Devyn Andrews
Short Fiction
Two days after the photographer dumped me, sometime in the middle of January, the bathtub in my apartment began to back up with dark, foaming sludge of rusty sediment and other people’s hair. My own strands were certainly amongst the clumps; for all I knew, they could have made up most of the blockage. But sewage, once sewage, belongs to no one in particular, I thought, hunched over, bailing some of the water out into the toilet with a stainless steel salad bowl, and anyway, regardless, it did not belong here, lapping in waves at my loofa and leave-in conditioner as I fished around the tub fruitlessly with a yellow plastic drain snake. I took solace in the fact that I was awfully sang froid about the whole thing.
I didn’t hear back from my landlord until several hours later, when I was drip-drying in a shower stall at my local budget gym after cashing out my (No Commitment!) First Free Visit, declining a tour of the cardio machines and heading straight for the women’s locker room. The landlord thumbs-up reacted to my photo message, suggesting I try keeping the door to the bathroom closed for the smell. He couldn’t promise a plumber by tomorrow and advised me to anticipate & expect delays in the repair due to cold. All over the city, apparently, pipes were bursting.
I wouldn’t have minded an excuse to go without showering for a couple & then inevitably several more days due to cold. I wanted to wallow; I was suffering from whatever particular flavor of feminine disillusionment results in an overwrought prose style and blowhardiness on the line level. I wanted to make it all manifest somehow, the grease in my partline proof of something excising itself, seeping out.
But I thought better of it. The spring semester would be starting soon, and I had decided to try applying myself. I had sworn off vaping on campus. I had promised myself that I would not lose attention in class; I would regularly attend office hours and finally get around to downloading the updated version of the Purdue OWL MLA Formatting Slide Deck (reflective of 9th Edition Changes). I would have neat, glossy hair which would not cowlick at my crown. I would update my syllabus with timely and relevant course readings at some point before the teaching actually began. I would regularly and symmetrically pluck my eyebrows. I would deliver thoughtful, appropriately-lengthed, audience-aware book reviews to the school’s literary journal, as promised and on time and without a trace of hobby-horsing. I would produce just one godforsaken piece of original creative writing. Perhaps it was because I was thirty. Perhaps it was because I was angry. It was likely both and also neither. It didn’t really matter—the shower was the best I could do.
The water at the budget gym stung my skin, leaving red blotchy marks spreading in a patch over my chest and each of my thighs. I scrubbed my hair with whatever came out of the soap dispenser. It was quiet for a moment when I shut the water off; someone in the stall next to me farted loudly, then giggled to herself. I hadn’t brought a towel, water running off my legs into pools in the rubber honeycombed matting as I stood.
Maybe the sauna side of the locker room would have had towels, as certain family-friendly hotel chains do, folded and stacked and crammed into little cubbies beside the indoor pool and hot tub. I considered wandering over to look, but decided against it. Not out of modesty, or fear of nakedness, really— it was mostly the shame of appearing lost, wandering aimlessly, raw and dripping, amongst all the exposed breasts, those staring nipples, without purpose.
There was a low thudding vibration of free weights hitting the floor somewhere else in the building. A woman was talking loudly on speaker phone from the row of toilets around the corner, cut off by the sound of a hair dryer turning on with a high-pitched whine.
I pulled out my phone and sat directly on the cool tiled bench, drips pooling between my legs and in my belly button. The landlord had messaged again confirming further delays, and wondering, also, if I had been using hair catching screens over all of drains, including sinks, etc. The photographer, sure that I would not want to see him face-to-face, wanted to notify me that he had (half an hour or so ago) taken it upon himself to reunify me with the spare set of keys I evidently left in his possession. Apparently, in some sort of swan song, an unsolicited gesture of amicability, the photographer had dispatched said keys to let himself into the lobby of my apartment building, at which time he immediately sealed them (the keys) in a white mailing envelop (the no-lick kind, as I later discovered) addressed with only my first name, placed said envelope beneath the mailboxes on the little entryway side table (upon which lived the faux monstera plant and years of unclaimed circulars), and promptly exited, ensuring that the glass door had clicked properly, fully closed behind him that one final time. The editor of the school literary magazine, a PhD candidate in the English Department whom I considered a friend in very loose terms was wondering if I had any other headshots for use on our website, perhaps one in which I looked less like I was offering competitive home mortgage rates and more like I was recommending an interesting book to our readers. According to the budget gym’s FAQ page, in an effort to support and promote both hygiene and sustainability, all locations had recently switched to a Bring-Your-Own-Towel model.
