and what and what

My alarm clock is the crack of a soda can and the flick flicK fliCK flICK fLICK FLICK of a lighter. An arched ceiling amplifies every sound from the kitchen, and every day her breakfast is high-fructose carbonation and cancer. She is always up before me, and I cannot sleep without my hand on a breast and my dick pressing between the cheeks of her ass.

She has to be at work soon. She could have any job she wanted anywhere, but she has this one to be with me down here. She is smarter than I am and she knows I know it. Everything is easy to her, and she can take things or leave things, which makes me think she must want to be with me because she could have left this thing. Should have left this thing.

My job will never make me what I want to be. There is too much room for my own abuse. If I show up an hour late, I make up for it by leaving an hour early. Two-hour lunch. My responsibilities include spelling, which I suck at, and arguing about shit nobody in the argument understands, especially me. Hers include the foundations of all knowledge and shaping young lives.

I walk to the bathroom, ball my fist and rub crust from my eye. I lift the lid to piss and there is a giant tampon floating in red whaling water. It smells like dead babies, and my knee buckles. I catch myself on the sink and yell, "What the fuck are you trying to do to me!" Laughter echoes from the kitchen. She thinks menophobia is funny, but it is serious. I puke a little in my mouth. My mother's bloody tampons traumatized as a child, and she knows it.

This is payback.

I pinch my nose, spit, flush, piss, and turn on the shower. Water sprays me in the face and all over the floor. Someone — I wonder who — angled the nozzle out. I do not say anything, just turn the water off, adjust the head, turn the water back on and get in. The shampoo bottle will not flick open, and the bar soap will not lather — it is coated in something clear and hard. What the fuck. I am about to scream when a handful of flour hits me in the face from above, my mouth open a bit. More choking handfuls hit my shoulders and hair. An egg cracks on my head.

There is nothing to say. I stand still under the hot water and turn into dough.


~O~