There’s this thing people tell you to do when you get nauseous. Stick your head between your knees. What it does is, it increases the blood flow to your brain. Place your head at or below the level of your heart, and it doesn’t have to work against gravity. That means more oxygen to the brain, which is supposed to reduce the nausea. That's the idea, anyway.

But the truth is, people only tell you to do that so you don’t spray chunks all over the back seat of their newly upholstered car. So they don’t have to look at your green face for another second.

It’s just one of those things we say to make each other feel better.

I had this friend back in high school. Real goofy kid, long arms that he couldn’t control half the time. This friend of mine, he joins the football team his freshman year. And every year, the coaches, they plan this whole campout shindig at the beginning of the season. For team bonding or whatever. And there’s this woman, this old woman, who lives out in the hills all on her own. Some big booster for the school’s athletic programs. She hosts this campout year after year on her stretch of land out there in the hills. A wide grass lot with this tiny white house plopped down out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. She lived out there for years, all alone, except for her big German shepherd Bruno.

So, this old lady, she cooks up this fancy steak dinner for the whole team that night. As a special treat. Juicy hunks of T-bone that bled all over your plate. Everyone ate up.

That night, the seniors gather every freshman and line them up. Turns out, the upperclassmen, they get to do this whole initiation thing with the freshman at this campout. This was before all of those coaches down in Texas got fired for the hazing lawsuits.

It was hotdogs.

Packages and packages of them started to come out of the senior’s tents. Pink ballpark franks, the ones with the skin still attached. Then they brought out the grills. Small propane-powered camper deals that would either cook the dog to beef jerky or leave the insides raw and cold.

The deal was, you ate until you puked. Last man standing wins. Not that you won anything, really. Except for pride. And not puking.

My buddy said that one kid took a single look at how undercooked the first hotdog he was handed and threw it into reverse right away. Just to get it over with. See, there were fifteen skinny freshmen to feed. And the seniors, they only had two or three of these compact camper cookers. So there wasn’t really any time to cook the things more than a minute. They slide down easier raw, anyhow.

You ever think about what’s actually in a hotdog? Well, I’ll tell you. A whole lot. One thing is mechanically separated turkey. That’s when they force the bones and any other tissue attached through a sieve under high pressure. Like making spaghetti, except with a turkey’s carcass. It ends up feeling like Play Dough, the consistency. Then there’s beef stock. The boiled-down leftover muscles, tendons, joints, and bones from whatever sorry animal ended up in the slaughterhouse that day. All kinds of filler, too. Corn syrup, cornstarch, dried milk, cereal grains. Salt. Preservatives. Flavorings. All stuffed inside the small intestine of a sheep.

Inside your guts, it’s just a smorgasbord of slippery meat that leads from one end to the other. Your stomach is just a hollow muscle lined in mucus and bloated with hydrochloric acid and whatever was for supper. Whatever’s in hotdogs, whatever’s in your guts… They’re practically the same.

I'm just saying that to make you feel better.

Most kids got six or seven hotdogs in them before having a Technicolor yawn. My buddy said that one kid, his eyes bulged so far out of his head when he was going he thought he might die. There was a big orange bubble of bile that grew from his nose and then popped.

A whole junior varsity team’s worth of freshmen hurled their guts out onto the lawn. A symphony of sickness. The entire time, the old lady’s German shepherd Bruno strolled along behind them and chowed down on the spoils of war. Chunks of chewed-up and uncooked hotdogs mixed in with half-digested bits of T-bone steak in a soup of orange gastric acid. What was left over afterwards sunk into the ground and killed all of the grass in a long patchy line.

Even now, this buddy of mine says he can’t even look at a sausage without gagging. He said to me that the worst part wasn’t even the vomiting bit. It was the afterwards. Turns out your guts have a tough time dealing with a pound of undercooked hotdog meat and T-bone steak.

Then there was this other gal. A cheerleader. She was a junior and had just made varsity. That year during Homecoming, the cheerleading squad had this big fundraiser. They sold homemade cupcakes and cookies. Lots of them. There were posters everywhere. Then they spent all the money on these spiffy new uniforms.

The uniforms come in and they’re real nice. Sparkling fringe lined the bust and the skirts didn’t come up too high and flowed easily. There was a big pressed-on patch of our school’s mascot across the chest. Wiley Coyote. But the thing was, they all arrived a size too small.

And this girl, she wasn’t too big or nothing. Big for a cheerleader. She was tall. Wide shoulders. She needed a large. And of course, all they had were mediums.

So what she did was, she finished lunch early that day. Cold corn dog and peas. She tossed her tray and walked into the ladies’ room. She found a stall way down by the end and went in. Then she knelt down, stuck her middle finger into the back of her throat, tickled her tonsils, and filled the toilet bowl with acid chowder.

She did this again and again.

This girl, she purged so much that her bottom teeth started to wear down into these little yellow stubs. From all of the stomach acid.

But hey, you know how that goes. Once it starts to come up, there isn’t much you can do to stop it. Just gotta let it all out.

One of those things we say to make each other feel better.

Another thing that all of that stomach acid will do, is it’ll cause these lesions in the soft lining of your throat. Small tears that’ll send up blood every time you retch. Now the party’s really started. Then excruciating abdominal pain wants in on the fun. Esophageal ruptures show up late.

Pretty soon, names like Mallory-Weiss and Herman Boerhaave start to have some relevance in your life.

