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

trigger if Roddy didn’t receive a return on his investment.
    In the sewer, Cheezy approached, wings spread in a benevolent gesture. She stood a head taller than Boydman, and her wings blocked his view of the other creatures. She dipped her head, as if to preen her chest feathers, then raised it again with Boydman’s wallet clutched in her beak.
    Boydman took the wallet and couldn’t hold back a smile, nor tears.
    “I’m so sorry.”
    Her black eyes never blinked as her wings embraced Boydman. She reeked of sewage and rotting meat. And chemicals.
    “Cheezy, come home with me!”
    She pushed him away and pointed a wing at the ladder leading back to the street. Boydman hesitated, but Cheezy backed off and lowered her wings, permitting the menagerie of mutant pets to resume their approach.
    Boydman put the wallet in his mouth and scrambled up the ladder. Back on the street, he opened the wallet. The check was there, but the picture was gone. He wondered if, after paying Roddy, he’d have enough cash to buy another bird.
    A cold breeze wafted up from the manhole, chilling Boydman’s naked legs and carrying the echo of a distant shriek.
    “I looove youuu!”

Irreversible Dad
    Kenton K. Yee
    I noticed Dad shrinking when I was in third grade. He could no longer pull books from the top shelf, and his pants mopped the floor. I wanted to tell Dad to see a doctor, but Mom told me to let him be. “He is what he is,” she said.
    By the time I reached high school, Dad was the size of a teddy bear. Fortunately, he had academic tenure, so his condition was not a problem at work. The morning after I got my driver’s license, I threw a blanket over him, locked him in a cat carrier, and drove him in for testing. “Collapsing wave function,” the man wearing the stethoscope said. “It’s irreversible.”
    Dad continued teaching until a student nearly stepped on him. By the time I was packing for college, Dad was smaller than a mouse—a baby mouse. We kept him in a gallon mayonnaise jar with two cotton balls. He licked one for water; the other absorbed his waste.
    I had to squint to resolve him during my first visit home. We sat in the kitchen. I munched a donut and flicked specks of powdered sugar into his jar. He chased after the falling flecks like a goldfish gobbling food flakes.
    “Be nicer to Mom,” I said. “Changing your soggy cotton balls through the mouth of a mayo jar with tweezers is making her twitchy.”
    He cupped both hands over his mouth and shouted, but all I could hear was the quiet of cotton.
    A few days later, Mom phoned to say she could no longer find him.
    I rushed home and took his jar to the research hospital, wherethey stuck it into an electron microscope. The computer screen flickered a black-and-white image of Dad sitting on a molecule of atoms, his legs crossed, an elbow on a knee. Engrossed in the undulations of a proton wave, he was as I had always imagined: the tall physics professor who reached up to the top shelf and pulled down books for me; the skinny graduate student who worked up the courage to ask Mom out on the final day of class; the little boy who stayed alone during recess in his second-grade classroom to read about subatomic particles in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Death & Taxes
    A.J. Sweeney
    M artin walked home from work in the rain. Bus fare was not an option; he didn’t get paid until the end of the week, and rent was due. In a perfect world there would be no work, or rent, and he could curl up in a ball under a big blanket and wait for it to all be over. But, the world not being perfect, he got up and went to work every single day.
    In the dim light of his living room, his answering machine blinked red. He hit play and listened to the message: “Martin, it’s Bob Jenkins. Long time, no speak. I’ve got something to discuss with you. Be at Mary’s Bar tonight at seven-thirty. It’s important. Try to make it. It’s important. That’s all. It’s Bob Jenkins.”
    A cold