by Colleen Chen



After making sure no one was around, Cosmo unzipped his pants to relieve himself in the park gardens. Just then, a tiny female with wings popped out of a flower.

“Stop!” she cried.

Cosmo was so surprised, he did pause.

“Are you my conscience?” he asked. “If so, I gotta pass on your advice this time, ‘cause I really gotta go.”

“I am not your conscience. I’m a fairy. And if you withhold your urine from my home in these gardens, I’ll give you a marvelous magic boon.”

“What—you mean like make me really rich? That sort of thing?”

“If that’s what you want, yes.”

With difficulty, Cosmo controlled his urge. He ran to the park bathroom and made it just in time.

When he returned, the fairy was waiting for him. She took out a tiny wand and waved it in front of his pants.

“My flower and I appreciate your kind gesture. You have now been blessed—but remember, it only will last for twelve hours.” She disappeared inside the flower.

“Hey, wait—where’s my boon?”

But the fairy was gone.

Cosmo cursed under his breath and stomped off to get drunk at a bar.

After a good half dozen beers, Cosmo stumbled to the men’s bathroom. He was relieving himself at the urinal when he noticed something odd. His urine wasn’t making any noise.

He peered down. The urinal was painted a shiny gold color inside. It looked like real gold.

As he was examining the urinal, a single drop of pee splashed onto the floor. Where it hit, the floor shone gold. When he inspected it, he found it was dry; he scraped it with his nail and a fine gold dust shimmered on his finger.

His urine turned everything it touched into gold!

“My boon!” he breathed.

He tried to urinate some more, but he was dry.

“More beer!” he yelled as he ran out of the bathroom. He downed another six beers as fast as he could, then rushed back to the bathroom to see if it would work again.

This time he peed all over the wall. I’m rich! he sprayed in large, shaky letters. He climbed up onto the sink and sprayed a happy face on the mirror. All of it turned to pure gold. He danced a little jig, then left the bathroom whistling. The fairy had said he had twelve hours—he’d been drinking for a couple hours already, so that left him with a good nine hours left to go home and turn everything to gold.

He would have whistled his way right out of the bar, but then the bouncer blocked his way.

“Before you leave, you gotta pay your tab.”

Cosmo checked his pockets.

“Hey, I don’t have any money on me—but I just quadrupled the value of your bar while I was in the bathroom.”

“No money?” growled the bouncer, hands curling into fists.

“Hold on there, big guy! Seriously—take a look at the bathroom! I just turned your urinal to gold!”

The bouncer grabbed Cosmo and hauled him outside.

“I’ll give you a demonstration!” howled Cosmo, and then his words became unintelligible under the onslaught of the bouncer’s fists.

The bouncer deposited Cosmo into the back alley when he was done.

After Cosmo regained consciousness, he threw up. Feeling guilty about the mess he’d made, he peed a little on the vomit, turning it to gold. He began to stagger home.

As he passed a street lamp, he felt something hard poking him in the back. Two men wearing ski masks were standing behind him—he  was so out of it he hadn’t even heard them approach. One of them held a gun.

“Your money or your life,” said the one with the gun.

“I don’t have any money!” cried Cosmo. “I just got beaten up because I couldn’t pay my bar tab.”

“I guess it just isn’t your day.” The gun pointed at Cosmo’s face.

Cosmo wet his pants. Or he would have—except his pee turned his underwear and pants to gold.

“Look at his pants! Is that real gold?” said one of the men, reaching forward for a grope.

“Take your pants off! The underwear too!” said the other.

Cosmo did so. The two muggers ran off with his pants and underwear, laughing madly.

He’d only gone four blocks when a policeman accosted him.

“You there—hands up. You’re under arrest for indecent exposure. You oughtta be ashamed of yourself—there’s still kids out here this time of night.”

“But I got mugged—my pants were stolen!”

“You can explain that downtown.”

In jail, Cosmo was given a pair of orange pants to wear, but that didn’t stop the three men in his cell from pawing at him.

“Hey, new boy, let’s have some fun,” the largest one said. Two of the men held Cosmo’s arms while the large one began pulling at his pants.

