Toilet Boy

Before he woke up in the hospital, with the tingle still creeping in his fingertips, Johnny didn’t believe in the stories. No one did except for the oldies over in Little Hollow Terrace. But who believed them? No one with half a mind sane enough to talk straight, that’s for damn sure.

            But maybe something less would have saved Johnny from that annoying tingle in his right hand and the nightmares.

            “How are you feeling today Johnny?” Nurse Susan James, an intern at the small tech school and nothing short of a babe. But that was hardly on his mind anymore; only cold things were on his mind. And eyes. There was that, too. “You don’t remember much, do you?” She was worried he did. She was new and couldn’t handle the crazies well

            (who does)

so he wouldn’t worry her.

            “Not much today.” A depressing undertone was in his voice. It could have been the drugs, but he didn’t think so. He could hear himself and he could feel it, too.

            Susan pepped up a bit. “I guess that’s a good thing, right?” Sweet, too, but not that smart. “Here is your lunch, Johnny.” He heard her heels click out of the room and close the door.

            Johnny glanced over his shoulder and saw his lunch

            (cuppa drink cuppa food and a cuppa pills)

in disgust and looked back out the window. It was snowing in April and it was sticking.

            Of course I remember, you dumb b***h.

            I have nightmares about it.

                       

 

            He opened the door and walked out of his third period classroom. It was the last week of school and they still had pictures of those kids that were killed in that shooting almost six months ago. They should of left that poor Batterson boy alone. He walked past these quickly, before a heavy pang could settle in his gut. Johnny’s day was going pretty well, last week of school, he managed to pry Martha’s cell number out of her cold hands, and Brody snuck a bottle out of his dad’s liquor cabinet. And if everything went well, I could get lucky. A small smile reached around his cheeks. Maybe those pictures couldn’t ruin his day after all.

            He turned down the second hall on his right and slowed down a bit. History class was going on right now, so he was in no rush. Geez, he didn’t even have to go to the bathroom like he told Mr. Norbertson, he just had to stretch his legs and get some nice hallway air.

            A good ten minutes from now, he would be thinking how he should have just slept through the movie or let his a*s fall asleep. It would have saved him a lot more than just a class period at the end of the year. An arm’s and a leg’s worth more.

            He passed by the lockers; sliding his index finger across each one, send a small clicking noise through the empty hall. Each one seemed to echo back at him.

            The red and yellow lockers came to a quick end by a rusty water fountain and another corner. He turned right again and passed through the English hall. He passed through a couple more halls, getting a kind of Last Look before the year ended and he was off to the U. But just shy of five minutes, he would realize school wouldn’t be for him for a good while. He’d probably occupy a small chair in front of a window at The Hollow Mental Institute.

            Johnny pulled out his phone and headed towards the boy’s room.

 

 

            The most popular tale he had heard was the all-famous Alligator in the Sewers tale.  He remembered hearing it when he was starting his first years of school. A little boy his age had decided to drop his brother’s baby alligator in the toilet and flushed it. Instead of just dying off like it should have, it thrived. And it grew. His own brother, who was now resting in a small hole in the Middle East, use to say to him that if you didn’t stop pissin’ your pants like a baby, the alligator would crawl up the drain and drag you down to the sewers by your a*s and eat you for lunch. He usually only said this after Johnny had snuck into his room or pissed him off in some way.

            Johnny didn’t like this version of the story though. Not because it scared him, he actually got a kick out of it, but because he could see all of the holes in it. What mommy would give her son a pet gator? And how could a gator climb up the pipes? It was huge and the pipes were tiny!

            Out of probably the half a dozen other stories he heard that was like that, the one that scared him the most was the one about Toilet Boy.

            Toilet Boy, sometimes he used to be a Ralph or a Gregory, lived in a small house just outside that city. It had large farm that grew alfalfa weeds and milked cows before they were sent off to the slaughterhouse in Kingston.

            He had a busy family, always cleaning or throwing hay or out in the fields. One of these busy, summer days, he had followed his father and his brother out to the fields. But being as young as he was, he couldn’t rightfully follow and the alfalfa was long this year and harvest season was still a few moons away.

            Toilet Boy got lost. He soon got scared. He ran through the alfalfa, the grass scratching him with crude nails and making him itch, the sun quickly burned him.

