by Sagar Patel

A musty man in reddish brown suede exterior settled into the urinal space next to me. Some people have large feet that range from a size ten to a size twelve. And some people just have large feet where if they told you the size you would respond, “holy shit.” He had “holy shit” feet. His feet grazed against mine and as I looked down my pupils slowly dilated and my heart rate sped up faster than a Tasmanian devil spinning in 360’s. As I averted my gaze away from his corpulent feet and to the yellow, chipped bathroom tiles placed in front of me, level with my eyes, my mind shut down. What if he was a serial killer? What if he could sense my nervousness and planned on taking advantage of me? Did he lock the bathroom door so that it would just be him and me, alone, enclosed in this somber space filled with hard tile, feces, and metal?

After putting his arm in a bent, ninety-degree angled position over the separator of both of our urinals, he said, “I call this assisted pissing.”

My head turned at the slowest possible rate to my left as I nodded and fake laughed at his joke. I could’ve been a typical bathroom jock and said, “Yeah man, you got that right,” but I despised agreeing with anything or anyone.

“Yeah man, you got that right,” is the go-to line during bathroom conversations that range from how shitty the weather is to how expensive whores have gotten. I didn’t care for the weather, as I liked to stay indoors with the blinds closed. I have a sharp sense of hearing so thunderstorms and heavy rain were the only two forms of weather that alerted me to their presence; sunshine and clouds were denigrated in my household for they had no benefit nor did they give us something to complain about. I did care for whores but in a way most men mocked; I asked them about their career aspirations and what led them to this point as opposed to haggling prices for a blowjob that I might’ve received in my new Nissan Venza. My wife wouldn’t like that. If I didn’t make a mess or spill, I’m sure she’d notice the new car smell was replaced by an old whore’s perfume: pheromones to be polite. I prefer to be polite. That is why I fake laughed at this behemoth of a man’s joke.

“Yeah man, you got that right,” I said fifteen seconds after he’d zipped his pants back up and pressed down on the silver urinal lever. He was nowhere to be seen. He didn’t wash his hands; instead he walked right out the bathroom door after his twenty-five second piss. He was the most eerily honest person I’d encountered on that day. And that is why I’m hanging out in the bathroom until sunrise.

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Sagar Patel is 24. He likes to write about psychological themes and about characters who have deep psychological burdens. He typically goes for absurdist themes based on the mundane. You can read him at http://sagarjaypatel.wordpress.com/.