She releases a warm stream into the toilet bowl, giving in to gravity.
Enjoy it while you can. Soon you won’t be able to sit in the dark anymore, peeing like a racehorse. Earth, onions, wild mushrooms. Stop it. What kind of woman relishes the scent of her own urine?
When he finds out he’ll smother her with attention. Prenatal vitamins, kale smoothies, wool socks. Another of his projects, like renovating this Victorian.
When you’re a mother, you’ll pee, wipe, and flush in less than a minute.
How many houses had she grown up in? Seventeen? Eighteen? How many nights stumbling along unfamiliar hallways, her bladder full, sleep-blind fingers unable to find the light?
Your superpower. Peeing in a dark, quiet bathroom, you could be anywhere. A forest. Outerspace.
A November day in second grade coming home to a U-Haul in front of the house, Mom chirping on about Dad’s new job in Kansas while she packed their suitcases. For good, Mom said. She would make lots of friends.
Even perched on a strange toilet for the first time you could punch through space, leap over mountains. As the pee rushed out of you, you soared over continents, above the girls tittering as you stood alone on the playground.
Kansas was a bust, so they followed Dad to Arizona, nine months later to California. Remember not to bring friends to the house, Mom said. Dad needs quiet. There would be no friends to invite. A small knot of girls would fawn over her, losing interest in a day or two. She wouldn’t stay long.
Your boobs will spill out of your bra. Your belly will stretch across time zones, entering a room before your swollen ankles, not that you’ll be able to see them. You’ll be a cow, milked at regular intervals, leaving the room at the first sign of leaky nipples.
Mom scrubbed the kitchen floor every day, sure a clean house would keep Dad’s hands from trembling, his voice calm. Three high schools in four years. No one noticed when she skipped class, scouting the best places to smoke.
You’re not a mother. He can’t do it alone.
One look at the house needing “a bit of elbow grease” and she knew he would want it. “Look at all this space,” he whispered out of earshot of the real estate agent. “Room to grow. Our home for years.”
Your bathroom—crowded with toys, potty seats.
Driving back to their studio apartment, he talked nonstop about how they could refinish the floors, the wood-wrapped window frames. Paint each room a different color.
Eight more months. Make the most of it.
She unrolls a few squares of toilet paper and wipes. She doesn’t need the light to see the dark red walls, the framed black and white photograph of his great-grandmother scowling at her.
Maybe it’s a false positive.
She flushes, blinking at the light as she opens the door.
Phebe Jewell's work has appeared in Monkeybicycle, Spelk, Bending Genres, Ellipsis Zine, Fictive Dream, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and other wonderful publications. A teacher at Seattle Central College, she also volunteers for the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound, a nonprofit providing college courses for women in prison.
