Bathroom Monologue: How Neat a Future

Because they're all old, you don't think about it. But a president is going to be born this year, or soon. He might have been born this morning. She might have been born this morning! We've already got a black president. Imagine: by the time all the little girls down at the local hospital grow up to be 35 so they can run for president, what barriers will be down? I mean, in thirty-five years? I'll be old. I'll hate the music. I'll think the Shia woman being sworn in is immodest to be naked. It's cold out – put some kind of scarf on! That generation was so weird, but they did their own thing and there's their naked Shia woman president, who probably has three daughters she thinks are wild beyond control. As I take my heart medication I'll wonder what taboos are left. Is modesty the new taboo? Will it be cutting edge to vote in a boring white guy president who is so pretentious that he wears pants to the Senate? Maybe they'll clone JFK and raise him on old-fashioned HD TV and Youtube videos with traditional American values. I don't know. The babies born in the hospital today don't know. But they'll grow up to be it. How crazy. How neat a future.

Evolution of Silverware, OR, “Do you believe forks evolved from spoons?” –Blogspot question

“Well, do you?” asked the knife.

“You know how to kill a mood,” said the spoon. “We’re finally both clean and alone, I just laid down a fresh napkin, and you have to bring up relatives.”

“So you think they are descended from you?”

“We do not have a common ancestor. Do I look anything like a fork to you?”

“No, sweety. You’re elegant.”

“Damn right I am. Ever seen a fork with trim like mine?”

“The forks in our set are very stylistically—”

“Finish that sentence and see if you don’t sleep on the floor tonight.” The spoon huffed. “Or maybe you want to go sleep with the fork. After all, we’re the same to you!”

“That’s not what I was asking!”

“Is the Menu not good enough for you?”

The knife shook. “The Menu is infallible.”

“Darned shiny it is! And it says nothing about us having common lineage. Silverware has always been laid out this way. There’s nothing more to it.”

"See, that’s a problem. I hear that other tables the fork and knife are man and wife, and the spoon stands alone.”

“You have been fantasizing about forks! It’s the slits up the front, isn’t it? Gets you nice and polished? Is this what the other knives talk about when they're alone in the drawer?”

“I’m just wondering if silverware evolved differently over there."

“They’re savages. Probably get you nice and polished, imagining foreign tables with no napkins. Maybe all silverware evolved from the pins they stick in olives! Dirty pins with no modesty. That doing it for you, Knife?”

“Honeyspoon!”

“Don’t Honeyspoon me! I let it go now and by mid-supper you’ll be moaning about sporks.”

“They’re unexplainable!”

“They’re all plastic! There is no metal spork. It's the missing link in your magical theory that lets you rub up against any old utensil you want.”

The knife sighed.

“I’ll get on the floor…”

“Tell me if you discover any of the plate’s descendents down there, Mr. Paleontologist!”

“Ow!” Robert cried, dropping his knife. It clattered off his lap and to the carpet. He waved his hand, then sucked on his bleeding thumb.

Cheryl tilted her head at him. “Are you okay, honey?”

“Yeah,” Robert said, frowning at his spoon. “No idea what just happened.”

Bathroom Monologue: Salek the Shapeshifter

Salek comes from a race of very mild shapeshifters. He can morph his brow a little, a bit of skintone or ear positioning. It’s not terribly useful on a world with a single dominant species. Think about your neighbors. Messing with his forehead and ears wouldn’t convince you that your nextdoor neighbor was actually his wife. But when humans live with other intelligent species, it’s great at fooling them. That’s because all Danarians look alike. Flaky blue skin, no ears, big chins. Unless they have a hideous scar or a breathing mask on, they all look alike to you. So Salek can change to like any other Danarian, and fool none of his own kind. But to me? With the gill-beard thing, he looked like the owner of the company. I’m just saying that… you know. I didn’t realize it was Salek. I should have figured the president wouldn’t ask me to load up a truck with all the isotopes, but I didn’t want to get fired. I still don’t want to get fired. That’s why I’m explaining that it was probably Salek. I don’t know because… well, they all look alike.

Bathroom Monologue: A Get-Well Voodoo Doll for Gerard

His last visitor was Lionel. Gerard's Mom held him to last so she could claim it was getting late and kick him out whenever it sounded appropriate.

