Dad's Phases

"Dad, I’m a fairy princess and I’m off to slay the dragon!"

"That sounds exciting. How do you beat a dragon?"

"I don’t know. I think you need a wand. Can you make me a wand?"

"The library might have some books on it. Want to come read them with me?"

- - -

"Dad, I’m gay."

"Okay."

"Look, I know you’re upset about it."

"I'm not. How did you learn you were gay?"

"We were playing a game at a party. I know you’re upset."

"I’m really not, unless, wait, tell me more about this game."

- - -

"Dad, this is my boyfriend. His name is Vasily."

"So you're not gay anymore?"

"It’s called “bisexuality” Dad. God. Way to make a first impression."

"Pleased to meet you, Vasily. How did you meet my girl?"

- - -

"Dad, I’m not a girl."

"You’re not?"

"I never was, and I've known it since we started using lockers in Gym class. It’s why Mom and I don’t get along."

"Your mother thinks the world of you."

"You don’t notice anything, do you? You’re just in a little cis-cultured bubble."

"So you’re not a girl. What would you like to be called?"

"I don’t need your labels."

- - -

"Dad, I’m pregnant."

"…"

"I know. I’m not married, and I don’t want to be married. This is my choice."

"…"

"Dad? Are you mad?"

"No, I just forgot how to feel this way for a few years. It’s coming back to me."

"You’re so weird."

- - -

"Dad, I have cancer."

"…Okay. Okay, how do we beat it?"

"I don’t know."

"The library might have some books on it. Want to come read them with me?"

- - -

"Dad, I miss you."

Bathroom Monologue: Telling Dad

There were only my parents left to tell. I rolled up to the house and found Dad on the porch. An extension cord ran through the window to power a fan that blew into his face while he smoked his pipe. Maybe that’s why he was smiling. It was a rare event.

My bowels tightened as I approached, but it was probably better to catch him in a good mood for this.

"Hey Dad," I said. "Can we talk a minute? I have something to tell you."

"Is it that you're going to pay back-rent for the eighteen years I raised you?"

“You don’t have the legal grounds for that, Dad.”

“You going to pay me back for sending you to law school, then?”

I smiled into my sleeve, not wanting to show him too much positive reinforcement. Dad took encouragement like others took alcohol, and he was an abusive drunk.

“You know how I’ve had the same roommate for three years?”

“How is that lease?”

And down we went. Sucked directly into an inferno of topics on his mind. I bided my time, weathering complaints about the Dodgers’ line-up and the Republicans' concessions to Obama. There was a pause around what we were going to do for Memorial Day. Charcoal was a tenuous issue for him.

Charcoal is not how most people come out, but it was a break. I jumped in.

"Dad. I need you to know: I'm gay. Danny isn’t just my roommate. We’ve been together for almost a year."

He studied the handrail of the steps. I put my hand on it, and he studied another part of it. There was this big opening, and honestly I didn’t know how to fill it. Then Dad looked up, lower lip puckered.

"Okay," he said. "I tongued your mother's asshole last night."

My mouth fell open a little.

"You... what?"

"Kind of makes you want to throw up, eh?" His lip wasn't quivering anymore. "But you're not going to stop me. So what are we doing for the grill?"

And that was it. He even helped me break it to Mom, which was nice because it was another week before I could look her in the eye.

I swear he's a good man.

Bathroom Monologue: Oxytocin & Oxycontin

There are many more chemicals in the world than there are letters in the alphabet or syllables in the English language. Certainly many more chemicals than the syllables Hazel knew. She was two weeks too late to realize "oxytocin" and "oxycontin" weren't the same thing.

Oxytocin was a chemical related to love, and particularly the love that formed in a mother towards her child. Too little of it might have explained why Hazel's mother never wanted to talk, never made her lunch, and was so out of patience with her at every question. If there wasn't enough and her mother didn't want her, though, oxycontin didn't fix anything. It only created an addiction that took her further from Hazel.

She hated chemistry ever afterward.

