Twist

Dedication

For my grandma Jeannine, who told me to do great things. I’m not sure this was what she meant. But I’m trying, grandma.

Chapter One

Most people don't worry about finding a head in their toilet, but I'm not most people. It goes back to my childhood, and the realest nightmare I ever had, about finding my Grampa’s head in the toilet.

When I peed—then as now—it didn't sound quite right—no splish splash. I was sitting because I felt like I had more to do, and maybe I did, but the sound stopped me cold. It was my first pee of the morning; sometimes things get kind of mushed to the side, and that maybe explained the sound—but that explanation fell shy of convincing.

I wanted not to look; I’m not crazy, and looking for heads in toilets is crazy. But I couldn’t not know. I tried to look into the bowl through my legs, subtly, like maybe there was a rational explanation for it. But there was too much shadow, and the angle wasn't quite right. A shiver went down my spine when I caught the edge of a square of toilet paper clinging to the side of the porcelain from the corner of my eye, and assumed it was a shadow cast by a head. I forced myself up, and pulled up my underpants; if I was discovering a human head in my toilet, I wasn't going to expose myself to it.

But the toilet was empty. It was always empty. Well, okay. I, I see things. So sometimes it doesn't look empty. Sometimes I see a man in the corner of a room, glaring at me, or yelling at me. Sometimes it's a woman, sitting on the edge of my bed, petting my dog.

Leroy? I called for the mutt. He usually couldn't wait for me to go to the bathroom. He had a toilet-licking problem. We kept the seat down, so he couldn't drink from it, but he still liked to lick the edge of the bowl, really jam his tongue between the seat and the porcelain. It wasn't something I encouraged, but without posting a guard on the bathroom at all times, there was no way I'd be able to break him of it. Hell, it was hard to get him to stop when I was sitting on the seat.

Sometimes he stayed in bed with Hanah. She was still in school, finishing up a business administration degree, so she didn't have to be out of the house as early as I did. She wasn't great about letting him outside, but she did usually walk him before leaving, so I wasn't terribly worried.

I woke up on the couch this morning with a massive headache. That probably meant my back was bothering me. Or it maybe meant we had a fight—though usually she went to the couch as a way of punishing me. I strained to remember what we might have fought about, but the harder I tried to remember it, the more piercingly my head hurt; it felt like the onset of another migraine.

I hated fighting with her. Maybe our life wasn't idyllic, but it kind of had been before we moved in together, and even the crap we fought about—it always felt so petty and small.

But I didn't have time to worry. I needed to start getting ready for work. I showered, though the water turned cold awfully quick. It made me think Hanah must have showered a little before me. I put an English muffin in the toaster. I didn't want to get dressed, because that meant going into the bedroom, and disturbing Hanah and the dog. On the best of days I hated waking them up, but on a day after we had a fight, there was a decent chance that was going to be heavy in the air. There was a chance the fight might reignite.

I also knew work wasn't going to tolerate me coming into work without clothes on, so I opened the bedroom door. It was empty—no Hanah or Leroy. That confirmed the fight. I sighed, and tried to remember the night before. I thought we watched some TV, and... that was all I could remember. No knock-down drag-out at all.

Maybe she just had an appointment, or even an interview. That thought brightened me up. She was going to school, but she wasn't completely full-time; her working weekends only just made ends meet, and subsistence living put an extra strain on us.

I walked across the room to my dresser, and opened up the drawer. No clean underwear. Or socks. I checked the closet, and there were no clean pants, or even casual work shirts. My work frowned on clothes that were too dressy, or too casual, so there was a sweet spot. And in my closet, that sweet spot was entirely depleted.

That kick-started my memory—we did fight. She was pissed about me leaving piles of clothes in the laundry room. I shut my eyes, and through the pain haze I heard her, but muffled, like she was talking to me from under the covers.

I’m not your mother, and I’m not your fucking housewife. She thought the piles meant I expected her to do my laundry, which set off her feminist alarm, because I was trying to pigeonhole her into doing women's work.

I wanted to defend myself, though I couldn’t remember if I had. I hadn’t actually expected her to wash my clothes —it just made more sense leaving them piled there than our bedroom floor—especially since I suspected Leroy liked to piss in them rather than get his paws wet outside, and at least the laundryroom floor was concrete, and had a drain in the center of the floor.