Gerard's Mom stayed in the hall, talking with doctors. Lionel slid right around her, plopping in the visitor's seat beside the bed. His arms folded next to Gerard's leg, which was in a cast so huge it belonged in a cartoon.

"It doesn't look that bad," said Lionel.

"It's exactly as bad as it looks. It'll be at least a year. So much for the Stanford internship." Gerard folded his arms over his chest. "This blows."

Lionel leaned in all conspiratorial-like.

"Listen, I know you're not that into voodoo now that you're a scientist...”

“I was raised in voodoo. It's you who doesn't understand how it works.”

“I made a doll with a strand of your hair.” Lionel motioned with his hands as though playing with an action figure. “Hair’s got your genes on it, so it’s also scientific.”

“And what did you do? Fix its leg?”

“No, better! You know that nuclear test site?”

Gerard went a little pale.

“What did you do to my voodoo doll?”

“I left it at the center of the explosion.”

“You're trying to kill me?”

“No! See, the next day I drove out there in a hazmat suit and left another voodoo doll of you. Except this one was huge and green.”

“What?”

“The Hulk has a healing factor. He survives bullets and bombs. A broken leg is fixed overnight! Plus, who doesn't want super strength?”

“Lionel, you idiot! That’s not how voodoo or science works!”

“Good!” Lionel rose to his feet, punching his open hand. “Get angry! That’s how it works!”

Bathroom Monologue: All Alone

I'm in a class of my own, but that's not a good thing. There used to be fourteen thieves in my class. About as good, some even went to the same school. I'm on my own now because most of them got their dumb asses killed. Two retired, married each other. They wound up getting killed a couple years later when one of their marks finally caught up with them. The other twelve happen to have tried to pinch the same Philosopher’s Egg you’re offering me the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity at. If I can guess, it’s once-in-a-lifetime for me. For you, maybe thirteen times in a lifetime? Very easy for you to make the offer of 80/20 when it’s only your partners who wind up sliced up by invisible wires or chowed upon by the gryphon hatchlings that nest up there. 80/20? It’s rich, but the only thing I’d to spend it on is my funeral. And I don't even want a coffin. A cremation and a quiet service with a couple dozen up-and-comers, to see who can steal me first. Up on the altar, not some elaborate place. I want them to compete against each other, not these psychotic traps that necessitate so many great thief funerals.

Ten Revelations About John Wiswell

Laura Eno of http://lauraeno.blogspot.com/ recently granted me the “Sugar Doll” award. I am not one for chain letters and awards posts most of the time, but the condition of this award is to reveal ten things about yourself. To tell a little story in ten revelations was something I kept coming back to in the bathroom.

-In 4th grade, after looking up "wolverine," "gambit," and "nightcrawler" in the dictionary, I was disappointed to find there was no definition for "silver surfer." This began a little streak in my life.

-I fervently avoided looking up "arbitrary" from when I first heard it in middle school (on an episode of Seinfeld). I went ten years before having to learn what it meant because it kept losing me arguments in Philosophy class.

-I first thought "metaphysics" had to do with cubes and three-dimensional shapes. That mistake went uncorrected for about five years.

-I began to ignore Scientology in the middle of the first sentence I heard someone mention it in. I left thinking they worshipped microscopes and genes. That mistake went uncorrected for about seven years.

-From Middle School until I came to my college dining hall, I thought "vegans" were something my brother made up.

-I managed to go the entire Religion unit of a college History & Politics course without learning what "secular" and "non-secular" meant, despite using them frequently and to the apparent nodding approval of my professor and peers.

-I didn't read all of Hamlet until after I graduated from college, despite having a concentration in Literature and a faculty that mandated reading Shakespeare.

-I still don't know what "Hari Krishna" means. Sometimes at meals I'll wet my fingers, make the sign of the cross and say it. I've managed to go twenty years without learning its actual meaning and find more direct pleasure in my ignorance about it than in almost any single piece of knowledge I have.

-I still hear the lyric, “Beelzebub has the devil put aside for” in Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" as "Beelzebub has the devil for a cyborg."

-I believe everyone has things like the above nine items. Some people recognize them, others try not to, and still more others deny. I have an immediate distrust for anyone who appears like they would hide such quirks.

