There’s… there’s just no excuse for this one. I kid. I actually like it. Let me know what you think.
He almost slipped on the shampoo that spilled to the suctioned rubber mat on the shower floor. When he caught himself before chipping a tooth, he clutched the handle on the wall and sighed deep relief, looking down at the drain as the spout battered the back of his head and the water dripped off his eyelids and nose and lips. Eventually he convinced himself to shut off the water and step out. In the steamy bathroom, he looked at his face. This was sixty-five. This was what he had become. He looked at his stomach. Loose skin grinning through his shreds of youth. He looked at the back of his hands.
He ought to cut his nails.
He knew he was getting older. His house looked like the house his parents used to own in Miami, because the nail clipper, like everything else, was exactly where he expected it to be. Next to the bottle of light-green toothpaste in the medicine cabinet with the sliding mirror doors that took a good shove to open.
Even his toilet had a furry pink slip-cover which greeted his rear when he sat down. ‘Christ,’ he thought. ‘This bathroom could be blue. It could be anything but this pepto-bismal pink.’ The wall paper was coming off at every corner.
He clipped one nail.
Then another.
His right hand first. Started on his second. When he got to his left ring finger he slipped and cut his finger tip. The clipper was dropped and he gripped his finger prematurely before the pain set in.
And he waited. Waited for the shock, the sting, a spot of blood. But none came.
Eventually he let go of his hand and looked. It was strange. A bit of skin was certainly missing, but it didn’t seem like there was anything on the other side. Just a kind of… hollowness.
He pressed and prodded, and eventually the edges of the hole chipped and the opening widened and he was able to slide one finger, into the other. His fingertip, the one was wasn’t bleeding- well, it was almost all gone. Little shards in the wastebasket.
Of course it was odd but there was something all too fascinating about it and he picked up the clipper and snipped away until the finger was entirely missing. Then he moved onto the others. He clipped a pinky-finger at the base and it dropped to the floor and shattered. Soon he had taken off the entire arm, clawing away at the facade-like flesh until naught but his shoulder remained. He had to find out what was inside him. Next he removed a leg, which toppled away from his hip, off the toilet, and disintegrated to dust across the expanse of tile. With one leg gone the other simply had to go, and soon after, his penis.
He beat his chest in to see if he had a heart, and he reached through the hole and felt around. There was nothing for a long while, but he knew there had to be… something. Anything.
And then someone from within grabbed his wrinkled hand. Their hand was soft and young, and out climbed a young boy. And the old man knew that the boy was him, and through parched lips he said, “Oh…”
“I knew you were in there somewhere.”
And the boy stood before him and hugged him, and the legless old man smiled, and broke into ten million pieces.