            But he ran anyways. He ran in a blind, exhausting fit. Toilet Boy had run directly into an old well and tripped. His foot cracked against the stone and sent him in a wild somersault through the rotted wood and down into the dark. When that dark reached up and covered the sky, no one could find him. They searched the whole fields but couldn’t find him or the well he fell in.

            When harvest season came through and the family was again busy with work, they harvested the alfalfa. They cut it shorter then the years before and when they went back to pick up the bales, they found the well. The father felt a very rational sense of hope weigh in at his chest. But looking down the well snatched that hope away from him and crushed it. Crushing so that he would dream about that well and how his boy fell in, how his boy scratched at the walls and screamed for just one set of ears that would never hear him. And just before he would wake up, he would see those claw marks on that stone in great detail. He would see the white lines against the gray stone. He would see the broken fingernails forever trapped in mold. He would see a little line of blood stain the rest of the way down.

            But that wasn’t the part that scared Johnny whenever he heard this story. His brother, and even some of his friends, could have sworn he heard Toilet Boy, still begging for help, his cries echoing up through the drains whenever there’s a light out in the bathroom. He even swore, once, on his mother’s grave that he saw him, one white and fleshy arm reaching up out of the toilet bowl for a lending hand.

Just one.

 

 

Johnny stepped into the bathroom and let the door swing shut behind him. It was dark, nearly pitch black except for one fluorescent bar of light hanging above the urinals.

He stepped over to one of them and immediately felt his phone buzz in his pocket. He pulled it out and read the short text

(sext)

with a short smile. He started typing in a reply with a memorable speed that only high schoolers truly know. He finished the text

            (sext sext sext)

and hit send a little too hard. His phone slipped out of his hand and fell into the urinal and slipped out of sight. He looked down and uttered f**k.

            A little light broke through the prism of water as his phone buzzed with life. Johnny groaned and rolled up his sleeve as he got down on his knees. He stuck first his hand into the cold water and then his arm as he reached into the bowels of the urinal. He felt it slide away from his fingertips and soon he had his elbow hugging the bowels.

            His lips curled into a snarl as his arm soaked in the toilet. He felt the phone slide away from him again-

            Wait. That didn’t feel like a phone. It felt kind of squishy. He felt something slide up slowly past his forearms. Something cold and bloated, like sponge that has never been cleaned.

            He felt what he thought was thick worms wrap around the part of his arm that’s just below his elbow. He let out a yell as it started pulling on him, banging his shoulder against the porcelain and ripping his elbow apart.

            “Ah! Let go! Let GO!” He felt the skin and tendons around his muscle start to split apart. He started screaming inarticulate noises; tears streaming down his cheeks.

            The toilet water started turning red and his screaming turned into a high-pitched vibrato. He thought he could hear footsteps running towards the boy’s room.

            He felt the skin split a little more and he heard a sickening pop as his help was pulled apart just a little more and with a watery tear, he fell backwards. On his way down to the tile he saw a pair of

            (the eyes I saw his EYES)

colorless eyes looking up at him, as if he was pleading for help, and white, fleshy fingers recede back into the bowels of the urinal. He felt the color drop out of his face, like a boy in free fall.

            Johnny landed on the floor and saw a half dozen pair of feet run in. He heard a lady scream and saw her go white. He followed her gaze to his arm. Where his elbow was suppose to be was just a tangle of skin and muscle tissue. He screamed until he passed out.

 

 

            The stringy tangle of red that was his elbow has long since been cauterized and healed over into a bumpy stump. He looked out of the window and saw that the clouds were darkening and the snow was turning into rain. He sat there quietly and just looked until his focus slowly changed from the view outside to the reflection on the inside; the reflection of a man with stump of an arm, sitting in a wheel chair that could not willingly get out of.

            He saw the reflection of a boy standing behind him. A white, bloated, fleshy boy, standing there, soaking wet and grinning at Johnny,  waving at him with limp hand grasped loosely in his fat fingers.

Author's Note

I actually got this idea when I walked into the tiny bathroom at a restuarant. I got more of an image and the image was of a phone falling into a urinal. And then I thought, "would someone really reach for that?" I was kind of hoping this story would turn out to be kind of funny.

Reviews

[dw817]

What does the (sext) mean ?

[Nick.B]

Interesting and funny idea, the plot seems good, love that's something "fresh" and new