Perhaps at some point I had become deluded, or perhaps I had always been grossly misguided about the state of things. Maybe I had failed to notice—or worse, looked away from—the aberrance of my situation, the disparity between things as they were and things as I’d imagined them to be. It seemed I’d a habit of doing that (for better or worse), foolishly believing my environment, my context, proximal to some vaguely-defined ideal. Maybe I was just wrong. Regardless, there were definitely places that offered towels; the budget gym just wasn’t one of them.
Up at the ceiling, a vent kicked on. I draped my clean T-shirt over my neck, letting my wet hair sop into it. Yes, somewhere along the line, I’d been led to believe that there’d be towels at a place like this.
Thanks, I responded to the landlord. Please let me know when you have any updates.
The first time we met, sitting at a slightly-wobbly high-top in front of the open windows at the combination Bar & Coffeehouse in the Historically Gay Neighborhood’s Central Business District, the photographer and I agreed that, despite our comparably non-traditional career paths, at least neither of us was a comedian.
“Sounds Sisyphean,” I said. “Having to always be the funniest person in the room.”
It was summer and condensation adhered the cardboard coaster to the bottom of my glass each time I lifted it, the contents of which tasted increasingly of Dirty Beer Line and decreasingly of Citra Hops with Notes of Stone Fruit. We’d been waiting over fifteen minutes for the water we had requested alongside our alcoholic beverages due to a drinkware snafu involving a devastatingly loud crash from the kitchen. It was whatever afternoon time that such an establishment evidently experiences trickle-down service delays in the transition from one primary liquid of interest to another.
“I mean…pretty bleak.” (I was aiming for something like quick-witted, yet down-to-earth.) “To hitch one’s entire wagon to humor like that.”
The photographer laughed, his hand resting around the pint glass as he spoke. “Exactly. The only artists lower on the food chain than we are. I mean—as Writer and Photographer, you know?”
He waved his free hand in a kind of sweeping gesture between us, as if to clear away any specific and personal offense he may have caused by ranking me on this unarticulated scale, theoretically behind painters, dancers, musicians, sculptors(?), cinematographers, and (one supposes), actors. At the time, I thought it was quaint that he’d assumed I was offended; if anything, I’d found myself struck mostly by the casual air with which he, in so few words, defined himself as an artist, and in generous syntactical inclusion extended that definition to me.
Up until this point I had considered myself, at very best, art-adjacent. I didn’t necessarily think I was lacking in natural ability, or perspective, or motivation—at least, I thought it was plausible that I had some of those things, somewhere deep down, albeit in meagre supply. The issue was that I either could not or would not get out of my own way, the self-doubt compounding with each half-hearted attempt I made to write something I actually cared about. All those false starts in my notes app, all the dead-end drafts Moved to Trash—all evidence of my failure to create or say anything true about the world whatsoever.
I knew, (I thought), at very least how I did not want to live, and I knew, in an abstract sense, how one might become an artist. But creating, as the Marxists in my department might have proposed, a synthesis between the two was where most of the problems occurred—some dialectic, some opposing forces duking it out, evidently, with me trapped in the middle. But all that felt a little heady for a first date. So, sure, I was an artist too.
“How so?” I asked, sloshing a bit of beer out of my glass in an attempt to scoot my stool closer to the table.
