Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Presents Flush Fiction

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  “Terry, I thought we got past all this. No one can take it like you can. You gotta think strategic. There’s no reason to fight this guy.”

  Mack knows I don’t quit. He also knows if he throws in the towel, I walk. When he took me on, he said no more bar fights. I said fine, but you call a fight and I’m gone. We shook on it. I’d say he’s like a father to me, but that word ain’t a compliment to me.

  “Punch the little bitch, ya fairy,” my old man says. Sipping whiskey, making us fight for his entertainment. My sister Annie’s hair is tied up, and we wear oven mitts for gloves. Tears on our cheeks, we circle the cold basement floor.

  Annie bites her lip and throws a wide hook I can duck, but I don’t. It thumps my ear, which rings for days.

  “Now hit her back, ya little faggot! Toughen her up!”

  Double vision from the water in my eyes, I swing. I go low, but she won’t block. Her lip splits open like red roses on a grave. She falls on her butt, dress deflating, buckled shoes giving the concrete a one-two.

  I rush the old man and he laughs, letting me get a few in, then I wake up in bed with a goose egg on my eyebrow.

  “Terry!” Mack yells, snaps me out of it. “Last chance. Be smart, kid.”

  I pound my gloved fists together, hop off the table. Mack slaps me on the back.

  I walk head first into the crowd’s roar.

  Charlie Makes His Way

  Peggy McFarland

  Charlie left the farm, mostly to escape his heritage. His great-great-great-great-great grandmother’s penchant for pigs and rats worked for her, but Charlie wanted to travel and spin his own tale.

  After miles of heat and dust, Charlotte’s progeny happened upon a remote structure with a tantalizing buzz. He scaled the stone foundation to an opening. He considered this new corner, but the setting sun’s rays glinted upon shards, an omen to continue exploring. Broken windows did not make for comfortable homes.

  He lowered himself into a subterranean room, then stopped and studied his surroundings. Rustlings, buzzings, and murmurs, along with a pleasant dankness—an enticing place for the kind of prey he needed for survival. Yes, this could be home.

  He climbed a table leg to a mahogany surface, clambered over brass handles and descended into a large box. The bottom surface was soft, the walls cushioned. Corners were necessary for the structure he aimed to build. A centipede emerged from between cushions and padding, and nuzzled its way toward a pillow. Flies circled above, occasionally settling upon upholstered buttons. It would be difficult, but if he could build his web, he’d feast. He scurried to the indent and got his gland working. Yes, it would work, he could establish the anchors around those buttons. A hinge and the upper edge were more than suitable. A family of cockroaches convinced him; time to spin.

  Charlie spun his silken radii, which spiraled larger and larger connections to his long, taut frame-threads. He labored most of the night, and reinforced sticky threads in anticipation for crawling delicacies.

  Abdomen aching, eight eyes bloodshot, eight legs sore, Charlie settled into the center of his web, proud of his handiwork. Outside, the night bugs lullaby faded and the first rooster blared to the world. Background noise to Charlie, his attention remained focused on a moth gnawing its way along the cloth. Come on… come on… Charlie thought, anxious to feed.

  So intent on his dinner, Charlie ignored the bat that glided in through the broken window. He also ignored the bat’s evolving shadow—wings snapping outward into a billowing cape, round body elongating into human form, dark face glowing pale in the predawn shimmer.

  Charlie bared his fangs, almost drooled, the moth wing one flap away from the first sticky thread—

  —human-like fingers pinched the moth and flung it upwards. The same brazen hand swiped aside Charlie’s night-long labors. Charlie scrambled, wedged his body behind a button’s pucker and felt the weight of a head settle. Hinges croaked. Charlie was trapped inside blackness.

  Charlie collapsed into misery. Without blood, he would expire. Without a web, he couldn’t suck blood. Within an airtight box, a web was pointless. Charlie peeked out from his hiding spot. Adding insult to injury, the human-esque blob filled almost every inch of available real estate. Charlie crawled onto the head. If he wasn’t so exhausted, he would start a new web anchored in the offender’s hair. A touch of his ancestor’s moxie crept into his tiny brain. He considered weaving a swear word across the snoring mouth. Scurrying to the lips, he revved up his gland. Empty. Didn’t matter, he was too exhausted to finish the task, plus he couldn’t spell. All he truly needed was to escape this coffin and find an airier spot to spin a new home.