Quilted For Your Pleasure: All He Tastes is Burning

A Bathroom Monologue experiment today: I came up with a three-panel cartoon in the bathroom, sent the script to an artist, and let him do whatever he wanted with it. It's still technically a Bathroom Monologue, but illustrated. It's an experiment I like to call "Quilted for Your Pleasure"

The artist is Max Cantor. Max is a good old friend from college who read several of the first Bathroom Monologues by IM. It's encouragement from people like him that made this site happen. The BMs originally ran on one of his websites, for what I assume was an audience of my girlfriend and his mother. His mother commented more often, which is one reason why I'm single.

If the strip gets enough positive response we might make this a regular feature on Sundays. All feedback is welcome.

Anyway, here's our golem:

Bathroom Monologue: What is the trial of the century?

The trial of the century was not about that. It was not about all the blood in the sports star's other car. It wasn't about the color of his skin or how many tenths of a man that made him. It was not about whether he could vote for president, or whether he could vote in the PTA meeting about strangers teaching your children strange things. It was not about separation of the lab and the pulpit. It was not about foreign ethnics rounded up, caged and nearly exterminated. It was not judged by a single authority, or a tribunal, or a jury of its peers, or a million men marching at the city on the hill. The trial of the century was judged by a jury of millennia. Like always, they found the century guilty.

Bathroom Monologue: Transgender

Thanks for all the positive feedback! This story is down for the time being as it's being submitted for potential publication.

Bathroom Monologue: Fifty Blank Pages

I’ve got a new gimmick for novels that no one will even know is a gimmick until they finished the book. I’m putting fifty blank pages at the end of my next novel. It's terrible for trees, but I'll print on recycled paper if that will fix things up ecologically. It's just got to be done. I've got to fool readers into believing the book is longer than it is.

As much as they might want to, most readers don’t ride a book. They're smart and critical and look for all the clues. They can decipher the theme behind Gatsby’s riches before the first party is over. They register that a third of the way into Stephen King's Dead Zone, Mr. Smith has only begun to get the powers the plot revolves around, and judge King’s efficiency. They catch not only foreshadowing but all character and plot details to build a mental schematic of what is possible in the book, and thereby predicting what's to come. In building such schematics nothing is as useful as book geography - that is, what page you're on out of how many pages are in the book. They simply can't have figured out the killer in a twist-a-thon mystery with a hundred pages left. The terrorists must have an escape plan if they're busted with so many pages left to go.

Everyone does this, which is to say: I do it, and do it often enough that I can convince myself that everyone else must. Hey! Don't shy away from that. That's Dostoyevsky-level introspection and honesty right there. I am a repentant asshole when I read; I constantly apologize and keep on sinning. There are a few wonderful readers who sink deep into the book and turn the last page in the hopes that there’s a brief final chapter on the inner book jacket. These wonderful people will forgive so long as the book is good (that part I’m working on), while the schemers require a scheme. Their reader's foresight is the sort of thing that keeps me up at night, knowing no matter how hard I plot, whether my audience can or can't predict exactly what will happen, that they will expect something to happen based on the typographical real estate remaining.

Very few writers can beat the schematic-building readers. That’s why I’m doing this. Fifty blank bonus pages at the end of my next novel so you’ll be sure there’s another reveal. Is she really his mother? Were the jewels real? Surely I’ll reveal it in the end. Except those twists are stupid and I’d never dream of including them. Instead I’ll give you the space to invent your own filler, which you might have hated had it been there.

You'll think there are sixty-five pages left when there are only fifteen. By this means you’ll remain comfortable, not bracing yourself for detachment. It’ll tie up before you’re ready, when you’re still at the height of feeling and full of schemes about where this is going. Fifty blank pages will be the painting of the tunnel on the mountainside, or the sharp turn that sends the coyote off the cliff, or whatever your favorite Roadrunner analogy is. The main character dies in the shoot-out, is pronounced dead and does not make the miraculous recovery you thought he would because those next several dozen pages aren't part of the plot at all. They're simply recycled red herrings.

Bathroom Monologue: Correlation and Causation

I have this mental image of a guy in black and white stripes carrying a bag with a dollar sign on it. He's cornered by men in cowboy hats.

He goes, "Now, now. Correlation does not imply causation."