The astrology app I’d mindlessly refreshed earlier, waiting for the photographer to arrive, had advised that my Do’s for the day should include Extra Ice, Leaning In, and Bold Patterns, while my Don’ts were Navel Gazing, Unnecessary Detours, and some cryptic third thing I couldn’t remember about scented candles. I considered for a moment mentally reviewing how the day was stacking up, but I wasn’t sure how success would have been defined by most of those metrics.
“I’m mostly kidding,” the photographer smiled. “Comedians just get such a bad rap—pandering, mining their lives for content, not knowing when to ‘turn it off,’ you know what I mean?”
“Oh, yes, I absolutely know what you mean.”
“But I kinda get it, especially for comedy, with the internet and whatnot. You almost have to have a go for broke mentality to break through the noise out there.”
I wasn’t uninterested in the way he went on about the Creative Gig Economy and something about social media, before he meandered through his own artistic background, from fine art to event photography to product advertising plus health insurance. I was just busy watching the way he held himself as he talked, straight-postured and with his chest open, even like that, on the barstool at the uneven table.
It was the kind of stance even my mother would have found impressive, perhaps even noting upon, after the fact—Tall, handsome, and great posture!—or something. Increasingly aware of the weight of my shoulders and the tension in my mid-back and the sweat gathering at the crease in my stomach behind the waistband of my shorts as he spoke, I was reminded suddenly of my mother’s habit of pulling, hand over hand, at the imaginary string she envisions above my head, puppeteer-like, as if to uncoil my hunched posture, stretch and straighten out my spine, in a gesture she still makes (to this day) whenever I slouch in her presence. Think tall, daughter—hand over hand, hoisting at the air just above my skull, as I assume one might hoist a bucket of well water— Shoulders back, blades together.
I tried to push the image away, but it was too late. The tug was already starting.
Somewhere along the way, my mother perfected the string pantomime to such a degree that, once she starts, the whole thing is impossible to ignore. Even bystanders (in the department store fitting room, or at one’s cousin’s wedding reception, or in line at the pharmacy, or on the train platform) when my mother breaks out into this performance often find it hard to resist rolling their own shoulders back in response, as if, through sheer willpower, a singular vision could be thrust so forcefully into the collective imagination that it becomes universally undeniable. As if somehow, once the string charade is set in motion, one is simply left with no choice but to feel that phantom thread, working its way up from one’s toes, elongating through the back, opening the ribs, ironing out the neck, breaking through the scalp, perfectly straight, on its way up through the ceiling.
The photographer had no need for string, it seemed. He was already up there. In retrospect, maybe this was part of it—it was usually my own shortcomings that outlined the things I found most attractive in other people. At the high top, eyes locked with the photographer, picturing suddenly our three, thick-eyebrowed, perfectly upright children, I shifted, trying to straighten my back slowly, hoping he wouldn’t notice that I seemed to be getting a little bit taller.
All of that—the first time I met the photographer, my spine, and my mother—came up somewhere between rack of kettlebells and the last elliptical, as I plodded up the row with my dripping hair and tote bag of dirty laundry and turned the corner to catch sight of myself, head-on, in a floor-to ceiling mirror.
“I just feel like we’ve hit a dead end,” the photographer said the last time I saw him, the two of us side by side on his couch, television paused. “I just don’t think things are progressing as I would have liked them to.”
“Oh,” was all I really remember offering in response.
Seeing my unexpected public reflection, I was struck by a sudden, Frankensteinian feeling part memory and emotion and sensation. It felt like some kind of teratomatous mess had ruptured somewhere in my gut, bringing everything back at once—outlines of all that dialogue, those certain angles of light, matters of condensation, an abrupt tightness in my midback, and someone, somewhere, tugging on that string again, as if testing the remaining slack. Because despite the fact that I was showered, clean, no longer undeniably young but certainly not old, either, there I was. Still slumped forward, heavy-shouldered as if walking into the wind, so clearly lacking in crucial, central musculoskeletal fortitude that it was hard for even me to believe that I’d ever deceived anyone otherwise.