Cosmo kicked and screamed, but to no avail. The guards seemed completely uninterested. Soon his new orange pants were off. The men holding him were going to turn him around for the large one’s attack. He had one chance. He let loose a spray of urine, directly at Large One’s face.

Large One fell, his face frozen into a mask of pure gold. The two others, surprised, loosened their hold on Cosmo, and he ripped free of them and sprayed their faces as well. They toppled without a sound.

Hours later, Cosmo was released without charges. Upon discovering the three gold-faced felons, the guards had made Cosmo drink several gallons of water and pee all over the bodies as well. Only then, gloating over their new gold statues, did they let Cosmo go.

Cosmo ran all the way home. Checking his watch, he saw that he had minutes left. Unzipping his pants as he ran up the apartment stairs, he flung open the door.

His pee sprayed out and hit a bouquet of flowers sitting in a vase in the entryway, turning them to gold. Then the twelve hours were up.

Cosmo looked at his gold flowers and the events of the past day overwhelmed him. He’d been beaten up, almost shot, arrested and then almost raped. He hadn’t turned all his possessions to gold like he’d planned, but the fairy’s boon had saved his life and more. He decided that he would be grateful for what he had, and moreover, that he would never pee in the bushes again.

As a side bonus, the flowers were worth at least a million dollars.






COLLEEN CHEN is a suburban Californian relocated to a small hill in the countryside of Brazil. By day she raises chickens and children, and by night she usually sleeps, but she dreams of raising hell, and sometimes she writes about it. She has a fledgling website at www.colleenchen.com.

by Joe Thompson



I’m with Sherri in the handicap stall of the ladies’ room. She’s cursing a rotten blue streak while I brush her hair from her eyes, sitting on the floor in front of her. Her jeans with the special elastic front stitched in are crowded around her ankles and her shirt is pulled up to her boobs, her bulging belly protruding like a fleshy hot air balloon atop a porcelain basket. My child is soon to enter this world and I can’t do much more than hope none of the patrons outside the door hear us and call an ambulance. Things weren’t supposed to be this way, but then again nothing ever turns out the way a person plans it.

Sherri interrupts my thoughts intermittently with cries that she attempts to stuff back down her throat. She curses me, she spits my name out like it’s used dip, she sprinkles each outburst with my brother’s name, which always sends me teetering back into the real world, if such a thing exists. If my stepfather knew what I was up to now I’d never be able to live it down, although I realize with a blossoming suspicion that he is already fully aware of my plight. The baby continues to burrow downward from Sherri’s swollen stomach. I like to imagine it’s head is like a drill bit, body and all twisting like a screw until it peaks from the warm tunnel, perhaps never stopping even after being born, perhaps drilling through the tile and cement and foundation and dirt and rock and fossil until it reaches what would probably be considered the greatest womb of all, the center of the earth.

Again my thoughts are broken by the screams, although this time it’s mingled with the scent of Beef n’ Cheddars being crafted a few yards away from me in the kitchen. I swear I can see the trail of fast food stink leak through the crack under the door and encapsulate this moment around Sherri and I in a fog bank of brown sludge. I swear silently to myself and my brother that if I get out of this predicament in one piece, I will never enter an Arby’s again for the rest of my life. I figure that after my next death, I’ll be reincarnated somewhere that isn’t America. It would truly be a delight to uphold, somewhere not steeped in depression and obesity and pride and mistrust. Again, I realize too late that such a place does not exist in this world, at this time, or most likely in any time following. The seeds have been planted.

Being the brother of Jesus Christ has its perks, as one could imagine. The roundabout immortality is at the very least amusing. I can die like any of the fat sloptarts eating week-old roast beef in the plastic coated dining room outside the door, although I’m guaranteed an instant resurrection in another new body. My brother seemed to have gotten the short end of the stick, what with the ‘one body’ thing. He hasn’t resurrected in a couple thousand years, and the last time he did was only for a few days. According to his calendar, he won’t be back for a couple thousand more. I hear heaven is a pretty awesome place from his accounts of it, although I’ve never been inside the damned place. My stepdad keeps me at the gates until my next body is ready. Sometimes it feels like I’ve been sidelined from a family get together, like I’m watching one of the many families I’ve learned of eating Christmas dinner through a frosted window. I suppose it comes with the territory of the lives I lead.

