Free Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Presents Flush Fiction by Bathroom Readers’ Institute Page A

semilegal satellite accumulation area for industrial waste. Not until he reached the corner of Dice and Hamilton did he examine the check under the glimmering eye of a lone street lamp. A fog, like cigarette smoke, gently grabbed his hand, making Boydman feel a tad uneasy. It hadn’t been so long since he’d quit smoking.
    The check was paid to the order of Milwaukee Toxic Takeout, a racket of Boydman’s in which he charged the going rate for clean and green disposal of hazardous waste, while he dumped the sludge in the sewers when nobody was looking. The number next to the dollar sign was big. Not bank heist big, but generous enough to raise the sword of Damocles that hung over his head. Boydman had borrowed a substantial sum from Roddy Size, a local kingpin and owner of Soapy Sam’s Laundromat up on 21st Street. The capital was intended to grow Boydman’s disposal business, but instead he blew it all on bubblegum and hookers. Consequently, Roddy sent out a guy to have a chat with Boydman. Monkey Cowalski was his name, and he was the kind of guy who could lift twice his own weight in soggy towels and underwear at the laundry joint.
    Boydman folded the check in half and extracted his wallet from his pants pocket. After inserting the check, he flipped to the wallet’s photo sleeve, in which he had sequestered a picture of a bird named Cheezy, a cockatiel with a crooked beak, long since dead, and the last friend he’d had on this Earth. She had avoice like a chainsaw on helium and he had taught her how to shriek, “I looove youuu!” And he had loved her back, until the day Cowalski had darkened his doorway.
    Boydman closed his wallet abruptly, refusing to chain himself to that train of thought. No sense letting himself get dragged behind that memory when he already felt vulnerable beneath the street lamp’s cone of illumination. He put the wallet in his pants pocket and started across Hamilton street. He was halfway across and inches away from a manhole when the cover erupted and spun in the air like a coin, sprinkling asphalt all the way.
    Something green. Something scaly. Something altogether unnatural and unexpected lunged from beneath the street. It looked like a giant iguana and it grabbed Boydman’s ankles, pulling him hard, dragging him into the hole. He was halfway beneath the ground before he arrested his descent by hooking his fingers in a deep pothole. He screamed, but no one answered. The street was empty and this was the kind of neighborhood where, if it wasn’t empty, people looked the other way and kept walking.
    His trousers ripped and slipped off his waist. The creature fell with a fistful of pants, freeing Boydman to struggle up onto the crosswalk.
    “My wallet!”
    Without a second thought, he lowered his bare legs into the manhole and climbed down to a dark river of cold filth. His socks slurped it up like sponges. His feet tingled, as if a weak electric current ran through the sludge. The air smelled like turpentine.
    Water gurgled and beasts groaned.
    As his eyes adjusted, the dark coalesced into shapes. Man-sized lizards. Goldfish the size of buffalo standing on quivering young legs. A hamster with three eyes and enough room in its cheeks to pouch a Volkswagen.
    “Who’s got my pants?”
    They approached. Silent. Hungry.
    An ear-piercing shriek stopped the animals and a hulking cockatiel, tall as an ostrich, pushed passed them. It had a crooked beak.
    Boydman gasped.
    “I thought I flushed you down the crapper!”
    Monkey Cowalski had been an accessory to Cheezy’s murder. Boydman himself had done the murdering. When Cowalski had come around to collect for Roddy Size he put a gun to Boydman’s head and pinched his ear with two jagged fingernails. He gently instructed Boydman to smoke cigarette after cigarette and blow the smoke in Cheezy’s cage until the bird fell belly-up in the newsprint. As Boydman flushed the bird down the toilet, Cowalski told him that next time he’d pull the