It could have been the symmetry of the situation, how the end recalls the beginning, the natural postmortem questions. But standing there, facing myself in front of all those anonymous and sweating bodies, trying to simultaneously lift my chest without overcompensating or adding tension in my shoulders, I was horrified. I saw myself finally the way the photographer must have from across that uneven table, succumbing to gravity and all those forces that cause a person to fold in on oneself.
And after all that time thinking I had gotten away with it—believing I’d successfully hidden that obvious, hideous emptiness—when I had already failed. It was a mistaken assumption, a fallacy I had carried forward. And now, the whole argument required reworking; the entire story was in need of complete re-registration. I had been an unknowingly and embarrassingly bad comedian, a fraud uncovered, an artist only if I believed the words of a man who had once wanted to fuck me. It was, I suddenly knew, so much worse than I’d imagined.
A light snow had fallen while I was inside the gym, and the parking lot was quiet as I walked to the car. My hair was slightly crunchy, freezing over.
The next day I’d missed a call from the landlord, delivering what I assumed to be continued bad news about the state of my pipes.
I’d felt my phone buzzing in my back pocket as I was ringing out a particularly slow-moving customer at my day job— when I wasn’t busy touring women’s locker rooms, nominally attending my own classes, or rewriting the same sentence over and over again, I was hawking candy-flavored vapes and deeply-discounted shake and vegan CBD gummies (to an oddly octogenarian-heavy clientele) at the Medical and Adult-Use Cannabis Dispensary in the Historically Gay Neighborhood’s Central Business District. From each according to her ability, or whatever.
“You have the patience of a nun,” my co-worker Max mumbled under his breath as I finished unpacking and re-sorting each of the two-dozen edibles that my customer had ordered into three separate handle bags, labeling one “FOR SLEEP,” one “FOR CHURCH/BRIDGE,” and one “FOR FUN,” as requested.
I handed the woman her bags over the counter. “Alright, here you go—take care now,” I said slowly and loudly, gesturing towards the exit. Like most emergency departments, airport terminals, or drive-thrus, the dispensary’s traffic was strictly one-way; even so, it was surprisingly difficult for some people to locate the way out, especially considering the store’s red LED lighting, pink iridescent window coverings, dark purple wallpaper, and small forest of neon green, faux potted plants spewed haphazardly around the space. I assumed it had all been designed to be very cutesy in order to give customers the impression that everything was running above board. Nothing to see here—nope, nothing at all.
“Jesus Christ,” Max sighed once the woman and her rolling grocery tote both made it finally out the door (“Ooop—no, you got it—it’s a push, ma’am,”) successfully. “She must have been here for like an hour.”
“Apparently she had time to kill today,” I said, taking a sip from my now-room temperature coffee.
“If I ever get that old and bored… I’m just taking myself out.”
“As they say… ‘Youth is the only thing worth having,’ or something.”
“And they’ll never truly appreciate it! This generation of kids in particular is just totally fried, I hear. But I’m sure you know that all too well—what grade do you teach again?”
“Oh! Uh, they’re first-year college students. I teach Intro to Academic Writing.”
“Oh, wow, okay! That’s great, I didn’t realize that!”
“But, yeah. They’re adults,” I added. “Well, at least, kind of.”
“Wow! I must have– For some reason, I guess I’d thought you were…anyway, that’s really cool. I’m sure you do a great job with them.”
“Well, I’m not sure how much I really do, all things considered, but thanks.”
I was relieved when the conversation naturally faded. It was a quiet day, and the sun was already starting to get low in the sky. There were only a few customers shopping—a young couple scrolled the vape menu on one of the TV-sized kiosks. A middle-aged man was jamming his card into the ATM slot for a third or fourth transaction attempt, huffing as he punched numbers on the keypad seemingly at random.