I wasn’t there. I didn’t have Mrs. Chaska’s fifth period English on the second floor right after lunch. But I heard there was so much blood that it ran down into the air vents. She just coughed up a mouthful of red in her desk and fell over. That’s what I heard, at least. An ambulance came. It was a big scene. They loaded her up onto a stretcher, put her on her side, and then we never saw her again. Her family moved to Idaho or somewhere. Two of our janitors spent the rest of the day scrubbing all of the throat blood out of the air ducts with a ladder and a bucket.

But hey, she fit into that cheerleading uniform at least. You’ve gotta admire the commitment.

What happened to me was, we were at a Korean restaurant in the city. I was feeling adventurous that night and asked my girlfriend at the time what was good to order. We’re not dating any more. That night we had been drinking a bit.

“I’ll handle this,” she says. She grabs my menu and says something to the server — sannakji. Beats me. We order more drinks and wait for our food.

Some time later when the both of us are nice and oiled up with expensive soju our server walks up to our booth with a silver tray. She sets it down on the table. A slimy mess of pale goop and a wooden stick. That’s when I learn that nakji means octopus in Korean. I try to send it back. But my girl won’t let me. She says I have to. It’ll be fun. It’ll be an experience.

Let me tell you something—that was one of the few things this girl was ever right about.

The little suckers on the tentacles stuck to the tray go pop as the server lifts the squirmy guy off. It’s still alive. The server grips the wriggling thing with his fist and runs her hand down, straightening the long arms out. It’s about as long as my forearm. She does this a few times. Then she picks up the wooden stick that was on the tray. She wraps the thing around itself in a tight wad. My girlfriend sits there clapping her hands.

There’s a cup of sesame oil on the tray and another of salt sauce. The server dunks the octopus in the sesame oil. He doesn’t seem to like it very much. Next is the salt sauce. He’s not big on that either.

Something I learned in Ms. Bailey’s fifth period Biology class, the class I was in when that cheerleader was having an esophagus eruption, was this thing about invertebrates. Most of them are pretty basic. Coral. Slugs. Fruit flies. But not octopuses. Octopuses are smart. They can find their way through mazes and they can distinguish between shapes and colors. They can use tools.

When these things are inside of your mouth, slimy and struggling for life, you feel none of that. It’s just a battle between your jaw, all eight arms, and a thousand suction cups.

Those small suckers, they grip to your tongue. The insides of your cheeks. The back of your throat. Your tonsils. You’ve just got to keep chewing.

If you want to know what it feels like, just stick a vacuum hose in your mouth and try to swallow.

The sides of my mouth are sore and tired. I’ve gnawed on this thing for what seems like an hour and it’s still writhing around inside. Screw it. I’ll swallow the bastard whole. I close my eyes and take a big gulp.

Halfway down, the octopus stops sliding. It’s stuck. Like when you try to gulp down too much spaghetti at once. The thing grips to the insides of my throat with two tentacles. The other five are wrapped around my tongue. One is stuck in between my teeth. He’s holding on for dear life, trying to pull himself out of the darkness. My gag reflex wants to swallow but he just won’t go down. He refuses to. They’re smart. I bet they know what death is.

I reach my hand inside of my mouth and try to yank him out. But that just hurts. The pulling of the suckers on the soft insides of my throat. I give him another tug. I can feel my windpipe move around with him.

My girlfriend starts to panic.

“Breath through your nose, honey, breath through your nose.” She keeps saying over and over. The server stands there.

I stand up and try to swallow him down again. No go. Little specks of light start to dance around in my eyes. He’s pulling my tongue backward through my mouth. That one tentacle jammed between my teeth. Breath through your nose. Breath through your nose.

And right then I feel the need to jazz up the carpet.

Once it starts to come up, there isn’t much you can do to stop it.

My tummy pulses and warm whistle chunks are sent straight up my throat. I bend over to let it all spill out of my mouth. But it’s not coming up. The egg-shaped head of the octopus is blocking my windpipe like a cork in a wine bottle. The pressure in the back of my throat starts to build. The white specks of light whizz around faster. Breath through your nose.

If I can’t tear this octopus from my tongue in the next thirty seconds, I’ll suffocate on my own puke. If I can’t blow my chunks in next ten, this octopus is going to win.

The server runs back to the kitchen shouting something in Korean. My girlfriend grabs the knife from her silverware.

The restaurant paid for our meal. They told me that when I woke up. When my family came to visit me, there wasn’t much to be said. I couldn’t say anything back anyway. Silence is golden.

And it turns out, having half a tongue really puts a damper on things in the bedroom. Your girlfriend being the one who cut it out is just worse. Like I said, we broke up.

People get all uppity when I say that I need my dinner blended up and served in a cup. But now, I’ll try just about anything. Even liquid octopus. And people think I’m a mute whenever I open my mouth to speak. So I don’t. But the truth is that I’m just lucky to have something to wiggle around back there.

You don’t look fat in that dress. Put your legs between your knees. Everything is going to be okay.

Those things we say to make each other feel better.

When I was in the hospital I thought a lot about those things. Because now, I can’t say any of them.

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What's good. This is another short story I've been workshopping for a minute now. Still has a ways to go. Not much else to be said, because it all gets said above. Let me know what you think. Let me know if it grossed you out any, or if it made you squirm.