Wide Eyed by Trinie Dalton

Author:Trinie Dalton [Dalton, Trinie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2005-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

TILES

Did you ever see that picture of the mouse with a human ear stitched onto its back? The sight of bloodied tiles can be abhorrent like that. There’s nothing like something beyond disgusting, something that scars you mentally.

I.

When I was five, my mom and I kneaded two loaves of bread. It was my job to find a place on the hall floor where the dough could rise in peace. It had to be a spot where my basset hound wouldn’t find the oiled pans full of salty dough and eat them. It had to be away from foot traffic because too much noise could stunt the fluffy, white, sticky bundles I was aiming for. My mom told me to hide them overnight and check on them periodically. I didn’t sleep that night because every twenty minutes I was jumping out of bed to make sure they were safe.

I was sitting beside my loaves, trying to watch them rise, when I heard a loud thump in the bathroom and ran in. My dad was lying on the floor, head propped up against the bathtub. There was blood on the sink and smeared in the basin. Trickles of blood ran down my dad’s face and neck. His black hair looked matted like a rabid dog’s. There were blood squiggles on the floor tiles, too. It wasn’t pink like in cartoons, it was brown. Brick-red and streaky.

Years later, my mom told me Dad had come home drunk from a bar and slipped on the bathroom’s slick floor. After that, we got lots of bathmats and those rough vinyl flowers called flower daisies that stick on your shower floor. Nothing was ever slippery again.

II.

My brother’s old house was a partially converted laundromat. He and about ten other college-aged guys lived in the warehouse area behind a fully operational laundromat. They paid rent by working shifts, watching customers and collecting quarters, making sure dryers were lint-free and running hot.

Their kitchen was never used. Mice lived in the stove. Beer cans, cigarette butts, and bottles littered the countertops, and the pantry was stocked with jugs of cheap wine. It smelled like hobos lived there. When I asked my brother why the kitchen reeked so bad, he told me it was because they used the sink as a urinal.

The shower worked, but was mildewy. Between the tiles, the caulking was black. Maybe the tiles had been white, but they were moldy now.

One of his friends was taking a shower, scrubbing with a bar of soap and making lots of suds. He aimed his piss stream down into the drain, and the combination of hot, bitter liquid and massive soap residue caused a mutant salamander to emerge. It had been living in the drain, shower after shower, month after month. Soap scum and other human skin chunks had built up on its back, and it had bumps that looked irregular like warts, or like someone had sewn on genetically fucked-up appendages.

The boy rinsed off in a panic as he watched the amphibian creeping toward his feet.

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