letting his English class read "Guts". Plot summary "Guts" begins with the narrator, aptly named "Saint Gut-Free", telling the reader to hold their breath for the duration of the story. The narrator then describes three stories of male masturbation gone horribly awry. In the first story, an adolescent boy inserts a Vaseline-lubricated carrot into his rectum to stimulate his prostate, then, in haste, stashes it in a pile of laundry when he is called to dinner. Later, his mother takes the laundry away and presumably discovers the used carrot, but never mentions the incident. Next, the narrator tells the tale of a young boy who, having heard that it enhances masturbatory pleasure, inserts a thin stick of candle wax into his urethra. The wax unexpectedly slips back into the boy's bladder, thereby blocking his urine flow and causing blood to seep from his penis. Because he requires expensive surgery, his parents are forced to pay to repair his bladder with the boy's college savings. Finally, the narrator explains how he himself suffered a sexual injury, when sitting on the water-intake valve at the bottom of his home swimming pool while masturbating. While swimming down to the bottom of the pool to stimulate his prostate before coming up for air—a repetitive process he refers to as "pearl diving"—the suction from the valve causes his rectum and lower intestines to prolapse and become tangled in the filter. Ultimately, he finds himself stuck on the bottom of the pool and must gnaw through his own innards to free himself and avoid drowning. When Saint Gut-Free's sister later becomes pregnant, he falsely believes that he is the father of an incestuous child, since he thinks his sister has encountered the semen he leaves in their family swimming pool on that fateful day (she is actually pregnant by her boyfriend and decided to have an abortion). In between the main stories, Saint Gut-Free muses over families who cover up their loved ones' accidental deaths by autoerotic asphyxiation. In doing so, he highlights the theme of sexual repression throughout the tale. For example, in all three cases of sexual trauma, the parents are aware of the erotic nature of their son's accidents, but never discuss them afterwards. As a result, their sons are forced figuratively to "hold their breath" in the silence that lingers. Saint Gut-Free refers to these moments of sexual repression as the "invisible