 |
| 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.
