The Romance Is Gone
I wake up. I get out of bed to take a piss, and when I get to the bathroom I look down and discover a giant log of shit nestled in a wad of brown-and-yellow-streaked toilet paper in our toilet. I know I didn’t give birth to this fucking thing, and the kids never use this bathroom, nor could anything this size come out of one of their assholes. It had to be Alyna. She’s still asleep.
I stare this thing down and it’s peeking out of the water almost like it has a head, like it’s staring back at me daring me to flush it, like it knows there’s no way my toilet is strong enough to break it in half and suck it down, because it sure as fuck isn’t going down in one piece. Something deep inside me doesn’t want to flush it, anyway. Some greater sense of human justice keeps reminding me that it was Alyna, the same woman who bitched at me for jerking off, who brought this abomination into the world. This transgression cannot go without reprimand.
Before I issue a false accusation, I bend down and really look the thing over to make sure there’s absolutely no way it could have been produced in one of my kids’ colons, to make sure the blame for this inhumane act of disgusting bathroom etiquette could only lie with a fully grown adult human being. I know Jane can’t even wipe her ass by herself, and Andy isn’t great at it. There’s no way the toilet paper that’s with the turd would be that neatly wadded. It must be the work of an adult.
Is it possible that it was some other person? Is this evidence of a stranger in my bedroom? The cable man? Did Alyna fuck some other guy while I was at work, and did he fuck her so hard that he worked up a shit he chose to leave unflushed in my toilet to mark his territory? This seems pretty unlikely to me. I finally conclude that my initial instinct was correct. Alyna pushed out a burrito-size turd and just left it in the toilet without thinking about it, or perhaps left it there on purpose in some kind of passive-aggressive protest to something I’ve done. Either way, this must be addressed.
I wake her up. I say, “Alyna,” and nudge her.
She wakes up and says, “What? Are the kids okay?”
“Yeah. Can you come look at something, though?”
“What?”
“Just come here.”
“It’s Saturday.” She’s clearly not happy about getting out of bed before she’s ready to as I lead her into the bathroom and get her to stand directly in front of the toilet with the lid up.
She looks in the bowl and says, “So?”
I’ve worked this line up. I’m sure it’ll get my point across. I say, “So . . . if you have to do that, can you at least flush?” putting as much effort as I can into mocking the tone she used with me when she caught me jerking off.
Either she doesn’t remember saying the same thing to me, or she chooses to ignore my inflection. She flushes the toilet and says, “Sorry. Now can I get thirty more minutes of sleep, please,” then walks back into the bedroom. I have to flush the toilet again to get the turd all the way down after she leaves, then I piss with the seat down and purposely splash some on the seat.