It’s pouring wet outside, but that doesn’t stop her from blowing blue smoke through the open window.
Even though it’s raining, she can still see the toilet in the back yard — mud streaked now, but usually it’s white with just a few stains.
It’s a toilet for god’s sakes.
There are flowers growing from the bowl. What are they, roses?
Funny thing about roses. People gave them to other people when they were in love. Maybe as a symbol of friendship. Were those the yellow ones? So hard to remember.
And it was roses that people put on other people’s graves.
Cept the folks underneath the roses weren’t people. Not anymore.
And — if they were even roses that is — they grew outta toilet bowls. Sometimes.
Cigarette’s gone, even though the rain keeps coming. She fumbls at her pack of cigarettes. Empty now.
Through the pane of rain, she looks at the driveway. That’s empty too.
Yard’s green and empty except for the flower sprouting toilet right in the middle of it all. The lid to the tank’s gone. Sometimes, if she fills it with water the birds use it as a bath. They don’t care if it’s not a proper bird bath. All they want is the water, the goddamn water.
Sometimes bugs drown in the toilet bath. But they drown in real bird baths too. Nothing special there.
She’d flushed so much shit down that toilet.
Her goldfish. They’d gone down the whirly pool.
Why didn’t goldfish get a proper burial?
Once, she had stuck a white stick between her legs after drinking an entire carton of cranberry juice. She had put the stick on the floor by the tip of her sandals, and washed her hands because she’d always been a sanitary sort of person.
When her hands were dry, she had lit up. The bathroom had a window shielded by a great big flowering bush — it was convenient because it hid the blue grey smoke and stopped the neighbors from mentioning it to the mother.
She’d flushed the butt of her cigarette that day too. Perhaps it rotted with the fish.
Perhaps the fish would take solace in the fact that it had at least lived longer than the cigarette, than the whole pack of cigarettes and all the other ones she had smoked in the past week.
There had been a plus sign on the white stick.
She had wanted to flush that, too, but the cost of a plumber stopped her.
It went in the trash instead.
If only microscopic babies were flushable, too.
That toilet had seen tears and fears. Good times gone up again, tasting sour and dirty now that all was said and done.
Pieces of her heart, pieces of goldfish and little white sticks that didn’t have minus signs on them.
And now it tasted roots and saw red flowers that were beaten down by the rain.
Thunder clapped and a baby wailed.