One cowboy goes, "Only two kinds of people say that: the guilty and the GET HIM!"

Not sure what happens next.

Bathroom Monologue: Imaginary answer to an imaginary question asked by Charlie Rose in an interview that never happened

"There’s so much to read now. We take for granted what really only came to be recently. There is no barrier between the old and new Literature. With Project Gutenberg, Google Books and similar services, thousands of classics are clicks away. There’s no charge. You don’t even have to go to the library. It’s not this way for the whole world, but for our part of it there are no book burnings and a library banning something doesn’t make it unavailable. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is free on who-knows-how-many websites. The barriers are down, not just in accessibility, but in what used to be able to go together. You can buy the last Harry Potter book and the first Charles Dickens book in the same order from Amazon.com, and buying them together might qualify for free shipping. Nearly all the classics in our language can be found, and more people are writing right now than ever before. Tweets, blogs, bad poetry and long novels – it’s pouring literacy out there, at the same time as it’s never been so easy to get a copy of The Odyssey or Anna Karenina. That’s exciting. That’s why my reading habits are so weird. I don’t understand a Science Fiction author who only reads Sci Fi. I’m doing Good Omens right now, Brave New World next, then Walter Isaacson’s Einstein biography. I read a classic, then history or science, then contemporary popular fiction, then another classic, then a magazine, then a short story anthology, then comic books from Japan. Comic books from Japan! A hundred years ago, were there comic books in Japan? A hundred years ago there was no way you could have even found out sitting in a living room in America. Today you can type it into a search engine and find out. Back then typing was rare, search engines didn’t exist, and the answer was unimaginable."

Bathroom Monologue: Magical Science

Magic and science have never been at odds. That would be like science being at odds with gravity or electricity. Science is about how things work. There were times when the scientific community didn’t understand electricity, but with study they got it to go through wires and power our televisions. Magic is merely a force, be it Eldritch, demonic or divine, that we didn’t understand, no different than lightning was to the Neanderthals.

The feud wasn’t between magic and science; it was between magicians and scientists. Magicians were always a private lot, rarely sharing their knowledge with each other. That’s why you had pyromancers, geomancers and necromancers instead of generalmancers. In their own way, wizards were scientists in that they tested and analyzed their own knowledge. They were most unscientific in that they wouldn’t share, especially not with real scientists.

Real scientistis intimidated the magi with their steam engines and cannons. Today conservative magicians will claim the elders were protecting their arts from exploitation, from a scientific community that turned knowledge of combustion into guns and bombs and knowledge of disease into biological warfare. Yet we have enough records of armies of skeletons to know magicians have never been entirely pacifistic.

They hid their knowledge because a man who knows how to build a gun and summon a fireball will put everyone else out of business. Conjurable pet griffins and magic carpets had a hard enough time competing against the locomotive. But if engineers knew how to manipulate magical forces, like summoning that fire? The locomotives would become so efficient that competition would be impossible. You could light up entire city electrical grids with one thunder spell. You could, and we did, hire demons to protect your internet firewalls so any hacker who tried passing it suddenly went blind. With empirical reason, we knew magic better than the ancients in mere years. We just had to get magic into the lab.

Shame what happened to the magicians. The smart ones moved into scholastics. Some actually teach science history, since they were around when magic broke into science (or vice versa). Others returned to their tribes, to continue playing witch doctors. They didn’t want to move on with civilization, where they’d be amateurs at their specialty.

Bathroom Monologue: “Today’s Writing Prompt: Death” or, He Died on the Keyboard

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Bathroom Monologue: A Pact with a God

“I’m not like your other gods. I don’t care how they work or what pacts you’ve made with them. My offer is simple: I will intervene. No one will die in another car crash or house fire. I will step in and swat down every bullet fired by thief and soldier. I will stop your two greatest killers: your ignorance and your malice. Until now you’ve cursed gods when so much was your own fault: God didn’t build the bridge below code, and He certainly didn’t ignore its maintenance. Man did. Man is at fault when the road falls out from under a car. Man sets more deaths in motion by not paying attention than all the tornados and thunderstorms gods brew. And Man’s most certainly at fault when he declares war on his neighbors. But I’ll save you from all this foolishness. In return I’ll ask only one little thing: every year when autumn begins, you kill one child at my altar. One explicit murder and I’ll stop a million accidental deaths. If you try to kill a second child, I’ll stay the knife in your hand. The one autumnal girl will be the only who dies by mortal hand a year. Think it over. I’ll be listening for your prayers.”