It was a continuation, or maybe an escalation, of an ongoing fight. It centered mostly around the fact that she wanted the house cleaner than I did—cleaner than I cared to work to make it. It was a vestige of my college days, working full time and going to school. I was just burned out.

And like with the laundry, she seemed to think that I expected her to make up the difference. I think she also felt like I looked down on her, because I worked more when I was taking classes with her than she did now. But I was also several years older. I may not have ever finished school, had I not met her.

We were both past the age where people are supposed to have graduated. But that was because we were working through school, paying bills as best we could. But I had stagnated. I went to school because the only job I could get wasn't good enough, but I didn't have a major—I didn’t have a direction, period. 

I met her in a history class. She was so ambitious and hard-working and grown up. It was easy being smitten, and from there, realizing that I wasn’t good enough for her. Not like I was. She deserved someone who could be her equal, her partner. In a way, she gave me direction when I was listless.

So the fact that I was two and a half years further along in my degree didn't mean anything—that was happenstance. I didn’t look down on her; between her school, and her schoolwork, and her weekend job, she was working as often as I was.

But Hanah wasn't here. Reminiscing didn't change that, and it also didn't get me a change of clothes.

I knew there was a pile of laundry in the front room. When I felt like unwinding, like the day was hard enough that I needed to tear away the vestiges (and vestments) of the working world and all of its stresses, that was where my clothes ended up. I hadn't worn a red, long-sleeve shirt from the pile in a week, so I didn't think my coworkers would notice it was dirty. I smelled it; it had probably only been worn once, and only smelled like my deodorant. So I put it on.

I figured my shorts from the day before were clean enough, so I rescued them from the bathroom floor, and covered them with the pair of khakis with the least heinous hiney. I'd learned my lesson about smelling the crotch directly; I got the smell of groin stuck on my upper lip for the better part of a day. It made me feel like I'd been giving mustache rides all night at a truck stop.

The socks were a little dicier, and they certainly smelled it, but so long as no one at work asked me to take off my shoes so they could sniff my feet, they weren't going to notice. And I was pretty sure that constituted some kind of workplace harassment.

My muffin was cold, so I put it the toaster for another cycle. The kitchen was a mess. I didn't like it. But I liked the idea of spending my free time cleaning it—rather than relaxing with Hanah—even less.

The toaster popped up, and I buttered my muffin and put it on a small plate. Then I saw the clock and thought better of it. My work was nearby, and I'd been trying to walk there, to make sure my pants still fit this winter. I wrapped my muffin in a paper towel and put the plate back in the cabinet. If Hanah noticed, she'd probably pick a fight about it, but it was a plate on which I set a buttered muffin—it maybe wasn't pristinely clean, but it felt a stretch to call it dirty.

I paused at the door. I'd been quietly hoping Hanah would burst in with Leroy, and tell me she woke up anxious, and decided to go for a morning run or something. It wasn’t the first time she disappeared like that—especially after a fight. She hated that I wanted to know where she was all the time; she said I was controlling. That wasn’t it. I didn’t want to tell her where she could be, or when; I just wanted to know she was okay.

It was starting to sink in that I wasn’t getting reassured this morning. I put on my sweater, slowly, milking every second I could. But if I waited any longer, I was going to be late for work. So I grabbed my keys, wallet, phone and muffin, and left.

The house was old, and over the years some of the wood had warped. One of the worst offenders was the frame around the front door. I tried to bolt the door, but it wouldn’t slide home. Then I wondered if maybe Hanah had taken an extra long walk to cool off, and she didn't always take her keys when she did. I didn’t want her locked out of the house. So I shrugged, and left the door shut but unlocked.

The sun outside cut through my brain like a knife—it was definitely a migraine. I squinted, and put on my sunglasses. I thought about taking the car, since it would cut down on my time outside—but the real issue was that my desk faced a shared window. The sun was going to be with me all day.

So I started walking. The grass in the front was getting long. That meant Uncle Alan was going to start pestering me any day about it.

Something across the street caught my eye. Opposite my car, I noticed a long metal dumpster. It was twice as long as my car and just as wide. Signs were posted on it, asking that residents fill it front to back, and only with leaves. I wondered when it had gotten here. I didn’t remember seeing it the day before, and I was surprised I didn’t hear it being delivered.

The glare off a car window I passed felt like I was being stabbed in the eyes. I wished I could call off. But I had only been brought up to full time recently, and I used my one accrued sick day taking care of Hanah after she had her appendix out. Which at least felt like a worthier cause than this. And there was a little part of