Bathroom Monologue: How Jay Processes Grief

Spend one minute on the phone with her widower, learning the news and asking the questions everyone does, in Jay's case, because he thinks that's what you're supposed to do.

Spend twelve minutes on the phone with her widower, the widower trying to console Jay when all the widower wants is to hang up and grieve with his family. Jay will spend eleven of these minutes feeling worse about being consoled by the widower than about the death, which doesn't seem real, and socially stumbling and failing to let the widower go do what he obviously wants to.

Spend thirty-two minutes staring at the clouds through his window, drapes halfway pulled. They are snagged in a way he's never understood.

Spend two minutes fixing the cord on the drapes.

Spend all night watching clips of her favorite shows on Youtube, and searching for related things, and forgetting her entirely and laugh at Youtube videos until his alarm clock goes off and he realizes he forgot to go to bed and he remembers why.

Spend eight minutes in the shower wondering if rain on your face could ever really be mistaken for tears.

Spend three minutes toweling off and wondering if he's ever cried in his adult life, and if it's bad that he's not crying.

Spend lunch break spreading the news around the office and finding all the social crannies are already filled with the grief-news. Pause awkwardly whenever someone seems shaken up by her death; despite desiring to share the news, he is utterly unprepared to talk to someone affected by it.

Spend two hours of work time wondering why.

Go to the wake.

Go to the funeral.

Go to the after-work drinks thing on Friday that is not about her death but is absolutely and totally about her death.

Get drunk enough to spend thirteen minutes in a red-faced argument over what her religion was. Get thrown out. Relentlessly kick a dumpster for no good reason.

Spend drive home thinking she'd be on his side for that argument and they're all full of shit and never liked her as much as he did and remember some more Youtube videos to hunt down.

Spend fifty-two years occasionally remembering her because of a funny video, or when bumper repair is mentioned, or whenever someone actually looks happy in a Christmas sweater, sometimes eliciting a pang, sometimes a tranquil smile, and very occasionally eliciting the feeling that "over it" and "not over it" are nonsense terms.

Go senile. Forget her.

The Succubus Argument

I don't see why we're always monsters. I mean, we are "monsters," but we're at least the best kind, better than vampires. They're walking STDs. They literally just want your blood; any sexy atmosphere is just a front to treat you like a juice box with two straws in the neck. We succubae want to screw you to death. You should love us!

At first, you evolved to eat and have sex, and though I didn't take notes, I know which one most of you seemed more enthusiastic about. Then you got culture, and prudence, and we drifted apart. But that was you playing coy. You invented capitalism and communism and skyscrapers – and all for what?

To ensure that you could have a place to stay. For what?

To ensure that you could afford clothing. For what?

So that you could stay safe, alive and warm?

Pff. Those are all excuses, means to the end of sticking it in my end. They're all ruses to get you more food and sex.

Well to a succubus, sex is food. Sex is the best food – the cream-filled puff of life itself. We're on your side. We've always been on your side, even when you got really scary. Modernity has jacked up some suicide rates. Poor little guys throwing away food – my food. My food with shattered little feelings that deserve nursing.

A succubus cares about your feelings. All the licorice strings of your insecurities, the robust stew of life experience, and just a sprig of prudential nervousness. We get it. We want you to be the happiest you've ever been, because that's when you're finger-licking good. I want you to feel comfortable, trusted, at ease and then at ecstasy. Loved, even. I love you as much as anyone on The Food Network has ever loved a dish.

I don't want you to die alone. I don't want you to spend tonight alone, and you don't want to be alone anyway! You want to curl up with someone who looks like… me. Who looks like a dream and knows all your fetishes in advance. I'll sit on your chest all night if that's your thing.

Look, if all your life is a struggle to get resources to hunt down sex, then why not give up the struggle and have the best imaginable? And trust me: it's the best imaginable. I'm mostly imaginary, which is why I only show up when you're asleep. We're sweet dreams, the cure to suicide and ennui, and the very best of homicide. Why toil? That's what seems monstrous to me.

Don't trust incubi, though. They're all pricks.