  Charlie stopped, sniffed. Warm blood, puddled in a dimple. Charlie skated across skin, swung over a fang and dove for the blood. The face shook. NO! Charlie refused to be shaken off, not until he sated his hunger. No time to spin and anchor. Charlie latched on the rat’s way—he bared his own fangs and chomped into leathery skin.

  Sour blood filled his mouth. The taste was horrific! He curled into a ball, slid off the face. The body shifted, crushing Charlie’s plump body, pinning a leg, tearing off two others. A blacker black enveloped.

  Even with six legs, Charlie could clamber and spring, spin and weave. Penny Zuckerman destroyed every message, but Charlie didn’t care—A-HA and STIL HEER weren’t exactly poetry. Plus, he’d have to move on soon, taunt a new family. The Zuckermans were becoming pale.

  The bathroom light glowed as Penny fumbled through the medicine cabinet for salve. She scratched her angry red welts, screeched when she came upon Charlie putting the finishing touches to U R FUD.

  Her father-in-law Homer blamed his spider problem on a niece. Penny would shout NONSENSE, but her husband, her children, and every visitor to the Zuckerman homestead bore the same red welts. Penny grabbed a can of Aqua-Net and screamed, “I GOT HIM!” until the rest of the family rushed out of their bedrooms, tripped over each other, and chased Charlie. Brooms slammed, newspapers smacked, household items crashed.

  A lamp crushed his engorged body against the wall. Charlie shrugged it off, scurried into a crack, and settled in until the humans retreated. He could wait; he had eternity.

  Almost nightly, they squashed and smashed, swatted and sprayed, and every night Charlie wove a mocking web. Charlie wondered if this would end.

  Maybe a Zuckerman—maybe another family—would look at a genuine baseball bat and get a flash of inspiration. Maybe consider the wood, see a smaller, sharper destiny inside its bludgeon-form. Maybe that victim would think about the lost art of whittling, shave off chunks and refine the slivers until the clumsy sports equipment evolved into a sleek, sharp toothpick. Then that inspired individual might sneak during daylight to the overlooked junk drawer, lift the old shoelaces, push aside dead batteries and toss out useless corks to aim that tiny weapon into the abdomen of Charlie, the vampire-spider.

  Charlie chuckled in his safe-crack, sure that inspiration expired with his ancestor and rarely flashed into human brains. Tomorrow he’d crawl out, weave another word-web and scurry across snoring faces to gorge until his belly bloated.

  Milk Jug Garden

  Sally Clark

  Sometimes you wonder why people do the things they do, until you walk a mile in their shoes or dig a season in their gardens.

  Shortly after my grandparents died, my husband, my two children, and I moved from a big city to a small town of less than five hundred people. We moved into my grandparents’ four-room, un-air-conditioned house where every spring my grandfather planted a vegetable garden on the east side of the house, between the house and the road, barely five feet from a moderately traveled street. After we moved there, I wondered why he hadn’t planted his garden behind the house, between the fig trees and the peach orchard, away from the dust and traffic of the road.

  Although we were “city folk,” my husband, Mike, always enjoyed working a vegetable garden. As soon as the ground warmed, he began weeding and planting in the long, sunny rows my grandf
ather had tended years before.

  One day in early spring, he cut plastic milk jugs in half and placed them around his tiny, new tomato plants to protect them from the sharp wind. As he worked, the owner of the local grocery story, Bunny Weinheimer, slowed his pickup truck and pulled up next to the chicken-wire fence that separated the garden from the road.

  Rolling down his window and shaking his head, Bunny asked my husband with mock concern, “Don’t you city boys know that’s not where milk comes from?”

