The Crapper

This is the smallest room I have ever spent any great amount of time in. There is nothing in it save a toilet. A toilet and nothing more. The customary bathtub and sink familiar to most household bathrooms is divided from the toilet by a thin wall. The toilet is isolated. Isolated in a room less than one meter by one in perimeter. Please excuse my vagueness but I’ve never been much on measurements. Suffice it to say that this toilet stands alone in a very small room. The walls of which are covered with once pink, now yellowing paper. This yellowing intensifies to a dark brown the closer to the floor one investigates. I often worry that the previous tenants of this flat were rather careless when passing water. I mean to say that I’m concerned they pissed all over the walls, hence the aforementioned discolouration.

Still, when on a longer visit to the toilet I give little consideration to such gruesome possibilities, the discomfort of the cold, metal seat beneath my plump posterior diverting my attention. I have attempted reading whilst in this cell but there is no window from which to obtain natural light and the exposed overhead bulb is too harsh by far, giving everything a jaundiced aspect. I should get round to covering it with a shade or simply change the damned bulb to one that omits a pleasingly ‘warm’ glow by which I can read in comfort. However, I regret to say that I suffer from a severe and incurable case of acute laziness. I’m afraid I digress. Lamentable though it be, this catalogue of toilet torture is not yet complete.

The crowning turd atop the whole steaming pile is that the door is too large for its frame and even were this not the case neither keyhole nor sliding lock is to be found on this - the worst of doors it has been my misfortune to pass through. So as you may imagine when using this dingy rat hole of a toilet one is forced to slam the bloody door with all one’s might in an attempt to partially wedge the thing in its frame. If I lived alone this would hardly present a problem but I do not live alone. Countless are the occasions on which George has sauntered in only to be confronted with my portly form astride the crapper, hunched forward and squinting at a book only to look up on his entrance with an expression of defeat on my now crimson-cheeked face.

by D. Diedrich

Copyright February 2006