A questionable crumbly substance was piled below the magenta waiting bench. At the opposite counter, my coworker Janine leaned against the wall, eating a banana and reading a book called Emotional Extortion: Dealing With Manipulators in Your Life. The lights on the other two ATM machines happened to be blinking in sync. “Landslide”was playing over the shop’s sound system for the second time that hour; someone in the back office was apparently having a hard time.
Max helped another customer at his register, an older guy with a trapper hat who insisted that he was entitled to an additional coupon. Kew-pahn, he pronounced it, drawing out the first syllable.
I checked my phone. Tried calling, the landlord texted me. I think your voicemail is full. Plumber might be stuck on another site today.
On my 10-minute break, I stepped out into the back alleyway to call him back, opting to stand next to the store’s dumpsters instead of sitting on the icy bench. Wind cut easily through my sweater, and I instantly regretted leaving my jacket inside.
“Hello?” The landlord answered as if he did not have caller ID.
“Hi there,” I tried to sound chipper as I reminded him of my name and apologized for missing his call earlier. There was a long pause and mostly static. “I’m your tenant in 2B,” I finally added. “You’d mentioned there might be a delay with the plumber.”
“Oh, yes, thanks for getting back to me. So, here’s the situation—with the cold, inevitably there’s gonna be a lot of burst pipes, tons of flooding, which is even worse cause, again you know, it’s so freaking cold, so now, as you can imagine, ice, too—Anyways, our usual guy Sean is up north today for a real big job, emergency one— don’t know yet how long that’s gonna take at the moment. By the way—I meant to ask earlier— are you by chance bathing that dog in there?”
“Excuse me?”
“The bathtub—are you trying to regularly bathe the dog in there too? You’ve got that big dog, right? Long hair? Shaggy, white?”
“Nope—it’s just me.” I did, in fact, have a cat, though the landlord had forgotten to charge me a pet deposit when I moved in and I didn’t want to remind him. I felt justified in this omission on the basis that my cat, an old, ornery, orange tabby, would have sooner flung himself out of the 3rd-floor window than risk exposure to running water, in the tub or otherwise.
“Hmm.”
“I did recently lose a boyfriend who was succumbing to male-patterned baldness.”
“Must be thinking of the tenant in the unit before you. Clumps of fur everywhere, even when I painted.”
“Ahh.”
“Anyways, stuff like that can contribute to situations like this. It’s worth taking into account the fact that it is a hundred, hundred-fifty year old building.”
“Mhmm.” It seemed to me that, if anything, a century and a half meant we were overdue for a clean-out.
“Meaning, hundred, hundred- fifty year old pipes,” he reiterated.
“Makes sense.”
“Just something to consider when these kinds of things happen.”
I took this last comment to mean either that these things were inevitable or that the blockage was a few decades more extensive than I’d first assumed, though I’ve been told that two things can be true simultaneously.
“And also,” he continued, “making sure they don’t happen again. You know what I mean.”
“Totally.”
“Well— anyways, listen—I’ll do my best to keep you posted on when we can get Sean out there. But, like I said, it probably won’t be till tomorrow.”
“Oh—wait, okay, tomorrow?” It is still unclear to me why there was only one plumber in the state he felt he could contact. “So, there’s… no one else? No other plumbers we can call?”
“If it’s a big deal for you,” the landlord responded, as if answering my question, “maybe there’s a friend or someone you can stay with.”
The cat had no business to attend to in the bathroom, but the closed door drove him crazy. He was hard at work, diligently scratching up and down the vintage wood when I returned home from the dispensary that evening. There were already several raw streaks below the knob where he’d filed off the walnut finish.
“Making good progress?” The cat stared back at me for a split second, then bolted around the corner and under the bed.
It didn’t seem like there was any new liquid in the tub. For a moment, I wondered whether the drain had simply been working at an imperceptibly slow pace. Maybe the entire clog would have cleared up on its own if I’d waited long enough, given the water enough time to have eventually made its way through the pipes as intended, exited as it was supposed to. Only the dirty ring from yesterday’s sludge was enough to convince me I hadn’t just imagined the whole thing.
