m

with his hands dangling grotesquely beyond his bony knees he scanned the tiny bathroom hoping to find a distraction: nothing that would occupy his mind longer than the time it took him to shit. first he settled on a pair of underwear (not his own--his girlfriend's) with blood-turned-brown stains along the crotch. seeing these, he realized how comfortable he'd become in this relationship--how intimacy was defined by seeing another person not at their worst, necessarily, but their most human. intimacy was a level you reached when you no longer pretended not to menstruate or shit--when biological functions no longer embarrassed you or, if they did, you no longer cared to hide it. that he'd reached this point with another person, made him happy. he was thankful that she'd grown so comfortable with him that she could admit: i am human, too.

to the left, in a little cabinet, he saw a four-roll package of toilet paper with a baby angel on the front. he wondered why and when it became acceptable for the makers of toilet paper to utilize blasphemy as a marketing strategy and why anyone would want to defile something allegedly "angelic" (and by extension: holy) with their feces.