Down the Drain

her side of the vanity, but those shower memories were still fresh, vivid. By the time he’d washed away most of the day’s dirt and sweat, he was rock hard.

His erection jutted from his pubic thatch, throbbed. He wrapped his fingers around the shaft and gave it what it wanted. Gave himself what he wanted.

It didn’t take long.

When the convulsions came, thick wads of semen erupted from his penis. Some of the fluid splattered against the wall and oozed down to the edge of the tub. The rest dripped to the bathmat between his feet and stuck there despite the surrounding currents of water. He continued stroking for just a little bit longer, closed his eyes, braced himself against the wall, and waited for his shivering body to settle. The fuzzy current of pleasure electrified his mind, replaced his thoughts with an incoherent jumble. Things cleared (eventually), and he opened his eyes.

He used the side of his foot to slide the dollop of sperm from the bathmat to the drain. Then he reached down to pull the clinging streamers from between his toes. These bits he flicked in the drain’s general direction. The shower would wash it all down. Let the water do its job. When he had finished the clean-up, he stopped and listened for a moment.

Sucking. Was that sucking he heard?

He eyed the tub’s drain, thought the water seemed to swirl around it a little more quickly than usual, thought the sound of the water slipping into the plumbing below had intensified somehow, become a sucking, slurping sound. A strand of semen came unstuck from the tub’s floor and spun into the black, guzzling hole.

You’re insane, he thought. And of course that was true. Had to be. His aunt, upon catching him in the act in her guest bathroom during a family picnic one summer, had told him he’d go crazy if he touched himself too often. Maybe she’d been right.

He lathered his entire body with soapy layers of Irish Spring, rinsed off, repeated, and repeated again. Sawdust could be a bitch to get off. If he didn’t overshower, he’d be tossing and turning in bed all night, too hot and sweaty and gross feeling to get any kind of decent sleep.

He washed both his skin and his hair with the bar of soap. There’d been shampoo once upon a time, but he hadn’t bothered to replace the last empty. Shampoo had been Eileen’s thing. As far as he was concerned, Irish Spring did the job just fine.

Finished, clean, he shut off the water and stepped out of the shower amid a billowing cloud of steam. His reflection, obscure in the steam, shadowy, floated across the mirror over the sink when he moved. He grabbed a used towel from the hook beside the shower and used it to dry himself.

The antibiotic ointment he found in the medicine cabinet had expired, but he slathered a little bit on his cut anyway and slapped on a sports band-aid.

With the damp towel wrapped around his waist, he went in search of his cat again.

“Selly?”

He went into the bedroom and looked beneath the comforter, stepped into the little-used office and checked the desk’s kneehole. When he didn’t find Selina in either of her favorite spots, he called to her again.

No response.

In the utility room, he found her empty water bowl. He also smelled out the yellow puddle in the laundry basket and sighed. Selina wasn’t the finickiest of cats, but if she got upset about something, she’d pee on the first inappropriate thing she could find.

He dumped the soiled clothes back into the washer, threw in some detergent, and set the machine going. He took the laundry basket to the back patio for a later washing. It had gone full dark outside. He noticed lights on in some of the neighboring houses and held his towel shut in case one of them happened to glance out the window during an untimely gust of wind.

Inside, he refilled the cat’s water and checked her litter box. Dry. And empty.

Where is she?

He didn’t think he’d left a door or window open but guessed it was possible. He checked the house and found nothing but closed, locked exits. Could she have gotten out when he came home? He thought he would have seen her, but he’d been more than a little brain dead when he arrived, and she could be sneaky when she wanted. He stuck his head out the front door, still clutching the towel’s loose knot.

“Sel? Here, kitty kitty.”

He quieted for a minute and listened for her familiar meow.

Silence.

Bruce closed the front door and made another loop through the house, checking the hidey holes and out-of- the-way places he’d skipped the first time around, half expecting to find the animal dead somewhere, curled up with her bloated tongue protruding from the side of her mouth and her eyes glazed, unseeing.

He found a furry slipper (Eileen's) in the back of the closet and was sure for a moment that he’d discovered the cat’s body. So sure that he surprised himself by welling up a little. When he moved aside the other piled shoes and found only more footwear instead of a corpse, he wiped away a single tear that had slipped through his day's worth of stubble.

Manly man indeed.

He couldn’t find her anywhere. Either she’d gotten out of the house, or she was playing one hell of a game of hide and seek.

Resigned, he went to the fridge for a beer and grabbed two instead. He took the brews to the sofa, started to turn on the television, and decided there wasn’t anything he wanted to watch. He twisted the top off the first bottle, took a long drink, and slouched.

Five minutes later, he was dead to the world.

FOUR

The next day was a total disaster.

Problem one: a bad night’s sleep. He woke on the couch with a stiff back, a sore neck, and a wet spot on the cushion beneath his butt that was half the result of the damp towel he’d forgotten to remove and half from spilled beer.

Problem the second: he still hadn’t been able to find Selina in the morning. Not in the house, not outside, not anywhere.

And then: he’d had to rebuild three different walls at work when his measurements came out slightly (or in one case, astronomically) wrong. He tried to tell himself she was just a cat, that he shouldn’t let her disappearance affect him so much, that she’d probably be waiting for him when he got home that night.

But she was more than just a cat. She’d been his companion for over ten years and the only friend he’d had since Eileen walked out.

And what if she wasn’t there? What if she was gone for good? Run away, or dead and decaying in a ditch