My Mother’s New Toilet Scares Me

My parents remodeled their master bathroom, and my mother decided to install a sleek, Japanese robo-toilet. It sits there in its little room, compact, inert, until it senses someone approaching. Then it opens up a big, glowing, angler fish mouth and hisses. If I were exploring a crashed alien spacecraft and encountered an object with this sort of gaping solicitousness, I’d expect my flesh to be feeding its babies by now.