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It was three in the morning when I heard it from afar.

 

The back door of my home, creaking open like a rotted old walnut giving birth to dust and bad taste.

 

Afar?

 

Sorry, the bathroom. I was on the toilet when I heard burglars come stalking into my house.

 

Right in the middle of the kind of bowel movement that brings tears to your eyes. The kind of sad thing that makes your mouth water with relief when it’s done.

 

C’mon…don’t act as if you don’t know what I’m talking about. Anyone who’s ever eaten Taco Bell knows exactly what special kind of misery I’m talking about.

 

Maybe an hour from wiping myself, and there were suddenly dreadful people in my house.

 

Whispers crawled down the living room hall, around the corner, and into my ears. I’ve got good ears. You don’t work for ten years as an insurance sales-woman without learning how to tune your ears to the tiniest sound of avoidance.

 

Four people; three fairly light-weight, one very heavy. Boots. Boots with treads. Clickety-Clack. Guns, rifles, maybe. Rattle-Rattle. A chain of some sort, maybe a pair of nun chucks.

 

One of them wheezed like an old car; an egg beater at the end of its days.

 

How can a heavy smoker think it’s a good idea to make a living breaking into houses?

 

Say someone managed to call the cops. If the cops arrived on time, (HAH) the culprit couldn’t possibly get away. They’d catch him by listening to his lungs shaking in place. They’d catch him by the sound of the rigid sea of phlegm in his pipes.

 

Before my thoughts managed to bear me away, I heard the burglars split up and enter different parts of the house in the darkness. Footsteps told me that one entered my bedroom. No good. He wouldn’t find anything in there but old Cosmo magazines and a vibrator the size of mutant squash.

 

Another set of feet, these nearer than the first set, spoke to me as they carried their owner into the kitchen. Maybe he’d help himself to the leftover tacos on the table. He’d have to wait for the toilet, though.

 

A third person walked into the depths of the living room. There was the sound of a chain rattling again, and then a click. A smell. Some foreign b*****d was now smoking in my house.

 

In.

 

My.

 

House.

 

Where even I didn’t smoke. I’d have to teach the rude f****r a lesson before this was all said and done.

 

The fourth person? The fourth person didn’t move from the living room hall. Such silence and self control told me that this must’ve been the leader. I’d have to be careful with this person. This was a person with common sense.

 

In the kitchen, something fell to the floor and smashed.

 

“Goddamnit, keep it quiet in there,” snapped a harsh voice. The voice of the man in the living room. The b*****d who had decided that smoking in a cancer patient’s home was A-ok. He sounded big, brawny. This street-beast son of a b***h was going down hardest of all.

 

“Sorry,” came a woman’s high pitched voice. From the kitchen. Ladies weren’t ladies anymore. They were men with hardened p*****s, by God.

 

Who ever heard of a female burglar?

 

That thought, more than any other, was what convinced me that the time to act had come. Though my bowels were still screaming, I quickly cobbled together a plan. A very lax plan. I stood up and silently pried the toilet lid, a thing of light, yet durable plastic, from the body of the toilet. This was held in my left hand. I kicked off my shoes and slacks, very quietly. Wouldn’t be good for these things to get in the way when the tough got going.

 

With my right hand, I collected a wad of toilet tissue and wiped my a*s.

 

That’s right. Women wipe their asses too.

 

I inhaled, deeply. I had to stifle a cough. Taco Bell didn’t make food that freshened the smell of the aftereffects. Not yet, anyway. I readied myself. After a moment’s prayer, I slammed the lid of the toilet against the edge of the tub.

 

See, that’s the great thing about a half-assed plan in times of stress and emergency. It’s half-assed and was sure to bring to bear unexpected results, sure, but not just to the person with the plan. It’s half-assed to all involved, which was what brought the woman from the kitchen running full-tilt to the bathroom.

 

The bathroom door was kicked open, and in rushed a woman who must've been at least forty-five years old. There were runners of gray in her hair, and she had a stomach like a truck driver. Her breasts sagged atop her stomach like great big balloons filled with warm water.

 

In her right hand was a crowbar. In the middle of her charge, she skidded to a halt. She paused and stared at me. Her eyes slid across the toilet seat in my left hand, but what really kept her attention was the wad of s****y toilet tissue in my right hand. Her face seemed to fold in on itself. The revulsion there was so absolute that she didn’t even move when I rushed forward in my nakedness and shoved the wad of soiled toilet tissue in her face with every bit of strength that I could muster.