Here I’ve run into some trouble though; I’m not supposed to procreate. Technically speaking I should be celibate, although there is absolutely no fun to be had there. I don’t see the point in living through the last two thousand years without the occasional century-specific one night stand. It worked the first few lives, but then everything seemed to drag on endlessly until finally I broke the seal. For someone who claims to demand sex only as a means for procreation, my stepfather sure made the act one hell of a good time.

Sherri was the only exception over all these years. I can’t believe this hasn’t happened earlier to be honest, but the fact remains that this is the first woman I’ve gotten pregnant. After a while I figured I was infertile, fruitless, a demigod that can never pass his abnormal seed down the line. Sherri proved me wrong. And try as I might, I just couldn’t talk her into killing the thing while it was still growing. I know just thinking that sends some terrible mojo towards my family, but I can’t help it; I’m more human than they’ll ever be. A child created by me should not be born. And yet here it is happening, in this Arby’s, on this cold Tuesday night, against the backdrop of shit and piss and used tampons.

In a different life, I would have married a woman like Sherri. I would have explained that I had a particular ailment that meant I had to refrain from direct intercourse. If she were one of the Middle Age women, that would’ve been able to fly no problem. As the years tread by though I’ve come to understand that in some ways, women want the same things men do, and their repression by my gender for so long has only made them more outward with each life I live. Sherri was and is no exception.

I’m watching the baby’s head crown and I’m suddenly filled with emotions I’ve never felt before. I wish I could father this baby, I wish that I didn’t have to drown it in that toilet as soon as it falls out. There’s simply no two ways about it though. Not even my brother knows what the fuck it’ll be. For all I know it could plop out spitting fire and reciting sections from the Psalms. At this point in my life nothing would surprise me. I feel worse knowing that Sherri will have to go too. She certainly won’t stand for the murder of our child. If I hadn’t waited, if I could’ve made up my mind at any time of the last nine months, I could’ve killed them both at once and saved myself the turmoil. It’s hard to feel too strongly about life and death when you’ve seen and done both so many times. My family understands the dire necessity of my situation. They’ll come to forgive me in time, although how many centuries it will take is uncertain.

Then I hear this screech.

Amid a sea of obscenities from Sherri comes this otherworldly retch, this gargling scream of life that is suddenly in my hands, bloody and writhing. It sounds inhuman and awful, something from the bowels of hell, something that I know simply should not be. But in that moment, I want nothing else but to hold it. I take my jacket from around my shoulders and wrap my son in it, him still yelping and screaming and crying and Sherri weeping and smiling in spite of herself, one still tethered to the other by the umbilical cord, one being with two minds and hearts and needs and wants and tears.

And then I start to cry.






JOE THOMPSON is an undergraduate senior studying at prestigious Binghamton University, one of the State Universities of New York, which is located somewhere within the lower rings of Hell. He aspires to do nothing more than write every day for the rest of his life, which falls in line with his career aspiration of grizzled homeless man.

by Ainslie Hogarth



On the night Robert died I discovered that someone had left an enormous shit in the toilet. Monstrously large. Like some slimy, prehistoric specimen. An early cobra: cobrus stinkitus. Wrapped around itself at the ends, coiled with evenly spaced segments to fill the whole bowl or terrarium, or wherever one might find something as large and menacing and off-putting as what I’d found. I stared at it between my fingers which had quickly made their way over my face, a temporary buffer to protect some of my more delicate, sensitive, open bits, from what lay stinking and sweating and soaking in the bowl before me.

Then the phone rang and within a few minutes I would learn that Robert had been bisected in a basement two blocks away. Chopped in half with a pair of clownishly large hedge clippers by a deranged neighbour. The problem with deranged neighbours is that you never know when you’ve grossly offended one. And it turns out that that’s exactly what Robert had done.