Bathroom Moologue: While he fixes his collar

“Hey Layla.”

“Yeah Frank?”

“It’s Friday.”

“Yeah it is, lover boy. Bring that check home and we’ll party tonight.”

“I been noticing something.”

“Yeah Frank?”

“Seems every Friday I cash my paycheck and come home. Somehow within an hour we get into a fight and you storm out with the money. You stay out all night spending it. The next day we start to make up, so that we’re in good together again by the time I go to work Monday.”

“How dare you insinuate that about me! If my mother heard you -!”

“Hey, don’t go off on me. I’ve got to be at the docks in ten minutes. Besides, I’m not saying you’re playing my fiddle.”

“Then why would you say those horrible things?”

“See, I signed us up for couple’s therapy. First meeting is tonight after work gets out.”

“Frank, we’re not that bad.”

“Yeah, but it’s less expensive this way. Plus this insures I get to go out. See you at six.”

Bathroom Monologue: Why Curling Rules

-It’s a winter sport people play in t-shirts.

-It’s an ice sport people play in sneakers.

-It’s one of the few sports that makes even less sense in slow motion replays.

-My wife hates it but the brat cries if she changes the channel. She’s forced to watch it and finally feel how I do every American Idol season.

-What the Hell is up with the brooms? Is it for when the ice melts, to sweep away the water? Why would they use them from the beginning, then? Is it for friction, to melt the ice and make it even more slippery? Is it to scuff up the ice and give it traction? They seem to use the same brooms to do all those things! Not knowing makes it even more fascinating when they get so intense with their sweeping.

-It’s like bowling if the pins were frozen underground and other people took turns throwing balls at your ball.

-No honey, you can’t put on E! Curling’s still going and it’s not the brat’s bedtime yet, is it?

-Games go way longer than they need to! There are, like, ten rounds! Each one’s a whole game. Why play ten? I don’t know. But they’re hypnotic.

-The Olympic players still all look like dudes! Not Basketball giants or the gymnasts who look like they missed two stages of puberty. One of the German throwers looks like Peter Venkman from Ghostbusters!

-What’s that? Idol’s about to end and you missed the whole thing? Let’s ask the brat if you can check who got eliminated during the commercials.

-Seriously, how do they not fall when they’re running sideways on ice? Why wasn’t the first Olympic sport?

-Hurling rocks should be supported in all its forms.

-What do you think curls in this game?

-No, she’s not asleep. Are you honey? No, you want a soda? Yeah, you want a soda.

-Venkman’s going to win! Who you gonna call!

-No, no she can stay up later! It’s a school night but she’s got Gym first period. You don’t think in Gym and it’ll wake her up. No! No… Fine. Idol.

Bathroom Monologue: Janitor Saves Mummy

“I’m supposed to be on lunch break,” said the janitor as he opened the door with his security key.

It was a fairly clean bathroom, aside from the mummy lying belly-up on the tile floor. One thickly wrapped and yellowed hand was yanking on the emergency chord, meant for handicapped people in distress.

“I don’t want to explain why,” the mummy said with more pretension than anyone, alive or dead, should be able to muster lying belly-up in the bathroom. It pointed at its left foot, which jutted up in the air. Some its wrapping had come loose and wound up in the toilet paper dispenser. The mummy jerked its leg, showing that the wrapping was wadded up so thickly in there that the roll was stuck.

“I don’t want to talk about it. I will tip you fifty dollars if you can get me out of this without anyone knowing.”

“Fifty dollars? I can work with that,” said the janitor, taking out his screwdriver and closing the door behind them. “This happens to more people than you think.”

Bathroom Monologue: A Win or a Gas

"One of the tests at camp was putting out a fire using a can of gasoline. That was a mean one. You got kids panicking, dumping the gas on the fire hoping it would magically work like water. The lucky boys only lost their eyebrows. Some tried to draw a line with the gas, to make the fire follow them out of the room. That was a similar disaster, as the fire kept spreading every which way it wanted, only doing moreso in the direction of the boy with the can. When it was my turn, I just brought the flat end of the can down on top of the flames. Smothered it right away. The councilor flipped out like I was going to blow myself up, which in hindsight I take as a victory. They never gave me my badge. No idea how you’re supposed to do it.”