Bathroom Monologue: Three Laws Concerning Children

"Don’t have sons. If they survive childhood, they’ll be drafted off to war, sentencing you to spending every day dreading news. You’ll imagine them sweating, and fleeing, and crying out for you, all while you have to pretend how proud you are, instead of how your life is defined by dread of mailmen.

"Don’t have daughters. You’ll fear for their safety every time they leave the house, and you can’t fix the world that wants to abuse them, and you’ll never be able to prepare them for everything out there. They’ll be degraded, and paid less, and attacked more, and expected to appreciate it.

"Don’t have no children. Then you will spend your entire existence haunted by who should have been born, and the successes they could have wrought, and the mud they could have tracked onto your carpet. If you keep your carpets clean for fifty years, they will not be as valuable to you as will be if they suffer a single indelible foot-shaped stain. It will be an accident that fills all the empty moments, and emptiness is something the soul can not abide. You must have children.

"It's so hard being a parent. So hard not being one. The weight of being both has about broken me."

Bathroom Monologue: Message for Mona Liddel

"Hi, I’m calling for Mona Liddel. I just wanted you to know that I’m your son.

"This isn’t a crank call. You put me up for adoption in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1995. You left me a toy airplane, which I kept until we lost our house in a factory accident. I… I’m your son. I’m not crazy. I got your information from the adoption center.

"We’ve met three times. You think my name is ‘Jesse’ – it’s not, it was my dog’s name as a kid, and I panicked when you asked that time while we were waiting in line. I don’t even know why I had to see you. I’m not a stalker. I just recognized you in this coffee shop, and came by the next day at lunch to see if you’d return, and got lucky. And then I promised I wouldn’t go back again today, but I got a call from the hospital. That’s why I’m actually in town – there’s a great oncologist who specializes in kidneys only eleven blocks from here. Howard Kleinman, he smells like fish food. After they called, I couldn’t help it, and I almost came over to your table today. I’m actually sitting across from where you were having lunch.

"Damn it, I sound crazy. Mo… Mrs. Liddel, I’m dying. It’s my kidneys. I’m not looking for an organ transplant or anything—Kleinman says the onset was too rapid anyway. It’s a freak problem that might have had to do with where I grew up. There was a factory nearby that processed a lot of chemicals, and it exploded, and really, you don’t need to know about that, because I’m not calling you because I’m dying.

"I guess I’m calling because I’m not brave enough to walk up to you. This is easier, and I need a little easiness right now. I’ll be at this table for at least another hour if you want to come back. See me, yell at me, or whatever.

"You’re beautiful, by the way, when you don’t think anyone is looking. All three days now you’ve gotten that way, with the long stare, like something big is on your mind. If you wanted somebody to talk to about that… I don’t know.

"I wish I’d inherited your cheekbones.

"Okay? Okay. I hope I see you again some time. Otherwise, I guess, goodbye.

"Yeah, goodbye.

"Oh God, my name’s Kevin. Your son’s name is Kevin.

"Okay, goodbye."

Bathroom Monologue: Give Me Your Daughter

Everyone in the camp knows at this point. This thing, this monster is going keep attacking us every night, killing a new victim until we give it my daughter. I thought you’d get it last night, but this morning there’s a new widow, and I hear people murmuring that he died instead of my girl. That’s not an exchange a father ever wants to hear murmured under breaths while he’s taking a piss. Now I hear you might consider giving Cornelia over.

Understand that you’re not giving that thing my daughter. Give it me instead.

It goes for stragglers. People too near the perimeter, or who don’t think there’s safety in the group. It’s never killed a group, has it? So tonight you build fires, and you set traps, and you sharpen all the fucking pointy sticks you can make. And you get everyone into a single group. You scare them with stories about what’s been happening – what happened to that pardoner who thought he could do better alone last night. You tell them his bloody tale so they get theirs into camp.