Robert had never had a problem with The Deranged Neighbour before. Of course, we’d always called him The Deranged Neighbour, so we must have been given a clue at some point as to his unstable mental condition. I suppose we both just forgot about it; Robert had been living next to the man for so long now. So long, in fact, that The Deranged Neighbour had grown to learn where Robert kept a spare key, tucked under a lawn gnome in the garden. He knew that Robert sat quietly and watched television in his white chair most evenings. He knew that he could easily sneak up on Robert, what with his hearing being so weak these days and the volume on the television cranked so high. He gagged Robert with a wad of wool sock and some duct tape, then dragged him back to his garage where he kept the hedge clippers he usually employed to trim his magnolia tree.

Afterwards The Deranged Neighbour felt much better about the gross offense. He even forgave Robert’s top half. And then turned himself in to the police and told them all about it.

The offense in question is best represented by a pert, pink magnolia tree. The same pert, pink magnolia tree which stands in both Robert’s and The Deranged Neighbour’s yard. No one would ever suspect a magnolia tree of symbolizing a violent murder. Magnolias are benign little fellows, like lovely old ponies. Things to be taken care of and enjoyed, valuable inasmuch as you can love them.

You see, two months ago, Robert planted in his yard the same pert, pink magnolia tree that The Deranged Neighbour had planted the summer before. Neither Robert nor I realized it, but The Deranged Neighbour was quite offended by this act which Robert considered both a sincere form of flattery and a nice way to brighten up the neighbourhood. Their parallel trees. The best of friends, standing next to each other, interlocking their roots and branches like elbows on shoulders, leaning on one another for support. Robert had even told me that they reminded him of us. A picture of he and I on his front lawn. He said he loved to see their shadow at night, emblazoned by the street lights, splashed all over his bedroom wall.

The Deranged Neighbour had a very different interpretation of the trees. Utter disrespect is what he felt. A despicable display of inconsiderate rudeness, like graffiti all over his blue vinyl siding, Robert shamelessly holding the spray paint can. The shadow he saw on his own wall at night made him sick to his stomach with rage. After a few years people would never know who planted their sweet magnolia first, who rudely copied whom. All of the agonizing hours The Deranged Neighbour spent deciding whether or not to plant a graceful little magnolia in his yard, let its buxom pink flowers explode with bloom all over his lawn for him to pick up, graze his thumbs against, wet his fingers in the rot where it fell from the flower, would have been a waste. And that glorious moment, the moment he treasured above all of the other moments which made up his life, when he finally decided, yes, yes, yes, I’ll place that delicate little creature in my garden, a great weight lifted from his shoulders. A decision made, something was going to happen. The first thing he’d changed in twenty-five years. He gazed at his new tree all summer, his heart beating heavily, his eyes bloated with fat old man tears, the ones that flow thickly like paint, or water from rusty taps, mottled and heavy with underuse. He would wipe them away quick with a gardening-gloved hand. A swipe of dark dirt left along his cheekbone. Apparently he wore those same gloves when he chopped Robert in half.

And this enormous shit was birthed at exactly the same time that Robert was split open. But I didn’t know that yet, or any of those previous details at all really. I wouldn’t know anything until I spoke with Robert myself, which would happen soon enough.

And at this point, all I wanted to know was which one. Which disgusting, inconsiderate rube left that filth in the toilet? This shit, like a thick, muscular serpent waiting patiently in the toilet bowl, ready to strike at your eyes when you flick on the light and lean in for a peek.

Who left this shit?

My floor contained three small apartments: one bedroom, one kitchen, one little square of a room connecting the other rooms to a front door. We all shared a bathroom at the end of the hall: one toilet, one shower, two sinks. The landlord called us The Three Sixes. The tenants below us, The Three Fives, below them The Three Fours and so on to the basement, which the landlord occupied entirely.