But, no—I splashed a half-cup of water from the sink to see what would happen. It sat, stagnant, on top of the drain.
The radiator clanked heavily away, releasing a small whistle of steam. Keeping the door closed had left it overly warm and damp, and it smelled musty. All I could find in my mess of a medicine cabinet was a travel-sized before-you-poo spray, so I dribbled a few drops into the toilet and the sink and then a few more drops directly in the tub drain for good measure. I turned the knob on the radiator to shut it off and cracked the little window in the shower open. There was a nice sharpness to the cold, the way all that heat seemed get sucked out into the night.
It had been dark for several hours by then. By 8:30, I’d given up hope for the plumber and anything other than dry shampoo and reapplied deodorant until the next night. The landlord’s last text, promising to send more updates ASAP, had arrived at 4:12.
I reheated leftover pasta in the microwave and spent a long time searching for a bottle opener before realizing the beers I’d bought on the way home were twist-offs. I smoked a joint out the kitchen window while eating, standing up at the counter. I gave myself the exact amount of time it took to drink to the label line on the beer before working up the courage to open my laptop.
I’d been significantly neglecting my text messages and emails. I hadn’t told anyone about the photographer or my ongoing plumbing situation, either. It just couldn’t bring myself to try and put it all into words at the moment. Besides, I told myself, I’d other more pressing things to attend to, such as the fact that the final version of my spring syllabus was due to the Department in two days, meaning that I had exactly two days left to ruminate on the particular ways in which I would soon find myself failing, once again, to get through to another group of 19-year-olds compelled into my classroom by the university’s core writing requirements.
After I finished the beer, I felt blasé enough to open the literary magazine editor’s slew of emails. In addition to his note about obtaining my updated, preferably higher-resolution headshot, he had sent feedback on a draft of a book review I’d submitted (albeit, a week behind schedule) revisiting the work of an overlooked (I argue) 20th century female essayist. There were a notable number of stricken semicolons and added end-stops in Tracked Changes. Though the editor seemed to receive the piece warmly overall, he vaguely alluded to the importance of deadlines in his response. I couldn’t help but notice a kind of calculated tiptoeing in his summative notes.
You make some really excellent points towards the end, but there’s so much throat-clearing up front, he wrote. What you need here is some sort of central question, introduced early enough, that the rest of the review in its entirety serves to answer.
My first thought was that I could re-purpose this feedback into several days’ worth of material on my course syllabus, once I got around to that, perhaps during the Writing Project I: Research Proposal unit. My second thought was that it had never been more apparent that I was incapable of taking my own advice. How many times had I marked student papers with similar comments— about taking a clear and strong stance, contextualizing the argument succinctly, ensuring that subsequent body paragraphs adequately developed the paper’s overarching claim(s)? For all my understanding, I could not outthink my problems; the evidence was there in my own rambling sentences. That what I knew and what I did were somehow doomed to always be in opposition.
I opened another beer and drank a few sips while I started typing a direct message to the editor. Thanks for the feedback over email, and sorry again for the delay. for some reason I thought the review was more of an evergreen thing since shes like been dead –
The message sent prematurely when I accidentally hit Return. I hadn’t been completely committed to the tonal register in which I was drafting, but was committed now.
Almost instantly, the read receipt showed the message had been viewed.
Hey! Seriously don’t worry about it. Just wanted to get it up for the February web exclusive.
Oh shit sorry lol, I typed. The editor hadn’t struck me as the kind to be a prolific texter. i hit enter by mistake !!
Lol, no problem.
But anyway, i’ll take a look at all your comments tomorrow and get another draft to you ASAP.
Sounds good. And did you also see my note about a higher-resolution photo? The one you have is too grainy for the updated website layout.
Makes sense! I’ll look for another one and send that with my draft.
Don’t feel like it has to be an overly formal headshot either. I’m sure whatever you want to use will be great. At least as long as the file size on this one is at least 250kb this time, Lol.