And an hour after dusk, when no one’s left the campfire, and everyone’s armed, I’ll start an argument with you. I’ll shove you, and you’ll hit me, and I’ll storm off towards the conifers. I’ll piss on them, and complain to myself, and pray like I’ve been doing, none of it too far from you. I’ll be the only easy prey the monster sees. It’ll have to kill me eventually to make good on its threat.

You wait until it’s eating me. Until I’m screaming in pain. Then you bring everyone down on that thing and you kill it, cut off its head, tear out its lungs, so that it never bothers anyone again.

Then you don’t have to worry about it killing us in the night anymore. Then you just got to worry about raising my little girl.

Bathroom Monologue: The Only Thing Worse Is the Cure

I have never encountered an illness like that of the Young Master. What more rational name there is than “illness,” I am unaware, though it is an admittedly uncanny affliction.

Never had I wished for a thing so as to continue in my employers’ service when they announced they were expecting. The Master and Mistress had gone to great strains to conceive, importing all number of chemicals and powders, and seeking all number of blessing. One night I even witnessed the Mistress reading an occult tome, though the next day she ordered our precious blind cook to burn it and toss it out with the morning dregs.

The Mistress conceived it was time for me to retire. I could not deny the charges of my posture, of my trembling hands whenever I carried a tray of dinner to the Master’s upper study, and of my liver was deteriorating in much the same pattern as had that of my father and two forebears. It was only upon extreme begging of their charity that they allowed me to serve in reduced capacity through the birth and entry of a new member unto the household.

The Young Master was born of perfect health. I checked him myself as the doctors swarmed our Mistress, chanting of “internal aberrations," though I cannot recall her ever complaining of such conditions before. I carried the Young Master out of the room so he might not witness such pain as his first experience on our earth. It would be unseemly.

In the weeks that followed, the Master spent his days either in utter solitude in the upper study, or with the Young Master. How he stared at the the child, I sometimes feared he was going vile. I was almost relieved when he took ill and could no longer visit the lower floors.

It was by these emergencies that I was charged with finding wet nurses for the Young Master. Never have I heard of such trouble. Six we went through, six sturdy women, every one of them documented and with fine history. Four suffered anemia after their initial visits, and the other two were bedridden from unknown malignities.

We had such weather the night our Master finally slipped away. Nearly all the staff remained by his door, and it remains a regret that I could not join them, yet the Young Master required attention. I had to call upon a wet nurse of no documentation, who swore upon her life that her malignity was exclusive to her person and in no way transferable. Had I not been so shaken, I never would have admitted her, and yet?

The Young Master took to her breast immediately and found no complaint. Her milk was as fine as any of the women who had attended him before. No illness beset him that night or any night afterward, whereas, and I appreciate the sound of irrationality about it, but the wet nurse’s sallow malignity seemed to dissolve by morning. Even the boils on her neck waned. By Friday, she was comely for her age. I’ve had letters from her since that claim a total remission.

A coincidence, if not for this personal factor: since the Young Master came into my hands, these fingers have never been so steady. The pleasure of snapping one’s fingers is a thing I had forgotten, and now reclaim. I stride through these halls with endurance and posture unknown to me for fifteen years at the most conservative. And the pain in my liver? I have not felt it bleed in nigh on a month, and I should, for the Young Master takes to prodding at it whenever I carry him about his estate.

Census of the staff confirms my conviction: arthritis is extinct, and malignity seemingly out on vacation, while every able-bodied servant has taken to bed or had to excuse himself. I took my census to our precious blind cook for advice of one who thinks without the clouded vision of sight. Her answer shook me to my core, for after I asked her, she looked upon me for the first time in our long tenure together, and I realized that was her answer. She saw me, and it brought a tear to an old man’s eyes.

She has no more notion of what to do with the Young Master than I. Is this a condition that can be cured, and is it something that even ought to be cured?

So I must indulge in an indiscretion. Tomorrow, before the authorities arrive to take the Young Master into their care, I will shuttle him to the insane asylum on the other side of the mountain. I have known numerous educated men who claimed insanity to be an illness of the mind. Well if this is true, then after I push the Young Master’s pram through those halls for an hour, I may find several dozen cured and grateful minds with whom to discuss how best to serve him.

