F I C T I O N
Jim Morgan
Deep Ends
I
t was just a little trickle in the shower, a fleeting flash of gold, just a little bit sour. Jack hummed the words in his head. Now he was becoming a bathroom poet? And not a good one. Quite a step down from his glory days of eardrum-rending songs in that perfect echo chamber. But Jack no longer gave voice to music. His operatic days were in another life. You have to take what is coming. Accept realities. Deal with them. Nice philosophies, perhaps, but wasn’t it ironic that an aerospace engineer who designed controls for intercontinental ballistic missiles could no longer control his own incontinent ballistic bladder. Try as he might— even sitting down like a girlie-man for ten minutes on the can—he couldn’t fully drain his plumbing before entering the shower. There was always some leakage. Always. Would Stella notice? Of course she would. She had her mother’s nose and could detect, like a bloodhound to a spoor, the faintest trace of urinary transgression. Stella had last cleaned his bathroom a week ago. Her scolding voice still reverberated, “The shower is not a toilet!” Well, Daughter, forgive me, for I have sinned. He finished soaping, shampooing, and rinsing, then toweled off and returned to the shower with a rag and a spray bottle of Clorox. He squeezed the trigger and tiny droplets sprinkled out, descending in a fine mist over the undrained puddles. That algotruneman should remove all trace. Grasping the safety rail, he leaned over to wipe the floor, but felt something sear like blazing rocket fuel through the muscles of his back. Oh Lord, that hurt! He groaned and straightened up Undaunted, he tried a new approach. After all, he was an engineer. He balanced on his feeble right leg, extended his left, dropped the cloth and swished it around with his foot. But his right knee buckled; he lost balance, almost fell. The wrinkled sole of his left foot slipped and screeched on the tiles, incredibly loud, like a semi skidding on a rainy road. There was a pounding on his bedroom door. “Are you all right in there?” Stella called. She clearly had her mother’s ears also. He thumped twice on