6A: Anna Floss. A willowy woman with thin, white fingers and edgeless limbs. Every morning she quilted herself in shawls and scarves and made her way slowly down the steps to get a newspaper and a black coffee from the stand at the corner. She gripped the banister with both hands, one white knuckled along it and the other one steadying her wrist. She was very, very frail and her every movement wiggled just slightly. An involuntary dance that I used to watch my own mother perform on a nightly basis. The dance of too much to drink. Small movements seem to occur as the drunk loses balance, twitches, perhaps the body’s increasingly obvious attempts at achieving equilibrium, movements microscopic in the non-inebriated who can usually stand quite easily. I think that for Anna Floss, gin was only part of the problem. The other problem was that she hadn’t eaten a real meal in forty years, just enough to keep herself alive I guessed. I don’t think that she could be capable of producing such a monstrous crap. At least not yet. Perhaps after many years of extensive therapy, which she probably didn’t have time for anymore.

6B: Albert Magunty. Albert Magunty was from somewhere up North and he told me once that he used to wear a nylon mask to work. He said that at the end of the night, when he was finally allowed to pull it off, his face was all the wrinkled wet of oversaturated bath skin. He had long, depressed scars running down his face. Tiny valleys. Tracks along which blood and sweat could neatly follow. Because he bled a lot at work and sweat all the time, being as big and as fat as you can be without suffering from mobility problems. He had a large black moustache that hung hard and still like plastic action figure capes from the round nostrils of his heaped, leathery nose. His hands were always all over his face whether he was mashing an itch or rubbing sleep from his puffy eyes or stroking his burnt toast chin. I asked him once where he got all of his scars and he told me that his father was a butcher. I decided to leave the subject alone after that. Albert Magunty. Certainly a character capable of labouring through a shit like the one that had assaulted my eyes. I could see his burly asshole conditioning a specimen such as the one that would eventually occupy a fishbowl in my bedroom. Albert Magunty. My prime suspect.

6C: Adele Fitler. Me. And there are two unfortunate things about my name. Firstly, the obvious: that when you say it out loud it sounds exactly like Adolf Hitler. The second unfortunate thing about the name is that I’m a man. And Adele happens to be a girl’s name. Adele Fitler was my mother’s name and the name of her mother before that and her mother before that and her mother before that. Naming a boy Adele Fitler brought a new dynamic to the hell of the name. My mother wanted a daughter and my father ran away before he could talk any sense into her. Also, he likely didn’t care what she called me. He had run away from the both of us at the exact same time, because I was still just a little parasite in a plush, pink terrarium.

Yes, I admit, I took the pooh from the toilet. I fetched a plastic bag from my room and grabbed it up from the cold water which had preserved it for a then unknowable amount of time. At first I had no intention of doing such a thing. I walked into the bathroom and felt the same kind of repulsion that you or any other reasonable person would feel upon discovering another person’s waste hiding in the bowl. I was furious, glared in the direction of the other Sixes under wads of furrowed, angry brow. So rotten. So disrespectful. I had a mind to call the landlord, have him type up an authoritative looking document on his computer. A sign that said, “Please FLUSH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” with that many exclamation points. I was certainly that many exclamation points mad. I left the evidence where it was and returned to my room to get my camera. Someone had to capture the crime on film, otherwise there might not have ever been a crime at all.

When I entered my apartment the phone had already been ringing. I picked it up expecting Robert because Robert was my best and only friend. Only it wasn’t Robert, it was Robert’s brother, his belly all full of the details of Robert’s murder, which he had partially digested then regurgitated for me over the phone.

Magnolia tree.

Neighbour.

Hedge clippers.

A couple of hours ago.

Confession to the police.

Body found in two.

Top and bottom crammed into washing machine and dryer respectively.

I’m so sorry, Adele.

I hung up the phone and looked towards the bathroom. In my mind there was no possible chance that these two events – Robert’s brutal death and the enormous, serpentine shit in the toilet – were unrelated. How could they be?