My apologies to any orderlies who catch the annual chill from our visit. I hear it is quite savage this year.

Click here for Part 2.

Bathroom Monologue: Mr. Mines

You don’t know I am, so let me introduce myself: I am the woman who hammered that shrapnel into your ankles and knees while you were under.

You’ll be reassured to know every piece came from one of your landmines. None were the one that took my son’s legs, though I tried to find some. It would have been even more appropriate. As it is, all the charred steel now shredding your muscles and tendons is stuff you bought and put out there.

The handcuffs are for your own safety. If you pulled those shards out, you might bleed to death or get an infection. Mothers are very worried about infections. Did you know one summer when he 11, while playing soccer, he got such a bad gash that he needed injections in his calf every three days for four weeks? Of course you didn’t think about that, just as I don’t care what you were before you became a warlord or whatever you think you are.

We’re ten miles from your nearest compound. That’s a lot of walking to do with your joints full of metal. It might even be impossible, but maybe you’ll get lucky and waddle your way into screaming range for one of your lackeys.

I’m going home now. My son’s funeral is tomorrow, because he didn’t make it back to base, what you left of him. He only made it ten miles. Ten miles with no legs. Can you imagine?

Well, you will.

Bathroom Monologue: Tears For Wishes

Polly knelt in her single circular window sill, trying to think of an appropriate prayer. A pillow was tucked under her swollen left knee. He’d be home tomorrow and she still hadn’t recovered. Everything she knew was about honoring thy parents, so how did you ask the sky to stop them from hurting you?

Asking God the Father felt wrong, but so did asking His son. Tears rippled up in her little eyes until she spied an orange streak in the sky. A shooting star, she thought, a message. A chance. She clasped her fingers together and wished, and wished with all her heart, that Dad would stop yelling at Mom, stop grabbing her, and just, just, just stop.

Polly was a very lucky girl, for that orange streak wasn’t a shooting star. It was her father’s plane crashing.

Wishes come true.

Bathroom Monologue: Engendered

It took him a moment to see Sky. She sat as far from the door as she could, tucked into the far corner, hunched and hugging her sides so that she was hidden behind a stool. It loomed over her, a makeshift wall keeping him away. He respected her stool-wall, affording her the length of the room, as though afraid he’d infect her. That was stupid, of course, because she was already infected – and had infected him. His right arm throbbed from the battery of shots.

The door swished closed behind him, cutting off the bustle of administrators, all preoccupied with hundreds of other cases. It comforted him to shut out all the bodies under sheets out there. He focused on Sky not watching him, her eyes directed at her peppermint green skirt. She’d sewn it with Lita, and colored her white tennis shoes green with a magic marker so they’d match. He realized he knew more about how she was dressed than how he’d dressed himself – and that was perhaps part of why he didn’t understand her. Sky was only even a ‘she’ to him today because of how she’d dressed; if it was jeans and a sweater, Sky would be a ‘he’ to him now. It was an imperfect system for dealing with a question he couldn't ask.

He put his back to the door and slid down to almost eye level with her from across the room. He asked, “Can I tell you a secret?”

Still, Sky wouldn’t look at him. She preferred to examine the flaking grey paint on her stool, careless that she only had half an hour left this way. So he confessed.

“I was always afraid you didn’t like me. I was sure you liked your mom better, which is fine, because I like her better than me too. That’s why I married her.” He smiled, and she didn’t, and he spoke a little faster, “But when we first met, and I called foster care – you were so mad at me all the time. It was only Mom who saw that you thought I didn’t want you. I did. I do. I love having you. I was just petrified that your birth parents were looking for you, and then, that I wouldn’t be a good enough father. You were never a pain. Those nights we stayed up playing Fallout, you in my lap, being so good at picking everything up, then making me fight the mutants, until you fell asleep? I loved that. Even the time you wet your pants, and thereby mine. You got so mad when I laughed, but I laughed because I loved having you. The things I do come off wrong sometimes. It’s part of who I am.”

