Occam's Razor will explain this as my children forgetting to flush. They careen from that bathroom while I scream "Wash Your Hands!" from two rooms away. Or maybe it's me forgetting. I sleep in waves and forget what happens in those soporific states. My wife says I talk in my sleep. What else do I do?
But trapped inside this house with plague and rain hemming the outside I despair it's the house demon.
The house demon is female and slender. She is the tallest "Tall Girl" but made to knobbly wobbly lengths. Each joint bends in full 360 degrees including her head, which she flits back at you when you catch her with the corner of your eye. She is that feeling of being watched. The pang of guilt before you say "Fuck it" and half ass something.
She moves unseen but leaves petty traces. The unflushed urine. The lost socks. The wedding band slipped off between couch cushions. The wine and pizza polished off.
She lives in the voids of our home. Above the drop ceiling panels of the bathroom. The empty spaces between beams and the laundry chute. That space at the top of the pantry where cans rust circles into the wood? She is there crab jammed between walls ready to snap at your hand.
She can squeeze herself into smaller shapes and wiggle worm her arm under gaps in doors. The screw to the shower drain was in the middle of the bathroom floor. It cut the sole of my feet as I walked in to shower. And I knew she turned it from within the drain. She coiled into a sinister grinning clump of muck turning with fingernails never cut. She's coiled in the oily dark of the unused cast iron skillet.
But she will starve. Since the house is never empty. The house demon will wither and as spring buds outside. She will fade as we, bored and anxious, clean out closets and shoo away cobwebs.
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