I thumbs-uped the message and opened my camera roll favorites. The questionable headshot was there; the editor had a point about how low-quality the image was. I’d been using a cropped screenshot from my LinkedIn profile, mostly out of convenience and because my hair was the right shade of brown in it. I tried to avoid false advertising, and the fact that I’d spent most of my twenties as a bottle blonde to varying tonal degrees eliminated a number of my other options. But despite the hair, the more I looked at it, the more I realized the woman in the picture didn’t really look like me anyway, or at least me anymore. In the photo, my cheeks were fuller, my skin smoother. I had been wearing a stark white button-up the day it was taken a good decade prior at a free networking event I attended during my final semester of undergrad.
There were a few more recent pictures I could have used instead. But as I scrolled my camera roll, I realized that every other photo I could stand of myself was either taken by the photographer or included him. But just as unsettling as the idea of cropping him out, leaving a stray hand, a few fingers at the corner of my supposed headshot, was the concept of re-purposing his work, linking my words and his one-time view of me. I couldn’t decide which was worse: the pieces of him that would be left in the frame, or continually seeing myself, behind glass, from his perspective.
My phone started ringing with a call from a local area code. I sent it to voicemail, and resumed scrolling. The number rang back again immediately.
“Hello?”
“Hi there, it’s Sean from R&S Plumbing and Sewer. Calling about the shower in your unit.”
There was a rushing sound in the background, as if the plumber was calling on speaker phone with the windows open on the highway.
“Oh, hi, thanks for calling—”
“Yeah, no problem— I’m on the highway, just left the North Shore—a burst hospital main, I mean, what a goddamn disaster. Anyway, I talked to your landlord—you’re on Upland, right?’
“Yeah, 648. I’m #2B.”
“Great. I’ll be there in about—10, 15, sound good?”
“Oh! Minutes?” I’d assumed he was calling to confirm a time the next morning to come by. There was no time to consider the practicality of having the plumber over past polite hours on a Friday night, or whether I should feel any sort of guilt for elevating the issue to such a critical status that it compelled someone else to come fix my problem, labor on my behalf, clean up my mess, past 9 p.m. in the dead of winter.
“Yep—that work for you? I’ll park in the back and buzz. Shouldn’t take too long, hopefully. See you soon.”
The plumber made it up half an hour later with two five-gallon buckets, a large toolbox, and some kind of power auger. I’d just barely finished collecting all the empty cups around my living room, tucking my bong away in the front closet, brushing away the unseemly traces in the toilet bowl, bagging up all of my used tampon wrappers, and wiping all the toothpaste grime from the sink basin when he buzzed. I led him to the bathroom, despite its obvious location in my 600 square feet. There was a gentle way he stepped around the moderately-priced living room rug as he followed.
“So—yeah, it’s all sort of backed up,” I gestured vaguely as I turned the tub faucet on briefly to demonstrate.
“Ah, yep,” he said and nodded, setting his toolbox on the closed toilet lid. “No problem.”
“Let me know if you need anything,” I offered, before retreating tentatively to the living room couch and leaving him to it. I wasn’t sure how to best occupy myself given the situation—by that point, it was past 9:45. There is really nothing quite like inviting a stranger into the most intimate room in one’s house well after dark to make one reevaluate a good number of one’s habitual behaviors. I wanted to smoke another joint, but that felt like surely an inappropriate thing to do, given the circumstances.
I tried to work on my course syllabus. I got as far as making a copy of the document I had used the previous spring, adjusting the first and last date of the semester. I couldn’t see into the bathroom from the couch, but there was enough noise to indicate it was an active scene—clanking of tools, water splashing from one container to another, and, at some point, the whir of the power snake working through years or decades or century-and-a-half’s worth of hair and whatever else lay between the water in my tub and its smooth, municipal departure. There were other moments, immediately after all of that drilling, of relative silence.
“Oh, hey, beautiful,” he said all of a sudden.