He found his hands climbing his shins, rubbing at his knees. Where had he picked up that habit? Maybe from his father.

Sky was holding her knees with her little hands, as though to make sure they wouldn’t get away. She wanted Mom – she’d been calling Lita ‘Mom’ since the day they’d found her behind their bakery. Of course she wanted Mom, rather than this man she’d never once called ‘Dad.’ Something between his lungs and guts felt sore.

“And I’ve always respected your secret. It’s yours, and you get to tell who you want. Mom never told me, and I’ve never asked her to. If you feel like a girl today, you’re a girl. Tomorrow you can be a boy. Tuesday, you can be both. Wednesday, neither. Thursday to the end of time, you’re whatever parts of whatever feels right. You’re who you are. When I first met her, Mom was the biggest tomboy I’d ever met, while wearing sugar-pink bows, and the longest skirts I’d ever seen,” and he gestured to his legs, mime-signing for the skirt Lita had helped her sew, but it failed to translate and he had to keep rambling, “I wish she was here now, but she’s too far away, and we don’t have enough time. Hedinger’s Disease, Honey—”

She twitched, and he knew it’d been a mistake. Some days she lit up for pet-names, and others ‘Sport’ or ‘Sweetheart’ or ‘Captain’ landed on the wrong spot. Now she burrowed her face down, hiding it against her knees. It took a magnitude of will not to push across the room and drag her out of here, but that was the wrong thing he could do, even though she was dying by minutes.

“Sky,” he called to her as softly as he could. “At least seven children from your class have this disease, and so do both of your teachers. Probably everyone in the school has it, and that means you almost certainly do too. It’s very serious, but it acts very differently in… you see, when it gets up inside a girl, it… and, in… You see, they can’t give you just any set of shots. It has to match or it will only make the disease go faster.”

Every time he blinked, he saw one of the people dead under white sheets on gurneys in the halls outside, blood spots demarcating the sex they’d been. At least two short sheets, two kids – one a boy, one a girl, either or both kids that Sky could have known. Could have seen on her way into this room, as she fled from nurses demanding she tell them which she was.

He crawled on his knees to her stool, canting his head in a silent prayer for her to look at him and see what he meant, even if he couldn’t say it. “I always thought you hated me because, maybe, you thought I wanted you to pick, or to tell me what you ‘really’ were. I know some adults are ugly to you about that, but… you’re not simple to me. I don’t think you’re one hidden word. This disease – listen, whatever your body is, that’s just what it is. You’re whatever you feel. I wouldn’t even ask for this much, and I wouldn’t take it from you. This is your choice, and I know it’s too big. But it doesn’t take away whoever you think you are. It’ll just help us keep this disease from taking you away from me. So… please.”

He fought not to sigh at himself. Any doctors in the vicinity would think he was an idiot for talking this long. Even Lita would have dragged Sky out the room by now, but he didn’t have the same relationship. He wasn’t even ‘Dad,’ and such a man could not simply drag you down a hall and expose your soul to a stranger with a needle. His left hand rose as though to defy his conscience, to grab for her, and his right caught it by the wrist. He was fiddling with his cuffs when Sky stirred.

She rolled on her heels, narrow spine rising against the corner of the room, fingers rubbing over her knees and tucking her skirt behind them. So ladylike, so like Lita. Then one hand wove around the legs of the stool and clasped his left wrist, fingers so small they scarcely wrapped halfway around.

She tugged, and he rose around the stool, letting her draw herself to his side. Her whole front was feverish against his calf, but her dress was dry. The only moisture on her face was a trickle of tears and snot, and she murmured in her raspy voice, “Okay, Daddy.”

He could have run a hundred miles with her in his arms. He only had to go eleven doors down, but he remained standing, sometimes pacing for the rest of the day. After her shots, and after she was cleared, and after he signed a reckless number of forms, she paced with him in their shared observation room, and asked him why so many boys liked khakis. He hadn’t even realized he’d worn those today.