 

Something in her face gave a dull crunch, perhaps the bridge of her nose, and she screamed into the toilet tissue. This scream was instantly followed by a thick gagging sound. She had quite possibly swallowed s**t in her disgust and alarm. Her arms flailed as she fought for balance, but I refused to stop pressing my advantage. Even as she screamed and gagged, her fellows were rushing to the bathroom. Taking advantage of her loss of balance, I sunk my right knee as deep into her stomach as it would go.

 

That did it. The woman with the man’s stomach and the humongous breasts and the high voice wheezed and pitched backwards, falling to the left. Her head connected with the edge of the bathtub with a low crack.

 

She didn’t move after that.

 

“What the f**k?” shrieked a man with cigarette smells on his breath.

 

Him.

 

I dashed forward with the toilet lid raised, but I had moved too slowly. A chain lashed the side of my head, and instantly, the world felt immaterial, dream-like. Another bite of cold chain-link (this one across my left thigh) brought my awareness back. I caught myself in the middle of tripping over my own right shoe, for f**k’s sake. I managed to duck just as the chain whistled through the space that had been occupied by my head just moments before.

 

A chain has a lot of range, but it isn’t the smartest weapon to carry into a possible fight with completely unknown dimensions. The man with the chain, the smoker, couldn’t draw his weapon back swiftly without perhaps harming himself, which meant that he had to slow down in order to regain control.

 

That was when I took aim with the toilet seat and swung. There was a sharp popping noise as the toilet seat shattered across his right check. The man dropped the chain and grabbed his mouth, screaming through a haze of agony. As I swung the toilet seat again, I saw that many of his front teeth were broken shards of tortured enamel.

 

The second strike caved his face in and he sunk to the bathroom floor with a soft whimper.

 

Just as I was making my way out of the bathroom, an explosion crashed through the house. Something blazed like fire across my left shoulder, and I was driven into the wall beside the bathroom door hard enough to lose my breath.

 

I’d just been shot. Well, grazed.

 

“Son of a b***h!” shouted the man who now stood at the other end of the hall. He fired again, but I was too scared and too quick and too enraged to be hit. Another shot slammed into the wall over my head. I dodged it. Another shot. Somewhere, glass shattered. Another shot. Charred chunks of smoking wood rained down around me, but I kept moving as fast as my fear would allow.

 

I was like a lemming being driven off a high cliff and into an ocean of chaos. I couldn’t have stopped myself even if I’d wanted to. Terror and foolish self preservation had taken over and were steering my half naked body like sentient suicide bomber viruses.

 

While the man with the gun was fumbling with the trigger to paint the walls of my home with my guts, I drew the jagged edge of the broken toilet lid across his throat. Instantly, there was a fountain of blood and a shot scream. The man’s hands went to his throat as he fell to his knees, but I paid no attention to his paroxysms of shock. I kicked him in his face and felt three of my toes break. When he collapsed onto his face, hands still gripping his throat, I fell onto his back and pounded on the back of his head like a conga drum with the ruined toilet lid.

 

He stopped moving.

 

I hurriedly stood and looked around for the forth person. Any moment I expected my head to detonate like a watermelon with a firecracker planted inside, but it didn’t happen.

 

He’d seemed like a sensible leader, the man in the hall, and that was confirmed, now. I looked down at myself. There was blood and s**t everywhere, and in my right hand was a thick sliver of toilet bowl lid. It dripped with gore and bits of torn toilet paper.

 

Any man smart enough to lead a crew of impetuous a******s into a house of unknown qualities in the middle of the night was surely smart enough to know when he was beaten, or at least close enough to it.

 

He was smart enough to keep himself out of the fight. That’s what grunts were for, after all.

 

I was a harridan of blood and rage and excrement, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that some things just can’t be reasoned with or beaten.

 

Reviews

[Inda Lauryn]

Do I laugh or gag here? Not only was this totally hilarious, but it was also ingenious and original. I kept wanting to turn my eyes away from the page because of the scatological nature of the stories, but that's just the thing that made it so funny. You have a twisted since of humor. Cool.

[Ms. Spriggs]

Fantastic gore for the everyday reader.

"Ladies weren't ladies anymore. They were men with hardened p*****s, by God." What feminism has done to the lot of us. Though whether or not we could smash burglars with pieces of toilet seat and take a chain hit to the face? Who knows.

The slow build of disgust did well to bring in the reader. From taking a s**t, to smearing in a woman's face, to slitting throats and mashing guts. Excellent imagery, "harridan of blood and rage and excrement" is a great line.

Keep up the good work!

[Vlazuvius]

Oh my! I couldn't stop laughing. My friend Reggie lives clear over in Baltimore, a far cry from Idaho, but the part about Taco Bell's effects on your innards brought him here to me. And as for the crazy harridan narrator, well, I think I'm going to have to print a copy of this and take it home to the wife. I have a feeling I'm in for a lot of reading.