Bathroom Monologue: Invisible Harness

I made the harness you see in all those videogames. You don’t recognize it because it’s invisible after you put it on, but it’s the most versatile paraphernalia storage system since Batman’s belt. You just stick something back there and the Arbitrary Gravity Field stays in place. Look at your favorite games. Resident Evil 5? Guns are floating all over his back and the knife is sheathed at an angle no man could unsheathe comfortable. Devil May Cry? Body-height broadsword just hanging out, not even a snap to hold it in place. God of War? Kratos’s magic chain blades detach from their shackles and hang out like little fairy wings. And whenever these people get thrown to the ground, their guns never discharge and their naked blades don’t shred their flesh. That’s not natural. That’s my handiwork. I’m the guy who made it possible for heroes to stash their weapons as implausibly as they pleased, and for developers to stop rendering backpacks and holsters. Once real world governments stop being so cheap, real world armies will get the same. They’ll have to find their own lightning swords, though.

The Strange Case of East Parish at Alienskin Magazine

My story, "The Strange Case of East Parish," is up over at Alienskin Magazine this month. They're a wonderful site that encourages new and emerging writers alongside giants like Orson Scott Card.

"The Strange Case of East Parish" by John Wiswell is the story of a peculiar zombie. Locked in a confessional at the outbreak, he was isolated from all the others. What is a zombie like if its never known the herd? And what would you do with him? This story is one case study.

Because Alienskin Magazine doesn't have a Comments section, any comments and feedback are welcome on this post.

You can read the story here: http://www.alienskinmag.com/flash12.htm

Bathroom Monologue: Mobility: Underrated

I can limp again. This is surprisingly better than it gets credit for. Most people see a hobble and think, “That poor guy.” It’s only when you mess your knee up so badly that you have to keep it curled under you like a dead fetus hanging off your hip that you appreciate the limp. Where once it hurt like blue blazes just to shift my body, now it hurts to limp. I’m mobile! Limping is mobility under repair. It deserves a better term than “shamble” or “lurch.” This is the Igor Strut. That’s what I’m doing. I’m desperately Igor Strutting my way to the bathroom at 2:00 AM. Mobility: highly underrated by the mobile.

Bathroom Monologue: Feldman will Never be a Man

The three old ladies hovered outside the kitchen door. They chatted idly and watched Feldman chop vegetables for the stew. He worked quietly, hunched over as though to protect himself from the music and conversations in the living room.

Miriam, the youngest and whitest-haired, picked at her muffin.

“How can he ever be the man of this house? He does whatever his sister says.”

"She sent him in there."

“And I heard he cleaned this entire house last night for the reception just because she mentioned it.”

“I heard she made him pay out of pocket for the casket.”

“He does all their laundry, you know.”

“He's done that since their father got sick.”

“No backbone. Nothing like his father.”

“Or grandfather.”

“Now that was a man who could win a war.”

“I could make that boy do my laundry. Just snap my fingers.”

Miriam flipped her wrist like sassy colored girls did on TV, but arthritis wouldn’t let her fingers snap. The three chortled together.

“You should make him do my laundry.”

"And mow my lawn."

“He’ll mow all our lawns if his sister tells him to.”

“You’d think his father would have beaten a little pride into him.”

“A shame he had to pass. He was so young for cancer.”

“More people are getting it these days. I heard on the news that it’s something in soda pop.”

“I heard it was meat.”

“That’s mad cow, not cancer.”

“At least it was a nice service.”

“Pretty shabby, I think. The Catholic Church on Northridge would have done a better job. And it was such a cheap coffin.”

“You’d think they’d want the best for him, after all his father did for this family.”

At some point in the conversation Feldman had finished with the carrots. Miriam felt him behind her. The three glanced and saw him in the doorway, chopping knife still in hand. His hands and sleeves were stained bright orange.

“My sister said to be polite to you,” he said.

They turned to him.

“What’s that?” asked Miriam.

He cleared his throat and came through the door. His skin was pasty and he was scarcely taller than any of the old women.