  Never one to be outdone, my husband smiled and replied, “Well now, Bunny, you see that row of milk jugs over there? Those are male milk jugs. And you see this row over here? These are female milk jugs. I think it’s gonna work.”

  With a broad laugh, Bunny moved his truck on down the road to the store, licking his finger and stroking it down in the air, scoring one for the city boy.

  As the days went by, I watched from the kitchen window as other pickup trucks slowed and stopped beside what was now my husband’s garden. In this German-heritage community, each truck that stopped seemed to have a beer cooler in the back, and the locals were always happy to offer Mike a cold one. To encourage the friendship, he would stop working and accept a beer, lean on whatever rake or hoe was in his hands, and welcome the conversation. But since he was a light drinker, he usually poured the remaining beer out when they drove away, the tomato plants absorbing most of the fermented suds. I decided that my grandfather had chosen that particular space for his garden to cultivate friends as well as vegetables.

  As we settled into the community and the garden began to grow, Mike used mop and broom handles to stake the flourishing tomato plants and tied them with pantyhose to keep them off the ground. They seemed a bit wobblier than usual, but promised a happy crop.

  “Well now, I heard you were trying to grow milk, but what are you trying to grow with those pantyhose?” Alvin Dieke asked as he parked by the garden and popped the top of a beer. “You already got you a wife.”

  “Yeah,” Mike replied, “but she needs help around the house, so I planted a few mops and brooms.”

  “Well, you let me know if that one works,” Alvin laughed. “I’ll bring you some old overalls and maybe you could grow me some help for the farm.”

  As spring passed into summer, the garden began to ripen and the fig trees started to put on tiny green buds of fruit that the blue jays found irresistible. Mike tried tying strips of tin foil to the branches, hoping the reflection of the sun and the motion of the wind would help scare the birds away.

  “Golly, I wish you’d look at that,” Snoogy Jenschke pointed out one day as he leaned out the window of his pickup truck. “I believe you’re trying to grow an air conditioner.”

  “Nah, nothin’ that fancy,” Mike replied. “But I thought the figs might be in a sweeter mood if they were fanned a little now and then.”

  When summer was in full swing, we had a glorious crop of tomatoes—red, ripe, and juicy.

  “Must be the secret ingredient,” Mike said. “I never knew tomatoes drank beer.”

  “Yes, but I’m disappointed,” I replied. “I still don’t have a maid or an air conditioner.”

  Years later, after we had moved into a larger house and raised our children to adulthood, our son moved into my grandparents’ small country home. He was a gardener, too, and soon had a busy garden popping with produce. One day I caught him pouring beer on his tomato plants.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Watering the tomatoes,” he answered.

  “With beer?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why on Earth?”

  “Because that’s what Dad did. I thought you were supposed to feed tomatoes beer,” he replied.

  “Son,” I laughed, “Dad was just trying to grow friends, but I guess it never did the tomatoes any harm.”

  Proof in the Pudding

  Brent Knowles

  I win.” The voice box gave his voice a shrill quality made almost hollow by the large auditorium, but the students laughed at Tate’s introduction anyways. He knew they watched the sensors, on the monitor; the students in the front rows were probably even able to read the results. His numbers were high on the satisfaction scale; he enjoyed making them laugh. Tate had trained himself to understand, at an intuitive level, the underlying data that informed the emotion graphs the students saw. The monitor was for their benefit only, a way of sharing his internal state of mind. It also made him more identifiable, Ilsa, his former grad student and current assistant, insisted.

  She was still fussing with his countertop; she hated it when the early arrivals among the students leaned on it, leaving smudgy fingertips on the white granite slab that covered his tank. Few noticed how protective Ilsa was of him, but Tate did. There were two cameras on the countertop, flanking the monitor, and six more in the auditorium. Tate watched her, appreciating the attention. She gave one of the cameras a warm smile and then took her seat. That was the cue to really start the lecture.

  “Consciousness. What is it—that was the question I set out to answer. Critics used philosophical diarrhea to dismiss any argument I put forth that might threaten the sanctity of consciousness. And when I responded with essays of my own, they chided me: ‘But the matter can only be settled empirically!’ They thought it could not be. Settled. But it was. The human mind is a manifestation of form, of function.”