Now this is where things get a little odd. And I’ll admit that. Like I said, when I first saw the excrement I was as repulsed as anyone else would be. Probably even more so. I was as repulsed as your grandmother would be, to find something so heinous lurking in the place where I brushed my teeth and got naked and cleaned myself. Though taking a shit and cleaning oneself are both private rituals, there should really be separate places to do them. One day when I move into a big house I’ll have a separate room for each of my private rituals, specially designed somehow to perfectly accommodate them. But that will probably never happen because I’m an old man now and it’s very likely I’ll die here, on the sixth floor with the other Sixes.

Anyway, I fetched a plastic bag and scooped the shit out of the toilet gingerly, careful not to break it or bruise it or leave an impression of my hands in it. Then I put it in a fishbowl with a little bit of its own water and waited for it to give me a sign.

The smell was unbearable. Truly. As soon as I could prove that Mr. Magunty had laid this egg I would give him a pamphlet on colon health. I didn’t want either of the lonely Sixes to die before me. I could only bear to be the first. I found a box of painter’s masks beneath the sink, put one on, and sprayed it see-through with a deodorizing spray. At the time I had no idea what those fumes could do to the minds of lonely people. I’ve since been told.

A few nights passed. I thought about Robert and the magnolia tree that he died for. I dreamed of being sucked into the pink folds of its blossoms, devoured by a world that was loud with beauty and smelly and hot and wet and pink to brown and too ripe. I tried to claw my way out but couldn’t. I was being sucked down, towards the nucleus, the place from which all of the petals exploded and expanded and dripped rotted to the ground. I woke up in the middle of the night from this dream and looked over at the fishbowl. There was something new inside. A little note, sticking out from the turd. I walked over, stuck my hand in the fishbowl and retrieved it.

Hello Adele. It’s me, Robert.

Then I think I fainted because when I woke up, it was morning and I was lying on the floor with my mouth wide open beneath my painter’s mask. I still had the partially stained note in my hand. I read it again:

Hello Adele. It’s me, Robert.

I looked up, it seemed as though the turd had excreted yet another note while I’d slept.

Adele, you can hear me? Oh thank god. Am I alive? Oh Adele it’s good to see your beautiful face my friend. I’m not sure where I am. I can’t move. No one could hear me. Am I in the hospital?

I burst out laughing. Had I gone insane? Is that what was happening here? I sniffed the new note and it reeked. That smell was real, no question about it. My brain couldn’t possibly have manufactured an odour such as that. Talking to a shit in a fishbowl. This was going to happen. I laughed more. I couldn’t stop. I laughed and I laughed until my laughter turned into tears and I could barely breath I was crying so hard. I placed both hands on either side of the fishbowl and looked at Robert. My reflection manipulated by distortions of cheap glass.

“H-hello, Robert.” I couldn’t believe it. A fresh peal of laughter, a loud sniff, I was speaking to my friend the pile of shit. Robert, who had recently been worked out of Mr. Magunty’s asshole, with great effort I’m sure, judging by the length and particularly the width of him. The smell, my god. I took a second to fill my painter’s mask with more deodorizing spray. It made me feel nice and lightheaded and ready to take on the task of conversing with my old friend, the enormous turd. Like drinking a martini in a bar with a pal.

“Hello, Robert. I don’t know what to tell you, friend. You’re very ill I think. Something strange has happened. You’ve been murdered and now it seems you’ve become something else all together. You were murdered, Robert, killed by a psychotic over a magnolia tree, do you understand? I thought I had lost you forever.”

Another note forced its way out:

And now I’m back?

“It seems that way.”

For the next hour I spoke to Robert about what he remembered from the night of the murder, a mountain range of shit smeared notes beginning to fill my bedroom. I spoke to Robert about his magnolia and his brother and the thought of filling the long hours without him. Periodically I would have to spray more deodorizer in the room and into my mask. Now I had Robert with me forever. I could keep him here and speak to him and wouldn’t have to live life without him. I began to get hungry so I brought Robert to the kitchen where I could heat up a can of baked beans on the stove.

Robert squirted up a note and before I reached for it I thought for the first time about the sanitary concerns of acquiring such a roommate. Of course I would accommodate him, but it would take some getting used to. I plucked the note and read it:

Adele, you must tell me now. What is wrong with me, what have I become? I know I’m not in hospital. I see that much. Tell me.