Bathroom Monologue: The Original Tuesday

The meteor shower began Tuesday and ran into August. Isaiah only noticed them on his morning drive to work, with his left arm propped in the window, rolled down to enjoy the blow-by breeze. A shooting star cut his arm quite severely and he needed two band-aids once he got into the office.

Every morning the shooting stars found ways to cut Isaiah. They sliced his neck and gashed his brain. Soon he couldn’t type because of the bandage around his right hand. He wound up leaving the band-aids over his eyebrows because, even if they’d healed, the sting of removing tape from the fine hairs was too much for him.

Soon. Soon his office mates mocked his plethora of band-aids and gauze, and the special glasses needed to correct his vision after one comet collided with his eye. Some doubted his stories. No one else saw the meteor showers, but no one needs to see you cut in order for you to bleed. This, Isaiah learned.

There was a comfort to his adhesive, self-healing armor, and once Isaiah thought about it that way, he didn’t see why everyone didn’t want adhesive, self-healing armor. He replaced his socks with fresh gauze, and tailored shirts of hospital linens, and whenever he spilled something on himself he merely applied antiseptic and dressed the emergent area, and would then go back to eating his meatball sub and reading about the rites of mummification.

One Tuesday (after the original Tuesday), Isaiah removed his brain using a chopstick and a dental pick. Immediately nagging thoughts ceased to worry him. No longer was he affected by the peer pressure, or the second-guessing of his father, or by upcoming elections. Somehow it was only after pulling his amygdala out through his nose that Isaiah realized there had always been upcoming elections, and would always be upcoming elections, and no matter the result, he’d never been too satisfied with them, and so he would return to calculating obscene equations and reading about the lovers of pharaohs.

That was, no doubt, what made Isaiah remove his heart. It was easier than the brain on account of the passages between his ribs being more plentiful and generally broader than his nostrils. No sooner did he remove his heart then he found it much easier to talk around women. The ancient Egyptians did not believe the heart to be the seat of lust, but they were all dead, being ancient. This was another revelation he’d experienced since removing his brain, and he enjoyed explaining these things to the many women he met as they sheltered from meteor showers.

Women found him exceedingly clever these new Tuesdays. No other man had thought to bring a star-proof umbrella to the office, and so every lunch break he had his own personal harem clustered around him, at least until they made it to the deli. Then his harem scattered and took numbered tickets. It felt nice to be so popular.

Being so popular, Isaiah took more risks. He donated all his blood at a local drive, and several more organs for kids who needed transplants. He didn’t understand why people would want still more organs, but if so, then fine, have both of his kidneys, and both of his lungs, and all of the bone marrow you can eat, little medicinal vampires. He soon forgot why people wanted these things at all, and read long into the night of his occult texts to decipher why, and failed to decipher it, and decided their words had become deceiving because he tended to read them by the light of the meteor shower. There were no other lights these Tuesdays.

He came in second in the office footrace. He took a pottery class and sculpted himself a new face to wear over all his band-aids. One time his heel snagged on a sewer grate and his bandages unraveled until there was nothing left of him. Isaiah balled himself up and forced himself to go to work. He was out of sick days, and he thought the vampire in Accounting fancied him. He wondered if he might offer himself to wrap around her for when the months turned cold.

Then came August.

Bathroom Monologue: When I Read Historical Fiction

His hypoallergenic dog fed and napping downstairs, and his wife having texted that she’ll be locked up until six in the Hayworth divorce case, he sits down to write. He sits at a prefab desk, in his memory-foam office chair, wrists resting on an ergonomic keyboard that he bought at 24% off on Amazon, eyes flipping between his ultra-thin monitor and the view of the suburb out his glass window. The urge to go for a popsicle goads him, but his eyes fall on his grandmother’s photo, hanging on the wall. She’ll give him hell when he makes his weekly call if he’s behind on word count again.

So he consults two tabs in Firefox and the text book balanced on his waist basket. He sucks a poppy seed from between his teeth, then shakes his head at the confluence of claims between the three sources. He scratches at the scabs from yesterday’s vaccination – the soreness is obnoxious – before convincing himself of plausibility.

‘No,’ he thinks to his fingers. ‘People aren’t really like that. More believable if Caesar had…’

And he types what really happened in the Roman Senate over two thousand years ago.