  Polite applause and a cheer from Reid, who sat in the front row, leaning forward, engaged. Tate liked that Reid had attended all of the lectures, but his pleasure plummeted as the doors to the auditorium opened and Vargas entered. Seven minutes past the hour. The ass.

  “Come to concede, Dr. Vargas?” The crowd laughed, though none of the students dared turn their heads for fear that his beady, buried eyes might recognize them. It pleased Tate that his rival had aged so poorly.

  “How am I to know that this thing is telling the truth?”

  Ilsa stood stiffly and said, “Dr. Richards has followed standard scientific practice and evaluation,” she paused, her eyes meeting Reid’s as if for reassurance, “and every step of the process has been monitored by neutral observers.” Thank you, Ilsa! Tate did not know how he would have survived without her. He’d lost his family for a long time, but never her.

  The lower body had been the easiest to remove, though convincing surgeons to do it had taken years, the support of a tech company with deep pockets, and a law team to challenge his wife (now ex-), who felt what Tate was doing was suicide.

  “Psychological interviews throughout the process confirmed the consistency and stability of my character,” Tate said.

  Vargas laughed and replied, “Have you forgotten the breakdown?” Nervous whispers filled the auditorium. That was off-limits!

  “More evidence to support my point, Dr. Vargas. What human wouldn’t have a breakdown after a decapitative transfer?” For seven months and twenty-three days, his head had floated in a nutrient bath with machines stimulating and maintaining his functions while volume imaging was used to construct the schematics for the artificial reconstruction of his brain. He had been deprived of all sensation, swimming alone with his thoughts.

  “You’re a fool,” Vargas said, and that really pissed Tate off, for that had been Vargas’s favorite line of attack during their long debates in the teachers’ lounge. Ridiculing, patronizing, as if these were Vargas’s only methods of defending the ‘mystique of the human mind.’ But before Tate could speak, the students turned on Vargas. His arguments were old and outdated; any fear of censure was buried beneath the students’ indignation.

  We know more than this relic!

  In the end it had been a biotech solution: pseudoneurons and nanoprocessors meticulously duplicating and replacing the parts of his brain. Originally, Tate had hoped to be transferred to a digital medium, but the technology did not yet exist for that, nor was there a means to replicate the intricate folding of the brain. Instead, his spongy gray-green/bio-digital mental apparatus floated in th
e large tank beneath the white countertop.

  His face reddened with anger, Vargas stormed from the room. Tate, after a quick thank-you, continued the lecture. Question period ran longer than normal, but Tate enjoyed the discussion and interaction. Slowly, as it did every day, the room emptied, leaving only Ilsa.

  “A good session,” he said, and Ilsa agreed, smiling, but she was working more quickly than normal to clean up, as if in a rush. Tate noticed Reid waiting for her in the doorway.

  Oh.

  He was glad that Ilsa did not look over at the monitor right then because his emotional data points were scattered in a haphazard relationship. He almost begged her to stay, but she had already lowered his volume. As she left, she waved and then abandoned him to the empty auditorium.

  What could he expect? She had a life outside his. Pioneers like Tate had to make sacrifices. To shake paradigms, to change the world.

  He allowed himself a half-second of self-pity and then logged onto the Web, scanned his friends’ updates and noticed with pleasure that his kids were online. He greeted all three of them at once and their replies came back quickly. They chatted for hours, his numbers trickling back into the happiness range. The whole world was spread out for him, the mental network of his thoughts that he had so painstakingly proven to be the sole product of physicality connected, through the Web, to everyone else. He was still human.

  And he had won.

  The Feminine Mystique

  Elizabeth Creith

  One pecan pie, two peach Melba, and a cherry cheesecake. Four coffees?”

  “Yes, please,” Matt said. “Make mine decaf.”

  Shirl caught my eye.

  “We’ll be back in a few,” I said, pushing my chair out.

  Bill rolled his eyes at me. “Is it illegal to go into the ladies’ room one at a time?”