Boy Needs a Bath

You watch your mother haul the bathtub out into the backyard.

“The bathtub is where the bad things go,” she explains. “It came to me in a dream.” She drags the tub out of the bathroom, cracking the tiles, chewing up the wallpaper. She swings a sledgehammer into the sliding glass door, then into the walls beside it, to make room for the tub to pass through. She pushes the tub down the veranda steps and rips up the lawn as she tugs it out to the forest beyond your yard.

The absence of the bathtub makes it harder to clean yourself every morning, but no one notices that you smell. You do a good job of cycling through clean clothes and face wipes, but you know this won’t clean you the way your bathtub does. Did. 

But your mother stays true to her word. The bathtub is where the bad things go. A bill from the plumber—into the tub. A flat tire on the car—into the tub. 

“Nature washes the bad things away. But nature needs a bathtub.” 

She throws the bill and the tire into the tub and makes you wait with her until the night rain comes. The water melts away the bill and the tire, and the black goop that remains spirals down the drain and soaks into the dirt. Perhaps nature can wash the bad things away after all. Did it really only need a bathtub? 

Your mother tells her friends about the tub. They too bring items to offer. You watch women waddle into your broken house, stepping politely over the unswept glass, unbothered by the draft that blows in from the yard, coming to the bathtub to place their cursed objects in its porcelain mouth for cleansing. A burnt batch of lasagna. A leaky fountain pen. A wedding ring. They are all gone the next morning. The dirt beneath the tub sucks up the pulpy remains.

Word of the bathtub spreads throughout town. It washes bad things away. What a gift this is. People traipse in and out, and you become frightened. You did not realize how many bad things there were to be washed away. You hide beneath the veranda, collecting more stink from the mud and the mouse droppings, and watch the bathtub collect new things. A severed snake. A soiled flag. A dead grandmother, with bobby pins falling out of her hair.

A few nights later, you dream of the dead grandmother you saw, her mouth opening to hawk up a bouquet of limp snake bodies. You scream and run into your mother’s bedroom, and she gives you the hug you’ve been hoping to receive.

It’s then your mother notices how much you smell.

“Why do you smell?” she asks. She pushes you away from her.

“Because I cannot clean myself.”

“Why can’t you?”

“You’ve taken away our bathtub.”

“No, I haven’t. It’s perfectly usable. Go. Wash yourself.”

“But that bathtub is for other people now.”

“No.” She corrects you angrily. “That bathtub is where bad things go to be washed away. It’s for you too.”

You are a bad thing. You are to be washed.

She hoists you up by the armpits, pinching you as she carries you outside and tosses you on top of the fresh pile placed in the tub for tonight’s rain. You slide down between stock market reports and gutted fish and Ziploc bags full of frayed toothbrushes.

The rain comes, and the contents of the bathtub dissolve because they are bad things. But only parts of you melt. The plump of your cheeks, the flab on your arms, the rolls in your belly. They droop down to the tub floor in great globs of fat and blood, exposing your tissue and slender veins. But the rain cannot wash you away.

Your mother is upset to find you in the morning.

“But the rain washes bad things away,” she says. And she orders you to stay in the tub another night. More people visit, unloading their bad items. A family dog that bit the baby. A failed exam. A cheating husband. The cheating husband sits right next to you. He melts away along with everything else. But you remain. You lose an ear and a large slab of pectoral muscle. But the rain cannot wash you away.

Every morning, your mother comes and finds you sitting in a pile of your skin. There you sit, unsure of your offense besides your stench. After a week of washing, your mother comes and finds a little skeleton boy holding his liver in his hands.

“I suppose that’ll have to do.”

And she wraps her hands around your wrist bones and yanks you out of the tub. She forces you back to school, where the other children laugh at your little skeleton boy body or run far away from it. You’re sent home for being too distracting.

From your bedroom window that night, you watch your mother pile books and films into the bathtub. You grow angry. She put you in there because you were bad, you were not clean. But you were bad, you were not clean, because she took away the bathtub first. And now your hair and your nose and your eyeballs and your fingernails have all fallen off, and you can’t get them back, and you have to be the little skeleton boy who walks among bathtub preachers.

You leave your bed and slip outside. When your mother reaches for another book from the box by her feet, you shove her into the tub. You bury her beneath trash bags filled with porn magazines and pregnancy tests.

When you return the next morning, the bathtub is empty, sparkling. The dirt beneath the tub has turned swampish. The dirt cannot possibly handle any more moisture and muck. Nature washes the bad things away. Now, nature can have a break.

You drag the tub out of the forest, through the yard, up the steps, and back into the bathroom. You draw hot water up to your ribs and scrub yourself clean until your little skeleton boy bones are as pure and as white as the porcelain tub in which you sit.

Tomorrow, you will shop for a new sliding glass door.