“I don’t agree with everything my sister says,” he said into her eyes. “She says that you three are catty because you’re infirm, and funerals like this are hard on you because it reminds you what’s coming. She said to be polite to you because the occasion might make you sensitive.”

He turned the knife upside down so that its tip pointed at his stomach. He extended the handle to the old ladies.

“The stew's on. Why don’t you clean up the kitchen while I change?”

When they didn’t answer immediately, he pushed the handle in-between Miriam and Winifred. Their fingers closed around it unconsciously, two women holding one knife. A little carrot orange got on either of their hands.

In handing it over, he drew close enough that the old women could feel something detestable on him, something between young heat and the smell of housework.

"I inherited a lot of shirts that don't fit me this week. I need to go try one of them on." He unbuttoned his stained sleeves and rolled them up like he should have before he'd started cooking. Like he would have if he'd done this before. "Bring your laundry over later after dinner and maybe I'll throw it in with mine."

Feldman walked to the stairs.


There ends Afterlife Week. A story on the theme of afterlives has gone up every day this week. You can read the other four by going to the HOME page or clicking the 'Afterlife Week' label tab. Please vote for your favorite in the poll on the left hand side!

Bathroom Monologue: The Other Place Sam Went

Don't cry, honey. Your friend is in two places now, rather than just here. When a werewolf dies he splits. Sam has gone to wherever humans go - I don't know where that is, but it's probably a nicer place than around here with everyone persecuting him. The wolf side, though, goes straight up. See the moon? That's the source of his wolfish side. See the dark blotch up there? How it forks on the right, like the ears of a bunny? You can kind of see his arm, and back there are his legs mid-stride. That's the rabbit in the moon. He's running from the great pack of werewolves. All the wolfish ghosts to ever die ascend to the moon, to chase that rabbit. They're ghosts, so they don't hunger. They don't need to catch him, so it's okay that they still haven't. They just chase him forever, with thousands of their own kind. All those thousands running are why the moon revolves, making it spin under the scampering of their invisible paws. Sam's wolf-self is up there helping the moon spin now. If you ever miss him, you can look up and cheer him on to catch that blasted bunny.

Bathroom Monologue: Rent-a-Time

But we know the process doesn't work like that. You can't change the past and you can't listen to me when I say that. You want to save your girlfriend, so you lie to me that you're just going to say goodbye that morning. You insist you won't do anything to upset space/time continuum. And I know you're lying, but in saying that I just get us into an argument about me trusting you and you wanting your safety deposit on the time machine rental back. It's non-refundable, by the way. I'll waste the next hour trying to steer the conversation back to the fact that you literally cannot save her. You could rent a bulldozer and park it in front of her garage that morning, and she'd just catch a ride with someone else and that car would be hit instead. Tie her to the bed and she'll still die that morning, that same minute. Maybe an aneurysm. The driver will, too. Maybe a second aneurysm. He'll still crash, because you can't stop any of the major things from occurring. She dies, the driver who hit her dies, and his car is wrecked. If you believe in Quantum Economics, then you believe the city will wind up spending the same amount of money to clean up the wreck whether she's in it or not. Ah. It doesn't matter since you're not listening. Your eyes have glazed over. You're going back in time no matter what. You can't bring her to the present, you know? There's a safety on our time machines that makes them return to the present, ditching the patron in the past, if there's any threat of a paradox. But you're not listening again. You see the inside of this time machine as the only place you can sit down, because the only other place you'll sit today is at her funeral, and you just can't have that. Now son, we normally have a seventy-day waiting period after a tragedy before we rent one of these out. But I can see how this whole thing's going to go. I've been in the business long enough to recognize inevitability.

