Haunted
Chuck Palahniuk
 "Guts" begins with the narrator telling the reader to hold their breath for the duration of the story. The narrator then describes several unnerving incidents involving adolescent boys masturbating. First, he describes a boy inserting a lubricated carrot into his rectum to stimulate his prostate while masturbating, and then hiding the carrot in a pile of laundry. His mother later takes the laundry away and presumably discovers the lubricated carrot, but never mentions it to him. Next, the narrator describes a young boy inserting a thin stick of candle wax into his urethra to stimulate it while masturbating. The wax slips back into the boy's bladder, which causes his urine flow to be stopped almost entirely and blood to seep from his penis. It requires expensive surgery to remove it, which the parents pay for using all the money from the boy's college savings. The narrator then refers, in passing, to numerous boys of about the same age accidentally asphyxiating themselves while masturbating, a fad to which a spike in teenage suicide rates is attributed. Finally, the narrator describes an incident in which he sat on the water intake at the bottom of a swimming pool while masturbating in a process he refers to as "Pearl diving". The suction causes his rectum and lower intestines to prolapse and become tangled in the filter, forcing the narrator to gnaw through his own innards to free himself and avoid drowning. The narrator's sister later becomes impregnated by semen deposited by the narrator in the pool, which results in her having an abortion. In the case of the three core incidents, although the parents of the boys involved knew about the incident, they never discussed it afterwards, causing all three to figuratively "hold their breath" while they waited for the reaction that never came. It is also called the boys' "invisible carrot" in a reference to the first story where the boys mother discovers the carrot he had placed in his anus to achieve a more pleasurable orgasm. Purportedly all three of these incidents are based on true stories. According to Palahniuk, the first two tales came from his friends' experiences and the third he heard while shadowing sexual addiction support groups as research for Choke. In one of these groups, he met an extremely thin man. When Palahniuk asked him how he stayed so thin, he told him "I had a massive bowel resectioning." When Palahniuk asked what he meant, he told him the story which was the basis for the third episode in "Guts".