Bathroom (PDF)
She wants to look inside, but she can’t. The door is closed. We’d never been able to close it before, but it’s shut now: cockeyed in its frame, its lower half warping away from the jamb. I can see shadows of movement there, something like a frenzied activity happening in our bathroom. But I can’t get in, and neither can she. It’s locked.
We stand in the kitchen, listening. It’s loud. The sounds are felt. They’re violent, ruinous: the walls thundering, the tile denting under the frenzied panic of hooves. Though I can’t see them, I know the hooves are shodden, are cratering the checkerboard tile, spraying the gravel of its remains against the baseboards, pinging the sides of the trashcan, spackling the walls of the tub. The chaos occasionally cedes only to the gurgling of our toilet. As it bubbles forfeiture and loss, I know that the horses, temporarily distracted, drink from its cup. Sated, reenergized, they then kick like chorus girls into the width of the bathtub, where they piss and shit as easily as one might breathe, their gifts dropping like so much rain, such ripe fruit.
It smells barnlike, unruly. We cover noses and mouths as we hear the glissando of shattering glass. I turn to her, eyes wide: The mirror. It’s gone. It loses our reflections in the sink, availing itself of my face, of hers, holding, for a moment, the whites of the equine eyes, the coal silk of their manes, the ivory tile of their teeth. I laugh as I think of it: our tile for theirs, and still more of it cracks and gravels away from the floor as they stomp, turn, hoof away our bathroom.
Outside, the kitchen floor buckles, taffies away from the fences of its own walls. It’s as if the building itself were smiling or frowning. Opening its mouth. She screams: We have to stop them. We have to stop these horses, she shouts, from destroying our bathroom. But we can’t. I tell her this as calmly as possible, my hands pink against the yellowed panel of the door, my arms straining to now secure it in place. These are wild horses, I say, and we have willed them into the building. We have foaled them from our frustration, invited them to wreck the one room still common to us both. We’ve stabled them just next to the tub, its faucets incontinent where theirs are steaming and fluid, its belly worn to rust where theirs are soft with hay-colored hair. And we’ve pastured them below the sink, where they feed on the fur of old cotton and discarded tissue, where they lap up mildewed puddles that collect what the basin above cannot contain.
The bathroom can’t keep them much longer. Not as long as they kick at its walls, as they rear against a small window, upending a nearby shelf. The door begins to buck on its hinges, and I see towels fall over strong backs, lashing into makeshift saddles. I imagine us both mounting each steed, riding them over the linoleum of the kitchen, their hooves tarnishing the burnished floor of the hall, scuffing away resin to reveal the real nature of the wood below. The stairs will splinter under our weight, will ladder away from each floor and fall like so many divested planks to the foyer: no longer the front of the building, but now a berth, a gate, an open stable. And we and the horses crash through it all, refusing to look back as the house collapses.