The Toilet

There was something wrong with the toilet. It had been making gurgling noises; bubbling, guttural squelches. It had been doing this for two days now.
There was something wrong with the toilet and his mother wouldn’t hear a word about it. Gunnar would drag his mother into his bathroom and whenever she’d enter, it would stop. She was beginning to think her son was delusional, or one of those schizos; maybe it was in the genes, she’d known her great-aunt was crazy like that.
But then his mother would leave and the toilet would start up again. What was worse is that Gunnar’s mother wouldn’t let him go to the bathroom in hers; she insisted, in disbelief that her son was losing it, that he go in his own bathroom. He pleaded with her; that there was something wrong with the toilet, something really wrong with it; but she wouldn’t hear a word of it, stiffening, hand up in the air. She’d tell him to quit it with the theatrics; whatever attention he was lacking, get it from his girlfriend.
Gunnar didn’t have a girlfriend. His mother always assumed he had a girlfriend; Gunnar was twenty, still living with his mother. College…didn’t really work out. Now he was sitting on the edge of his bathtub with a baseball bat slung over his shoulder. He’d stopped watching TV, barely ate anything at all; just listened to the toilet. It was as if it was trying to say something to him. Sometimes it would whisper and the water would rise up like a finger, goading him to come closer. He would, bat in hand, and then the finger would morph into a bubble and explode; underneath the splashing, he could hear the toilet laughing at him.
He started taking the elevator down to the public restroom in his apartment building. But soon after that, the toilet began making the same gurgling, macabre noises.
He began having nightmares about the toilet; he couldn’t even tell if he was sleeping or not because his nightmares would always be about the toilet gurgling and gurgling and when he’d awake from his nightmares it’d still be gurgling, bubbling, murmuring something grisly to him.
Gunnar was running out of places to take a shit. He began squatting over zip-lock bags and taking them out to the refuse chute. As he walked down the hall he could still hear the toilet…gurgling, bubbling at him. The bubbles would snap and he would flinch, sometimes dropping the zip-lock bags onto the hallway floor.
One day as he was opening the refuse chute to throw one of the zip-lock bags in it, a tsunami of shit came spouting out of the refuse chute. The refuse chute was gushing shit; it was spewing out in droves; Gunnar scrambled to open the door but kept slipping. It was surging out of the refuse chute so profligately that if he didn’t reach the doorknob soon the refuse chute would flood the compartment and he would drown in a deluge of regurgitated shit.
But then it stopped and all the shit was gone. The refuse chute was laughing maniacally, hysterically, in its sputtering gurgle.
“I’ve had enough of this shit,” Gunnar said out loud. He opened the door and sprinted back home, the laugh trailing after him the entire way.

Gunnar had the toilet duck-taped shut; he hammered nails onto the lid. He put a three-hundred pound box full of action-figures on top of it; even turned off the water.
For awhile, everything was back to normal. It wasn’t until his mother went to Colorado with her friends that he heard the toilet snickering again. All the lights in the house were on. He’d stolen a bottle of liquor from his mother’s cabinet and had a lighter ready. He really wanted to get a hold of a gun but his best friend downstairs only dealt with knives. Nevertheless, he bought them all. It was the middle of summer and he was studded in his most protective clothing. He had put on a hockey mask. From dawn ‘till dusk he sat, watched, waited, a vigilante. The toilet kept snickering, laughing nonchalantly, swooshing and cooing at him. Eventually he passed out after three days staring at the toilet and when he woke up all his aegis was gone. All that was left on the toilet was a soggy note; the only words he could decipher was the word shit with a circle drawn around it and a line crossed through it.
He flung open the toilet lid. He backed out of the bathroom and checked his phone; why? No one had called him in over a month aside from his mom. There was no one that would believe him that there was something…something inside his toilet, something hideous, inhumane and maleficent.
The toilet didn’t respond. Gunnar peeked back into the bathroom. The water seemed…settled, crystal clear.

Weeks later, when Gunnar had nearly rid himself of preoccupying about the toilet, he heard a splitting scream cracking the sound barrier from his bathroom; he had to put his hands over his ears. Half-deaf, he opened the door. His mother was sitting on the toilet, pants coiled around her feet in a puddle of blood and verdant bile. Looking up he saw an anemic, sallow hand with a protuberant and hairy mole on it hanging out of her stomach, webbed with her intestines and blood. The hand seemed to be pulling her into the toilet, twisting her intestines around its finger and yanking them down into the toilet along with the rest of her organs, plopping into the toilet one by one. Her ribcage had been lacerated into a shredded vulture, burst open. The hand continued to pull, until the entire lower half of her body was immersed within the toilet; the hand continued to tug, cracking the bones of her brittle rip-cage as it snapped and jerked her entire body into the toilet. And with a final heave, followed by the bespattering of a bubble, she was gone.
Gunnar, shell-shocked, post-traumatic stress disorder foreshadowing the rest of his life, just stared, stared and stared. The toilet belched, then sighed as if satiated with its afternoon snack.
“You know,” it sputtered, “If only people…ah, never mind. You’ll probably shit your pants for the rest of your life in an institution, because no one will believe you, just as they don’t believe in me.”
Gunnar continues to stare. He…walks towards the toilet, warily, nearly tip-toeing. He stares into it. Crystal clear, not a spot of blood or remnant of entrails.
Except his own when the hand reaches out and wrenches Gunnar’s face with its fingers, twisting it and contorting it into Guernica; Gunnar’s eyes pop out like a summer girl with a beret on chewing gum, blowing bubbles. He’s immediately sucked in, face first, decomposed alive as the crystal clear water, now acid, simmers malignantly, further satiated.
The toilet belches one last time, and gently lowers its lid.