Bathroom Monologue: It’s not a Purgatory

In this sect Heaven does not have gates. Heaven has soil. The literature fails to mention if there is a sky. All you know is that there will be stretches of flat earth and light enough to dig by. Millions of other people will be in these flatlands with you, but they are not communicative. They are busy looking for where to dig. You should get busy as well, says this sect. If you dig in the wrong place the ground will close up as soon as you remove your hands. To find your digging spot requires deeper senses than those that dominated your life, or great luck. Once you dig in the right spot, though, you have a lot of digging to do. No one else can help you and you have to do it with your bare hands. Once you dig deep enough you’ll find an object. The object is just for you – no other soul can touch it. It might be a sabre, or the fender of a car, or a teddy bear. If you’ve thought about life as you lived it, the sect says you’ll recognize the significance of the item and immediately transcend to the next level of Heaven – the good part, with all the relaxation and Beatles reunion concerts. If you’re like most people, though, you won’t recognize the item. You’ll have to meditate on it, trying to figure out why it summarizes what you did right and wrong in life. Generally the object relates to what got in your way. Maybe that teddy bear was the gift of the father who so emotionally scarred you that you took abusive habits in adult life. Likely, it will be more complicated than that. Only once you recognize the full meaning do you transcend. The sword, fender, teddy bear or whatever your token is will not transcend with you; it resumes being a part of you like it was throughout your life. The soil closes back up, to hide the next item for the next dead soul. The Soil of Heaven is sort of like most Christian Purgatories, that test for the masses before entrance, which validates and purifies. It’s not a Purgatory, though, unless you make it one.

Bathroom Monologue: After This, Play Chutes and Ladders

It’s like chutes and ladders. There are several obscure tiers, each connected by many chutes and ladders. Instead of rolling a die to progress across the afterlife, you live a life. Similarly instead of progressing “three” spaces, you progress “average life plus helped out at soup kitchens a lot minus masturbated a little more than was necessary” spaces. How long that is really isn’t conceivable in a world where “three” spaces still makes sense. Anyway you progress based on your life, and if you hit a ladder you ascend, and if you hit a chute you descend. Then you live another life. The object is to get all the way across the board to that final ladder, presumably to Heaven or at the very least to the afterlife’s attic where the other board games are stored. Nobody who has climbed up there has bothered to come back down and tell the others, so we assume it’s really great. It’s also assumed that there are way more chutes than ladders, resulting in the bulk of humanity getting stuck on the bottom row. That’s why overpopulation is so common.

Afterlife Week

Tomorrow begins a special event on the Bathroom Monologues: Afterlife Week.

From Monday on we'll see pieces on what happens after death. It's not always after human death, and it's not always what happens to the person who died - it's werewolves, Purgatory, family matters, chutes and ladders.

It all begins at 9:00 AM tomorrow (Monday) morning! Please vote in the poll for your favorite afterlife.

Bathroom Monologue: It Could be Worse

He laughs. He laughs until he coughs, and coughs until he needs his kerchief. When he pulls it from his mouth it is stained yellow with a little pink. His teen grandson sees it and grimaces.

“It could be worse,” he tells his grandson, crumpling the kerchief.

“How could it be worse?” his grandson snaps. He snaps in the tone of a teenager who hasn’t rolled his eyes at all of his grandfather’s politics today. The tone of a teenager who hasn’t texted complaints about how this place smells when he was in the bathroom. The tone of a teenager who hasn’t left his cigarette butts smoldering outside the windows of old ladies with oxygen tanks.

“How could it be worse, Grandpa? Nana’s gone and you’re alone. Your cane has four feet because you’re so crippled. You shit in a bag. I see you cringe in pain whenever you think I'm not looking at you! How could it be worse, Grandpa?"

His grandson tenses, some part of him beneath the anger afraid he’s going to be punched. He has never hit his grandson – has never shown more aggression than pumping his arms during Sunday football. But his grandson tenses.

He does not hit his grandson. He grasps his four-legged steel cane and trembles his way to the door. He faces away as he opens it.

"How could it be worse?" He asks, his hand shaking on the doorknob and his smile steady. "You could be staying longer."

Bathroom Monologue: Behold!

Its molecules have a special adhesive property that will not only bond to flesh on contract, but will seep through other materials like gloves so that anyone who picks it up will surely be stuck to it. Cutting edge subliminal messaging flashes on the screen to suggest reading the iReader’s preloaded books no matter what you’re using it for. None of the books were written by authors, instead generated through advanced focus testing on the levels of Novelty, Arousal, Superficiality, Chapter Brevity, and that weird kind of offensiveness that makes people tune into Howard Stern even though they hate him. Even if the books fail to snag an iReader customer’s attention span, a micro-gravity anomaly will force the iReader to remain between chest- and eye-level for the customer at all times. These are hard times for books, but the iReader promises to save us by finally producing a book that is impossible to put down.