Bathroom Monologue: Monologue of father talking daughter out of suicide

"Sweety, put down the screwdriver. I miss Mommy too, but that’s not good for you – that’s not going to help. Can you give it to Daddy? Come here, or – okay, okay, stay there. It’s alright, you can stay there, and I’ll stay right here. But can you put it down for a minute? Daddy misses Mommy, too. He… I miss her so much, I understand, but that’s not going to let you see her any sooner. She’d wouldn’t want you to cut yourself like that. Don’t you remember how upset she’d get whenever we messed up our clothes? No, Sweety, she’d hate it if you hurt yourself. She loved how brave you are. Don’t you remember that time she was out in the blinding rain, and you leaned out the window and got all soaking wet, and never stopped calling for her, so she couldn’t hear her way to the truck? That, she was proud of. That’s my girl. Just put it down for a second. I won’t move, but you can if you want. Would you like to sit in Daddy’s lap for a little while. We can go over by the window – that’s good. That’s perfect, Sweety, here you go. You’re fine. You’re fine, I know, I know. What—no, I don’t think she’s coming back, Sweety, but we can wait by the window tonight if you want. I’ll put it open a crack, but only a crack. She hated when you got your clothes wet."

Bathroom Monologue: Cleansing

This absolutely did not happen, and is especially not about me or anything I said to my niece, no matter what anyone tells you. It is entirely a work of fiction.

Once there was a family of three, a mother and father struggling with their impulsive daughter. Despite buying her anything she wanted and bribing her with trips to the movies and theme parks, she refused to do any chores. This girl loathed cleaning her room with the passion that God loathed sodomy. Eventually they said she could not have dessert on any night when she didn’t at least make her bed. On the first night, she tore the sheets from her mattress and screamed so loud the neighbors phoned the police.

This girl had a loving and helpful uncle. He went over for dinner on the second night and witnessed her punting her iPhone across the house. When he inquired why, she yelled, “It’s a form of protest!”

After her parents explained things to this loving and helpful uncle, he asked for a moment alone with her. He shut the door and had a private chat in her room. When he re-opened the door, her anxious parents found their little girl hastily putting toys away in her closet. The parents took it as a miracle and hugged this genius uncle with a gratitude he wishes they remembered now.

When they inquired what he’d done, he said he’d merely talked reasonably to her.

When they inquired to his niece, she pursed her lips together, avoided their gaze, and asked if dessert were available.

Immediately after school the next day, she put her Adventure Time knapsack in exactly the right spot. After her father made her a sandwich, she washed her own plate for the first time in her life. As dusk rolled in, she rushed to her room to make sure it was tidy, and no sooner was dinner over, then she nervously circled the table and ensuring her parents’ chairs were pushed in correctly.

This routine lasted a few days, until an unusually strong storm knocked out the power in their neighborhood. The entire family woke up late, and she almost missed school. Her father honked from the car twice before going back indoors, discovering her hastily smoothing the sheets on her bed. He had to drag her away from the room, at which point she punched him square in the groin and threw an incomprehensible tantrum, yelling something about “him finding us.”

When her father asked who “he” was, she froze up and babbled that she couldn’t talk about him. He’d come sooner then.

While her father was befuddled, her mother was suspicious. She’d never been as nice to her brother as she could, and needlessly sought to blame him first. She phoned him in the middle of a very busy writing session, completely breaking his train of thought. It was only because he was preoccupied with writing-thoughts that he let slip that, maybe, he’d told his niece a fib.

The mother asked, as rudely as humanly possible, what story he’d told.

The uncle answered, as polite as could be, that there might have been an axe-murdering clown loose in the city, psychically attracted to families who left their rooms dirty. He tended to sleep in closets that were not properly organized or beneath unmade beds.

The mother went utterly hysterical, forcing the kindly uncle to drive all the way to their house and explain to his niece that there was no such clown. It took two hours of his day to convince her that the whole thing had been a joke and none of her family were at risk of axe-based homicide. Even after using his whole afternoon to debunk it, her parents showed no gratitude, screaming at him on his way back to his car.

