Moved

In the wild uncertainty of a world neither known nor understood I can draw a great comfort from the few constants that exist.

Death. Taxes. Miserable interactions with internet providers.

I moved into my new house. It's pretty great. The move has wreaked havoc on my writing time table, however, and on my blog upkeep. Just getting back into the swing of around two thousand words a day. Sometimes even the right ones. Sometimes in the right order. Other times, not so much. But wrong words can be fun too.

Fortunately, in my time away, I've been spared a deluge of topics that are mind crushingly worthless, such as Jenner's genitals (does it matter? I'm not having sex with them), emerging political campaigns (does it matter? No matter what, one of them is going to screw me) and trending hashtags (it doesn't matter.).

Instead, I've been spending my days filled with moving things, accidentally stabbing sofas, trying not to antagonize my brilliant gorgeous and supremely forgiving wife who loves that sofa, and the plight of the lemming. And occasionally, actually managing to read and write.

They're not suicidal, you know. Lemmings. They're just prone to anxiety and if you scare them enough, you can make them stampede in extremely dangerous places.

Some wrong words on a wrong story instead of anything useful, however, are enclosed below. Feel free to skip ahead if you don't feel like reading a tragic story of love found, love lost, ambition and defecation. Any resemblance to my wife's life experience is unintentional* and not at all a real thing*.

The door creaks open on worn hinges, barely a sound disturbing the blackness contained. The room is empty, dark and cool. Vague box-like shapes form the few minimalist contents there-in, and the wash of light from the hallway illuminates only clean floor tiles and sterile white walls. She is alone. She hurriedly slips inside, a quiet anxiety fueling her steps. As her foot crosses the threshold the lights snap into life, taught with a pulsing fluorescent glow that makes everything seem dead and false, washed out, a simulacrum of life. The heavy wooden door softly groans shut behind her, letting out a firm, audible thud as it finds its place. A smile steals a sinuous path along her lips.

“Hellooooo!” She calls out, to no response. A totally vacant bathroom, one that has not been despoiled in the past fifteen minutes, or however long it takes the automatic lighting system to turn itself off. Jackpot.

            With a manic grin she spins around, her hands up in the air, all hips and legs, frenetically flailing her way through a dance she does not know and is pleasantly certain that no one has ever given a name. Her years of training as a dancer lower their head in shame.

            “Hit me baby, one more time!” Oh yes. She went there. The song may have been over ten years old, but fuck ‘em. A true classic never dies. Her smile splits open and surges into a laugh that echoes off the empty stalls and walls.

She flings open the handicap corner stall, wipes for a feverish few moments at the toilet seat with a spare piece of single-ply toilet paper and tosses it into the feminine hygiene receptacle, humming with haphazard enthusiasm along to the song. Even the hygiene box is empty except for the newly wrinkled scrap. College custodians hard at work. She adorns the door’s garment hook with her worn college book bag, packed to unforgiving capacity with worn college books. With a tug, her yoga pants and undergarments no longer restrain her and she plops down on the clean cold white.

She is alone in her sterile kingdom, seated on her porcelain throne, humming with deranged delight. The little wonders see us through. She relaxes, in no rush at all, easing into her processes when a mighty sound blasts across the bathroom.

“Snrrrrrrrrrrrrkgh!” 

It is something between a mighty groan and the fluid garbled inhalations of someone with an acute case of tuberculosis. Her humming stops instantly.

“Wha?” She manages. Waits. 

No sound returns to her but the dull echo of her voice. She peeks under the door. Nothing. No incriminating feet, no judgmental glimpse of boots aiming at her, turned in frowning disapproval at her conduct as someone gazes in to view her shame. No large hooves indicating a reasonable source of such a snorting bellow. She is forced to consider, with grim dread, that the sound had originated from herself, unfelt, unknown, and unwilled.

Back to ground zero on the relaxation process, she notes. Tentatively, she lowers her shoulders from their stressed, vulture hunch and drifts back toward contentment.

“Don’t you know? I still believe, still believe!” She sings to herself, but quieter, more reserved, bursting in with the final chorus line, not in words, but in humming once more. Surely more acceptable.

“SNRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRKGH!” 

She catches herself on the toilet paper dispenser as she topples from the toilet seat, her need to utilize the toilet mercifully and instantaneously quenched.

“The fu-hell-shi-what?” She stammers out, rising to her feet and backing away into the corner, upsetting the toilet brush.

Then she hears it. It starts out low, and starts to grow. Not the Whos down in Whoville, however, no sir. A low, guttural, waxing rush, like waves against a beach. She ever so quietly eases open the door, as if silence now will conceal her. She creeps out, her soft shoes meeting the floor. She stops, looks down, and tugs up her yoga pants. Her eyes navigate the sliver separating the neighboring stall door from the stall foundation, peeking in, checking for any sneaky, hiding inhabitants or lurking, snorting serial killers. Whatever kind of person would commit such a sound. It takes her a moment to discern the tangle of hair and knees and drool from which the sound burst forth, a low, steadily rising, steadily wettening rush of air.

A tiny fellow student is perched on the toilet, open text book in her lap, pale legs bare but shrouded in her tangled messy hair. Her head dangles low against her shapeless chest, her mouth gapes, pooling drool on the open book. Our heroine, realizing she is no longer alone, feels her heart stammer in surprise. Perhaps she should wake the girl. Maybe she should check her vitals. She’s studied nursing for the last three years, perhaps the sleeping girl has stimulated her vagal nerve and passed out from the prodigious effort of pooping. From the unconscious, cavernous mouth a mighty, belching snore rips forth in a tremendous surge of sound and power that betrays its owner's diminutive size.

“SNRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRKGH!”

She takes a step back automatically. In near-reverence she creeps quietly, ever so carefully out the door, letting it slip shut behind her, back into the hallway, a revenant from the sleeping beast’s domain.

Hours later, she finds herself alone once more, driving her tiny blue Hyundai Accent with its forest of air fresheners and a spare pink stethoscope looped over the rear view mirror, howling out Britney Spears to hell and the heavens. There is a two second lull between songs on her CD (It’s not as if vintage Britney Spears hits the radio anymore, no chance of catching it there) which hearkens her back to an earlier time that day. 

She thinks of the messy tiny balled up girl sitting on a toilet, having quite possibly slept through her finals. Having quiet possibly had a brain aneurysm from the force of trying to pass her bowels and now was some necrotic terror waiting in an empty bathroom for the next falsely confident person to enter and plop down beside her.

“Ah, shit,” she shrugs, thrusting her fist up at the ceiling as she double taps rewind. “One more time!”