The Last Adult Superstore: A Story by John Wiswell

This is a story from the April 2024 issue of Worlds of Possibility. It also appears in Worlds of Possibility Volume 2, which is available for free as an ebook, and which will be available in hardcover format sometime in the next couple of months. I've been wroking hard behind the scenes to get all the contributor copies out, and soon, I will have news for everyone on how you can get a physical copy.

The Last Adult Superstore
by John Wiswell

I was halfway between Boise and Buffalo when the porn beckoned me. On a stretch of beat-up interstate, where Spotify kept skipping struggling and reconnecting, where I could smell brine in the wind despite being in the middle of a timberland. There the conifers parted to reveal a forlorn billboard:

NEXT EXIT: THE LAST ADULT SUPERSTORE

Steel gray letters in a stiff font on a stark black background, like it was a law firm specializing in lube. The billboard was weathered, its colors washed out as though it’d been up and untouched for years. Sex toy shops were a dying breed. Now everybody had the internet.

Badly as I needed to get home, I was also dreading the face-to-face with my boss and the mountain of travel laundry. Some days just doing chores around the house made me want to break down sobbing. Being on the road a little longer was an escape from the dual purgatories of work and home.

“Maybe they have a bathroom,” I told myself as I took the exit.

I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this. “The Last Adult Superstore” looked like a Costco, a football field-sized rectangle of a building with cheap white walls. If not for having their name emblazoned on the side of the building, I would never have thought this was the place. How much porn could they be warehousing in there? How many aisles had to be dedicated to leather handcuffs alone to justify this monster?

I actually got a little giddy as I sidled in. This was going to be a stadium of raunch.

What greeted me were boxes. So damned many boxes. Generic cardboard units as far as the eye could see, all lifeless recycled brown. No color. I went right over to the nearest shelf. Did they sell their sex toys in discreet packages so people could take them home without judgment?

The first box wasn’t the yeti-themed dildo I’d hoped for. Printed in the same generic professional font as their billboard, it promised:

GET OFF YOUR PHONE AND FALL ASLEEP AT A DECENT HOUR

I turned the box over, expecting a view window to see what the heck that was describing. Was this packaging talking down to you as part of a subservient humiliation fetish or something? But there was no window or product explanation.

The next box over had the same bland font. It offered:

SET HEALTHY BOUNDARIES WITH YOUR PARENTS NOW THAT YOU’VE MOVED OUT (medium)

What the actual heck? Was this a mommy/daddy fetish thing? I actually shook one of those boxes. It was sturdy, like it was heavily insulated. In fact, all the boxes felt stiff like the packaging was meant to keep the contents safe. I didn’t think I’d ever gotten a sex toy that was this firmly packaged.

All the product names were baffling. It was like baffling shoppers was their brand.

STOP CARING ABOUT RANDOM PERSON WHO’S WRONG ON THE INTERNET

ACTUALLY START HOBBY INSTEAD OF JUST COMPLAINING YOU WANT TO

MAKE NEW FRIENDS

I double-checked that one. That was all it said. ‘Make new friends?’ If I squinted, I could pretend that was about poly people and hook-up culture, but it didn’t read like that next to everything else. I didn’t get it. Was this a palace of hyper-specific fetishes? What was even in these boxes that had to be packed tight like nuclear launch codes?

There was nobody around me. No clerks and no leather daddies. I could mess up the whole aisle if I wanted.

I grabbed the next box I saw. At the very bottom of one side it read:

DO YOUR LAUNDRY

Unbelievable.

I clutched it in front of me and marched it to the checkout line. There had to be somebody on staff there.

Behind the register was six feet of slender white boy, with perfectly coiffed blonde hair, a sharp grey suit, and a cobalt tie that did not belong in a checkout aisle. He and his flawless complexion reminded me of the leads in the shows I’d grown up on. Those model adults who I was older than now, but because the show had been formative to me when I was a kid, would always feel like my senior. Thinking about why made me squirm.

I held this embarrassing box of DO YOUR LAUNDRY out to him. I asked, “What’s in this thing?”

“Just what it says on the box,” said this picture of obnoxiously functional masculinity. “I used to have a problem with laundry myself. Now I use that one all the time. You know if you buy the month-long set, it’s cheaper.”

“What does it… do?” I glanced at the box, feeling my cheeks heat up. I couldn’t believe I was feeling bashful in an adult superstore. “Is it a laundromat-themed costume?”

“Ha! No,” the clerk said. “I guess laundromats could use it. Although that’s intended for use in cleaning your own clothes. Every adult needs a little help. We at the Adult Superstore try to provide what adults need.”

“That can’t be right.”

He smiled, showing off uneven teeth that still looked perfect in his smile because of how comfortable he was with them. Like he never thought about them. “I’m not just a salesperson. I shop here myself when I’m feeling out of sorts.”

I fiddled with the box, and thought about the others promising to MAKE NEW FRIENDS or GET OFF YOUR PHONE AND FALL ASLEEP AT A DECENT HOUR.

“You’re saying this thing in here, in this box, will magically make me do my own laundry? That’s ridiculous.”

The man directed one long and fastidiously manicured fingernail at the package description. “It does a little bit more than that. Read the underside.”

I turned it over. There was a little more text in smaller font I’d missed.

I read, “Do your laundry… without crying?”

“Works for me every time. But if it seems too far-fetched for you—”

I slammed the box down on the checkout conveyor belt. “I’ll take it.”

“Yes, sir. Will this be all today?”

Scratching the back of my neck, I thought about the dreadful task sitting on the other side of doing my laundry. “Well, have you got any products for making meetings with your boss not feel like death spirals?”

The clerk snapped his fingers. “I needed something like that when I started here. I can show you where it is. Let’s get you a cart.”

About the Author

John Wiswell is a Nebula-winning and Locus-winning author who lives in the middle of the woods. His debut novel, Someone You Can Build a Nest In, was released from DAW Books in the U.S. and Arcadia Books in the U.K. in April 2024. John's work has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Tor.com, LeVar Burton Reads, Nature Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Weird Tales, the No Sleep podcast, Nightmare Magazine, Cast of Wonders, Podcastle, Escape Pod, Pseudopod, and other fine venues. He has been a finalist for the Hugo, World Fantasy, and British Fantasy Awards. His fiction has been translated into ten languages. Find him online at https://linktr.ee/johnwiswell.