Mike Mullin - Ashfall

I badly needed to pee. I had no idea where I was, where the bathroom was, or whether the toilet worked. I thought about peeing out the front door, but I didn’t know where that was either.

I swung my bare feet off the couch and sat up. A bad idea. I must have still been short on blood, because what little I had rushed out of my head. The world started spinning around me, and I toppled forward onto the wood floor. Pain spiked in my side and head, and I let out a short, involuntary yell.

Darla swept into the room a few seconds later. I was curled up on the floor in front of the couch, trying to summon enough strength to get up. She wore a T-shirt that came almost to her knees.

“What the hell-are you trying to wake up everyone in the house?” she said.

“No. Just looking for the bathroom. If you could point it out?”

“Christ. Let me find something we can use for a bedpan.”

Okay. I didn’t like that idea one bit. It was getting a bit embarrassing, exposing myself to this girl every time I saw her, especially since she found my “equipment” so unimpressive and didn’t mind telling me so. I certainly didn’t want to pee in front of her. Nonetheless, she had already left. I heard the clank of metal pans coming from an adjoining room. If I hadn’t already woken her mother, that racket was sure to.

She returned holding a bread pan.

“Really,” I said, “if you could show me where the bathroom-”

“Can you even stand up?”

I pushed my head and shoulders up off the floor, preparing to try.

“Never mind! I don’t want you ripping all the stitches out of your side. I worked damn hard on those.” She grabbed me by my left arm and hoisted me onto the couch.

I lay back, grateful to rest my pounding head. “Thanks for sewing me up. The stitches look good.”

“Why were you poking at them, anyway? I put the bandage on you for a reason, dumbass.”

“I just wanted to see them.” The insults she was dishing out were annoying, but I was grateful, anyway. She had probably saved my life with those stitches.

“Hmm. Well, they turned out okay. I’ve never actually done that before, but I’ve watched doctors stitch me up twice. Wish I had curved needles like they used on me-would have made it a lot easier.”

“You should be a doctor.”

“Maybe. Don’t tell Mom we used her second-best bread pan for this, okay?” She put the bread pan on the couch next to me and stared expectantly. “So you need to pee or what?”

“Yeah. Could you, like, turn your back or something?”

She rolled her eyes. “Whatever, sure.” She stepped to the hearth and added a log to the fire.

I pulled the pan to my groin, lined up my soldier and… nothing. It’s hard to pee when a girl’s in the room-even if her back was turned. And on top of that, I was worried about whether I could get it in the pan without splashing. I knew “performance anxiety” wasn’t exactly the right term, but something like that was going on. Or not going at all, rather.

Darla had finished feeding the fire. “Are you ever going to do it?”

“Yeah, I need to, but I can’t. Not with you standing there.”

She let out an exaggerated sigh and strolled toward the kitchen. “Yell when you’re done.”

It took a minute, but I finally got it done. Sweet relief. I didn’t splash, either. Well, not enough that anyone would notice. “Finished!” I called out.

Darla returned and took the bedpan from me. I pulled up the blanket. Despite the fire, I was cold. “Any chance I could get some water?”

“Yeah. Sorry, I should have thought of that. You need to drink a ton. Blood loss-your right boot was completely full when I pulled it off you. You lost some more while I was stitching you up. I’ll be right back.”

When she returned, she was carrying two thirty-two-ounce plastic cups, like the ones I used to get at fast food restaurants. She handed me one. “Drink this. I’ll put the other one beside the couch.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Don’t yell again unless it’s something important. Mom needs her sleep,” Darla said. Then she disappeared.

I woke to a smell: something delicious wafting out of the kitchen. I retrieved the cup of water from the floor and drank it all. I lay back down, thinking about calling out and asking for food. Before I could act on the thought, I fell asleep again.

The next time I woke, it wasn’t a sound or smell calling me from sleep. It was the imminent explosion of my bladder. My back hurt, too; I’d obviously been on that couch a long time.

I heard someone moving in the kitchen, so I called out, “Hello?”

Mrs. Edmunds came through the doorway. “My, I thought you were going to sleep through another day and night. You must be hungry.”

“Yeah. But, um, where’s the bathroom?” I sat up, holding the blanket to my chest. “I think my eyeballs are yellow.” I must have wobbled a bit, because she rushed over and grabbed my left arm.

“Sure you’re up for a walk?” She peered at my face.

I nodded.

“Okay, I guess there is something sloshing around in there.” Holding my left arm, she helped me stand. My head felt as if it might blow off my shoulders at the slightest breeze, but no way did I want to undergo the humiliating bedpan procedure again. I wrapped my left arm over her shoulder and held the blanket around myself with my right hand. Together we hobbled to the kitchen and from there into a bathroom.

There was no toilet. A sink stood just inside the door, and a shower/tub combo was tucked against the far wall. Between them, where the toilet should have been, someone had run a plastic pipe out of the floor. A big red funnel, the type normally used for gasoline, was affixed vertically to the end of the pipe at about knee level.

“Darla rigged it up. She calls it a squat tube. Although I guess you won’t have to squat.”

“It goes outside?”

“It connects to the septic system, like the toilet did. Now, it’s only for number ones. Number twos we’re burying over where the garden was, at the edge of the yard.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll leave this door cracked in case you need any help,” she said as she left.

I leaned against the wall, supporting my weight with one hand and aiming with the other, and peed into the funnel. When I finished, I twisted the knob on the sink, but nothing came out. What an idiot, I thought. Of course the water didn’t work. And of course what water they had would be too precious for hand washing.

I was wrong. Mrs. Edmunds had laid a hand towel and a bowl of water on the kitchen table. I washed my hands as best I could one at a time, using the other to clutch the blanket around my body.

The kitchen was dim. There was light filtering in through the windows, so it must have been daytime, but it was an ugly yellow-gray half-light. Even in the poor light, I could see the water in the bowl darken as I washed.

Mrs. Edmunds walked into the kitchen carrying a pile of clothing. “Your clothes need some mending. These might be a little big on you; they were my husband’s.”

“Oh, is he-”

“Dead.”

“Sorry…”

She shrugged. “Three years, five months ago. He was cleaning out a cattle grate.”

I didn’t see how that could have led to his death, but it didn’t seem polite to ask. I took the pile of clothes in one hand, hugged it to my chest, and hobbled to the living room to get dressed.

When I returned to the kitchen the stove was on. The blue flame of the burner was shockingly bright in the dimness. Mrs. Edmunds was spooning some kind of thin yellow batter into a frying pan. It smelled heavenly.

“The gas works here?” I said.

“We’re on propane,” Mrs. Edmunds replied. “As long as the tank holds out, we’ll be able to use the stove. Then I guess we’ll have to switch to the fireplace for cooking.”