Foam plug for an upcoming aluminum pour

Marshall dropped his forehead against the dull ceramic tile again. How many times? Fuck it, he lost count. His high-strength skull met the wall with a very specific and unsatisfying slap, a sound children under thirteen would be familiar with as it’s the one their bodies make when they hit concrete during street baseball.

The urinal walls elsewhere in the tiny, dingy bathroom were glaring with the reflection of fluorescence, but Marshall figured this one had seen its fair share of “face-palm” equivalents – men who needed a good punch in the face but could find no one around who could do a good job (or at least a good job without killing them). Sharpee signage and shittily made band stickers were plastered all over the three to five foot range of the entire bathroom, everywhere a drunk person could easily slam some slang, expletive, or epitaph. The best stickers were the band names that made a man laugh: Six Inch Foot-Long, Hittin’ Not Quittin’, Tube of Feces. There was a bit of graffito scrawled over a Reverse the Curse sticker just beneath Marhsall’s nose. Some piece of shit a few drinks in managed to inscribe: “Did you vote for a Terrorist?”

Marshall, most definitely, did not.

Marshall’s stream finally dried up with the usual series of light plinks, squeezing out every drop. Sixteen years ago, Marshall’s cousin had once said “Once you break the seal, man, you keep comin’ back.” This was a statement Marshall truly believed and clung to – he often avoided going to the bathroom while drinking as long as he possibly could.

He didn’t bother flushing, no one did. He passed three other urinals as he walked to the sink and two of them were full to the brim of dark yellow piss. Brown-yellow was probably a better descriptor, but Marshall found the idea of brown-yellow piss discouraging. His own streaming waste was strangely cloudy tonight, but it was as irrelevant as how many times he hit his face against the bathroom wall. The next unfortunate fuck to unzip his pants in the face of the Yellow Sea Urinals was bound to get boots covered in warm, cloudy piss.

The black rectangle that sat beneath each faucet argued with Marshall for a moment, adamantly stating that he – in fact – did not wave his hands beneath the faucet and he did not need to wash them. Disregarding its persuasive argument, he waved his hands again and was rewarded with cold, rushing water. It smashed into his ink-stained fingers and rained deflected drops onto his undone tie.

Marshall’s outfit had looked impeccable six hour ago – a light two-piece suit with a pale blue tie, gold cufflinks, black loafers and even a remarkably red handkerchief poking out of his pocket. He hoped the hanky said something like, “Oh hey, yes, I’m fancy enough for this handkerchief, but its’ perfect fold tells you that I – in fact – do not use it.” The hanky sounded remarkably like the faucet.

“Maybe you two’ll fuck…” Marshall mumbled as he ran the chilling water, trying to let it pool in his cupped hands, but only succeeding in directing the powerful stream onto the once-tucked portion of his shirt.

“Piece of shit….” He persisted and got enough water to splash on his face.

Prior to his visit to this bathroom, Marshall had maintained a decent appearance – he had been kept and clean, maybe a bit wrinkled, untucked and disheveled, but the illusion of kept was there. Now, that illusion was coming undone like the creased handkerchief that poked its red head out from his pocket.

The water stopped. Marshall went to wave his hand across the irregular black rectangle again and a single droplet of blood whipt onto the lower part of his thumb. His swiping hand stopped to the left of the faucet, but it happily triggered now, “Oh hey again, you need water right? Fuck yeah, come and get it.” This time the steady stream flowed without interruption as Marshall’s eyes watched the dark red splatters land, one after the other, on his hands.

Captivated, his head turned like a dog hearing a squeaking toy for the first time. ­The droplets fled lazily from his nose in an ever-increasing stream of crimson. Marshall moved his hand and let the bits of anima find their way into the drain.

He heard someone come into the bathroom, but fuck it.

The mirror in front of him played back the scene with impressive objectivity: a man with short-cropped hair stared down at his shaking hands as his nose begins to bleed. The man, instead of stifling the bleed, lets it drip into the running water at the sink.

Bloodletting, this was only the first step in his penance. There would be no leeches, only shitty bathrooms in unnamed bars at anonymous 3-digit exits along I-80. Marshall knew that somewhere – hundreds of miles ahead – was a town called Dix, Nebraska and he fully intended on finding out what went on there, but for now he was outside Sacramento on the first leg of his journey home.

Bloodletting, he wondered.