In the vast, open skies of the Karoo, where the silence is so deep it roars, there sat a peculiar rehab center—a quaint establishment a good stone’s throw from the sleepy town of Colesberg. Fame had touched this remote oasis, not for its outstanding success rate, nor for the tough love of its staff, but for a legend whispered in hushed tones from session to session: The Phantom Shitter.
The specter of this enigmatic entity had danced through the corridors of rehabs across South Africa, depositing its clandestine gifts like a perverse Santa, but it favored this one, where reinforcement was sackcloth-thin, and the night as porous as the desert air.
Here, every Thursday night like clockwork, as the Southern Cross peered down upon the arid earth, the phantom would strike. No rehabber slept easy; their dreams punctuated by the soft pad of footsteps and the faintest scent of mischief.
The staff, hardened by years of unspeakable antics, would discover—come morning—a clinical token of presence. The timing was immaculate, the methodology scrupulous; never was a soul caught in the act, their identity as elusive as a droplet in the desert.
It was the peculiar Thursday bread pudding that unraveled the enigma, a dish of such legendary horridness, made from Woolies jam older than the democracy of the nation. It was said that the jam had fermented to such potency under the Karoo moon, that it had acquired sentient qualities and an ambitious desire to be anywhere but within human bowels.
On a fateful Thursday, a rookie to the recovery game, a newcomer with intestines yet to be hardened by the culinary gamble of the canteen, balked at the week-long parade of gastronomic nightmares. When fresh beetroot, purloined from neighboring fields, made its glorious appearance, the lad gorged himself, unaware of the alchemical transformation his digestive system was about to undergo.
The morning after, amidst the routine dread of the Phantom Shitter’s aftermath, an exclamation shattered the dawn from the bowels of the shared bathroom. The commode, a canvas of the most alarming crimson, had the lad in a panic, thinking his final hour had come as his affliction erupted in a tidal wave of red.
With thoughts of burst hemorrhoids clouding his mind, the poor chap, ashen-faced and wobbly-legged, sought the only medical counsel available: the good doctor, a once-renowned professional now dethroned to patient status, his errors committed under the veil of self-prescribed stupor.
As he lay there, vulnerable and exposed to the too-familiar snap of the doctor’s glove, a horror of vulnerability stabbing sharper than his imagined ailment, an epiphany struck, delivered by the cooing whispers of fellow patients piecing together the mystery of the Thursday feast.
Beetroot—beetroot was the malefactor! His embarrassment was palpable, his relief immense. The beets had been the brush, his insides the artist, and his expulsion an unwitting masterpiece. The phantom shitter’s legacy lived on, but this day, it had found an innocent cohort in the lad’s own drama.
And so, the Phantom Shitter remained a fable shrouded in the red dust of the Karoo, its secrets folded within the desert winds. Who, oh who, was the elusive artist of the night? As ever, the answer lay just beyond reach, left for the next intrepid soul to ponder as they navigated their way through recovery and beetroot debacles alike.
(Do mind the platter, my fine friends. For every meal consumed within these recovery walls carries with it the weight of legend and the price of revelation, one way or another.)