It took me a moment to realize the plumber was talking to the cat, who was sitting, oddly curious despite the noise, at the threshold of the open door.
“What a pretty little fella,” the plumber half-yelled, evidently addressing me this time, from the bathroom. There are few times in my life where I’ve been more relieved and pleasantly surprised.
“Thank you,” I said, and really meant it.
By the time he finished, it was close to 11.
“You should be good to go now,” the plumber said as he was packing up. I didn’t think to ask him at that point what the cause of the clog might have been. After he’d left, it took a moment to bring myself to investigate the damage in the bathroom.
The dark rings still lined the tub, more sediment gathering around the drain. Muddy-looking splashes stained the while tile, dotted the faucet knobs. A grimy wet footprint from one of the plumber’s work boots remained in the corner by the pedestal sink.
I opened the closet where I kept my cleaning supplies and considered, for a moment, how the neighbors would feel about the noise I was about to make. But I decided that by that point it didn’t really matter—and anyway, if the plumber’s use of the impact driver for upwards of an hour had disturbed them, then the comparatively gentle hum of the vacuum would perhaps offer closure.
There was no real need to do the rug, really, but it felt unwise to only partially clean my place. I vacuumed up and down the living room and hallway and even the bedroom, getting the baseboards and sucking up the cobwebs and furballs behind the furniture.
I was still leaving the photographer on read. But as I put on a pair of rubber gloves and grabbed a roll of paper towels, crouching over the side of the tub with bleach-based cleaner and long-handled scrubber, I realized that perhaps nothing more was needed from me.
Maybe I would forgo having the last word, resist the temptation to offer some kind of summative statement or textual consolation or relationship epilogue. Because, despite their appeal, words were in many senses a false bottom. Not a display of power but an invitation for misjudgment and further opportunity for pain. Yes, I decided—sometimes, silence was better, because the alternative would grant another that final opportunity to slam the door, permanently, in one’s face.
In truth, the photographer did nothing wrong, and I supposed that perhaps I hadn’t either, but regardless, it was done. There was no language that could change that truth, and no sense in prolonging the hope that more words could mean additional clarity. I had to come to terms with the fact that I could try to piece it all together later, if I wanted, from a distance, but that application of hindsight would necessarily be one-sided and alone.
When I was finally done mopping the floors, it was past midnight. I found a 6 oz Coke in the back of my fridge and poured it over ice in a large plastic tumbler. I laid on the newly-vacuumed, moderately expensive rug, on my back, next to the cat. My back cracked a couple times as a relaxed into the floor. There was a sense, for a split second on those exhales, that I had no middle section at all until the air rushed back in. After a few minutes I got up and cleared off my desk for the morning, plugging my laptop in to charge.
“Enjoy your shower,” the plumber said with an awkward little wave as I’d walked him and his buckets out the back door, thanking him again before latching the deadbolt.
I’d never taken a bath in that tub before but I supposed there was no better, cleaner time to try. I soaked my hair in the warm water for a while and then washed it twice, rinsing with a plastic cup. The cat watched me for a while from the door, then stretched out, laying on the floor, tangled belly fur rising and falling with his purring.
The lighting was good. It would have been a great time for a picture, in some other context. When the water started cooling, I pulled the stopper. That crack of cold air rushing in above me through the tiny shower window made the hairs of my arms and legs stand up. It was nice to shiver, to feel the air prick my skin. I sat and let the water drain around me until nothing else was left.
Devyn Andrews is a graduate of the University of Illinois-Chicago Program for Writers. Her work has been published in Chicago Review of Books, Cutthroat, Memezine, and elsewhere. Previously, she lived in Boston and Sacramento. See more at devynandrews.com.
Photo Credit: Karin Reimondos is freelance photographer, emerging international writer, and horse breeder, living on a farm in Sweden with her Welsh Springer Spaniels, Ben, Billy and Mickey. Karin writes poetry and fiction. Karin’s Instagram is “The Happy Household.”
L'Esprit Literary Review 