The kindly uncle has since heard that his niece is back to leaving the entire house a mess, and that she broke some expensive plates when they asked her for help tidying the garage. He chooses not to believe the story. Let his sister and her husband learn on their own that monsters are absolutely real.

Bathroom Monologue 2000: A True Story of What Makes John Tick

This is the 2,000^th post on The Bathroom Monologues. I’ve been daily for a few years now and even I’m surprised I got this far. I asked you what you wanted for our 2,000^th get-together, and the majority of people said they wanted either a true story about me or an explanation of what makes me tick. I’ve done my best here to do both.

I didn’t actually remember this story until my sister told it to me a couple years ago. She was in college then, doing a paper for Developmental Psychology, and chose me as a subject. I took this as both amusement and offense. Rather than merely interview her subject, she interviewed our mother to find out what I was like before now.

I was the first child in the family – first to our parents, and first to all four grandparents. I enjoyed being the center of the world for about two years. They sang me songs, they read me stories, and took me everywhere, until my brother was born. Surely you’re familiar with how much older brothers love being ousted.

While Mom claims they didn’t entirely ignore me, the shift in attention clearly registered that way on the two-year-old John. I cried more, picked more arguments, and tried to interject myself on situations where the baby was getting too much attention. My father’s general answer was to send me to the basement to play by myself. This was wretched to the two-year-old John, though realistically that basement was stocked with colorful toys.

I told you all of that so I could tell you this: one weekend my parents heard me get up early and make noises for attention, but they refused to cave in. They were exhausted, and my father would be furious if I woke the baby. They heard come closer to their door and babble at it. They heard me rustle around the kitchen. Then the noises stopped. They didn’t hear anything for an hour.

My mother did what any mother would: concluded I’d killed myself, and ran around the house to find me. I wasn’t in my room, or the halls, or the kitchen. She heard a low hum from the basement and went down to check. There I was sitting in my little onesie, staring up at the television on the shelves. I’d figured out how to climb them to turn it on and was watching a cartoon about The Incredible Hulk with such awe I didn’t notice my mother had arrived.

This is my sister’s favorite part, and she got Mom to repeat it for me. “He was just watching the cartoons all morning,” she said with an adoring smile. “And he never came back.”

According to her, that is where my career in Speculative Fiction came from. When my parents were too tired for a bedtime story, now I'd offer to tell them some version of The Smurfs, or GI Joe, or The Hulk.

Hey Mom, can I use this as an author photo?

Two years later, my brother was ousted by our newborn little sister. Suddenly he couldn’t get time in Mom’s lap or on the family bed. Suddenly he was spending a great deal of time in the basement, starved for attention. Mom feared I’d use this position for revenge on the boy who had ruined my perfect existence, and we certainly fought a lot, especially once he grew big enough to hit back. But she was surprised to find that I commiserated with his ousting and took him under my wing in games. It seemed I kept coming up with stories for us to live in while our parents were busy. I’d had two years with the television to train.

Twenty years later, this helped my sister pass her Developmental Psychology course. She ran the paper by me to check its grammar and if the narrative made sense. She claimed that for her entire life I'd had the talent.

Bathroom Monologue: His Damned Niece

His damned niece.

He got up two hours before Denice every morning, so they couldn't talk about Freddie, or about work, or their inevitable divorce. Getting up that early, rising with that little sleep, made it feel like the avoidance postponed inevitabilities. He took his one cup of coffee in Freddie's doorway, watching the underdeveloped chest inflate under the instruction of tubes. He always left before the boy woke. He did so for many reasons, but mostly for one.

He took forty minutes in the parking lot, leaning on the steering wheel, exercising his breathing. Music, self-help books, even pot didn't steady his nerves as much as gathering his will over time. The gradual tick towards work.