I turned my back to him and shoved a thumb and four fingers into my eye sockets, pinching back tears. No, no, no this will never do. A few moments passed while I squeezed my face tighter and tighter.

“Are you happy right now, Robert?” I suddenly asked, spinning towards him on the balls of my feet, refreshed from a good, painful pinch.

A note popped out quickly:

What am I Adele.

“Are you comfortable?”

Said the note:

I won’t speak to you until you tell me what I am.

And he didn’t. I made my beans, I tried to reason with him. If he was happy and comfortable, who cares what he was? Why couldn’t he be happy with this new existence? I was careful not to divulge exactly what that existence was however. No response. As long as we were together, what difference did it make? I wouldn’t care if we were two mice in a wall, two boils on a chin. Or two soft, pink magnolia petals doomed to overripe and fall heavy to the ground. I pleaded through mouthfuls of sticky brown beans, no response. I sat and stared at him, cried and begged, shook the fishbowl, no response, no response, no response. I slept and woke to no note in the morning for three nights. Finally I cracked. Living with a turd in a fishbowl that I knew was Robert but who wasn’t speaking to me was worse than living without Robert at all.

“This is all very odd to me too, Robert, do you understand? I didn’t plan this or conjure it, it just fell into my lap. Or, not lap really. Into my toilet. Right now I’m talking to a turd, Robert. You’ve become a turd. I discovered you in my toilet the day that you died and you were the most impressive thing I’d ever seen. Well, not at first, but as soon as I knew what you were. You’re the mightiest turd, Robert. Mighter as a turd than as a man, this I promise you. The king of turds, do you realize that? I staggered when I first saw you, truly I did. You might even be proud of yourself if you saw because I think as far as turds go, you’re the most striking turd I’ve ever laid eyes on. And I used to clean up at that stadium, Robert, you remember that. Mightier and more handsome than any I’ve seen, that’s the truth.”

No response. No movement. No acknowledgement on his part that he had heard anything I’d said. Then suddenly, he began to quiver and stir and a little note forced its way out once again. The first in three days:

Grab a mirror Adele, I want to see myself.

“Why, Robert? Why do you have to see yourself? What difference does it make?”

No response. He knew how to press the button. I couldn’t have him quiet.

So I walked to my nightstand, pulled a small hand mirror out of the drawer and returned to the dresser that Robert was on top of. I placed a doily beneath him to make him look a bit neater before I held the mirror up to what might have been his face. It’s odd, the turd began to take on the qualities of a man’s face, or at least, I’d begun to force the qualities onto it. Two little seeds became eyes and a poorly chewed section of what might be creamed corn bubbled out for a nose. He seemed to speak or excrete notes that is, between segments, so I suppose that those segments could be his mouths. Nothing wrong with a man having a few mouths is there?

A little quiver and another note shot out, this time a bit faster.

“You seem to be getting the hang of this,” I said to him encouragingly. I plucked the note out and read it.

Flush me Adele. I can’t live like this. Look at me. I’m a turd in a fishbowl. This isn’t a life, heavens no.

A frown pulled at my face. I couldn’t help it. I could understand of course what he was saying, but how could I possibly flush my dearest friend? How could I lose him again?

“Robert,” I said, “how could I? You’re asking me to kill you, don’t you realize that? You’re asking me to end your life. I’ll be so lonesome without you, Robert. I’ll be so very alone.”

A tiny struggle, another note.

Please Adele. If I was ever any friend to you at all, you’ll flush me.

I sucked in another breath of deodorizer and began to cry. And I sat there and I cried until Anna Floss tapped gently on my door and whispered through a crack, her tiny voice tickling my ear, asking me if I was okay.

“Yes!” I replied loudly. “Leave me alone, Anna!”

And once I knew she was gone I made my way to the bathroom and performed a very private ritual with my very dearest friend Robert.






AINSLIE HOGARTH is a very recent graduate from an MA in Creative Writing program at the University of Auckland, where she completed the first draft of her first novel. She enjoys day old macaroni and writing very short biographies about herself.