which of the original thousands should be given the recognition.
And what, some dreamily wondered, was their tree of life?
Meanwhile, the first couple was still fucking — in hotels, stairwells, bathrooms in dark restaurants, and in every church in town. Recently, they had sneaked into a cafe and fucked in a corner faster than it took the waiter to get their order. They left the cafe undetected.
They among all lovers managed to stay secret. They kept their secrets for themselves, and took every memory to their graves — at which point, they had to stop.