He cancelled all his company e-mails accounts, refused any physical mail at the office, and kept his phone off until he walked out the building's doors. No one overheard a single sentence, and when they asked, his sentence was always, "Fine, Denice thinks he'll be a ball star," followed by an annoyed exhalation that always shut the conversation down.

And it worked. For weeks it constructed the silence on the topic that he needed, and then his God-damned niece had to fuck it up. A grown woman would have known that not answering her e-mails meant to leave him alone. She had to call his department and ask how he was doing with his son's cancer. That call spread like Freddie's disease, through the body of his workplace, though his co-workers and superiors, atrophying his morning in the parking lot, corrupting it into therapy sessions and office-mates dropping by to ask how the kid was. It made everyone feel at liberty to prod inside his wounds. He never asked anyone to deal with it. They told him to, and they controlled his family's health insurance.

Bathroom Monologue: R.R. Crossing

Looking through a windshield and a hundred windows rushing by, moving too rapidly to make out any faces. You look for a girl who isn’t looking for you anymore, and catch a glance at someone with her hair color staring at something in her hands. Her phone? Then the train carries her to her Full Ride. Red lights cease flashing and the bars come up. You are now safe to cross the railroad and drive to a permanently quieter house.

Maybe she was on her phone. Maybe she’ll have left a message. Maybe she’s calling you right now while she travels several hundred miles an hour towards dorm rooms, late nights and the lies of boys becoming men.

You check your cell just in case. No message, no hum of the vibration setting.

You press the gas pedal and roll across the tracks. Time to go put the things she missed in boxes. Time enough to catch the news. It would be nice for Lester Holt to announce, “Bright young woman’s train arrives safely. World welcomes her. Promises to retain virginity until Nobel is won.”

What twit said you couldn’t go home again? Didn’t he have a mother who had to? You wonder if he went to university.

Bathroom Monologue: How the World Really Is

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You maintain at least two extracurriculars a year until you break your leg at Track And Field. You start having heartbreaks as soon as you hit puberty, and you’ve got an afterschool job to start saving for cars by fifteen.

Early Acceptances and Deans’ Lists are goals. Settling and limits are lessons. The pregnancy scare, the Recession from nowhere, and not having a family house to return to are simply facts.

The man who sticks in your life is complicated, yet somehow your relationship is simple. Your pregnancy is smooth (so the doctor says).

Getting up every night to feed the baby is mandatory. So is getting into the Diner by seven. You budget Christmas presents on tips. You draft resumes and calculate mortgage rates on the backs of napkins. You watch social barriers crumble while your tires sink.

You re-learn trigonometry and European history to help him with his homework. These winters are harsher, these summers are hotter, and he won’t wear the same clothes for more than three months in a row. You postpone your OB/GYN to afford his iPhone. You risk you getting axed four times to drive him to the colleges he wants to see.

You do all this so that some Spring Break you can cook his macaroni and cheese while he tells you how the world really is.

Bathroom Monologue: Adaptation at Work

Observe two siblings. The firstborn likes nearly all sweets. Chocolate, vanilla, peanut butter, candy canes, mint ice cream. She will eat anything unhealthy for her first three years alone except for strawberries. Not chocolate-covered strawberries, strawberry-flavored drinks or candies. Nothing.

During her third year, her younger sister is born. After the time it takes to wean her, the new sister shows a similar great love of sweets. Chocolate, vanilla, peanut butter cause her to exhibit great excitement. It all sounds familiar.

But her older sibling intervenes, stealing her treats whenever the parents are not directly watching. Though the parents attempt to counter-intervene, mass candy theft continues for four months. The younger sibling exhibits great distress.

At the four month mark, treat theft declines rapidly. Observe that the younger sibling no longer asks for candy bars or caramel apples. The parents are happy she has shown an interest in fruit, but she is not omnivorous. She is only consuming strawberries. Strawberries by the carton, strawberry milk, strawberry cake for dessert, chocolate-covered strawberries for her birthday, and every day's lunch has a strawberry fruit roll-up.

Treat theft is at zero, while treat consumption is on the rise. That, my friends, is adaptation at work.