Mark Dunn - American Decameron

Bill asked the question; Heather nodded with equal curiosity.

“Not a single day. The house has been empty ever since it was finished last November. Nothing sadder than an empty house. I was here early this morning checking the keys and making sure the power company hadn’t turned off the — here we are. Isn’t it lovely?”

The house sat on a little hill. It had a steeply pitched roof suggesting a very high living room ceiling. The architectural style was nothing recognizable: an exaggerated Mediterranean arch over the front door, mansard eaves shading the front bedroom windows, a mishmash of different elements that maintained a sense of unity through color and texture, even if a cohesive architectural vision was lacking.

“I like the decorative glass,” remarked Heather after the threesome had landed on the porch. She ran her hand along the narrow etched-glass panel next to the front door and went, “Um.”

“Yeah. Real nice.”

Maggie unlocked the door and opened it upon a large vestibule that led to the expansive living room. “It’s 2,200 square feet overall, but the vaulted ceiling makes it feel even bigger — palatial almost. In the summer, all that hot air goes right up to the top. Then in winter the ceiling fan pulls it all right back down.”

The Hollons nodded. This was only the third house they’d looked at. Everything about the process of buying a home was new to them. There was a definite mystery to it. Maggie the Realtor was revealing great truths and they were imbibing them, absorbing them into their unformed, protean consciousnesses. They trusted Maggie, welcomed her as their house-buying sherpa, because she had been doing this for over twenty years, and because she was a member of the same Hernando, Mississippi, garden club as Heather’s mother.

There were two porthole windows near the ceiling of the living room. Maggie pointed to the one on the right. “When I got here early this morning the sun had just come up, and there was the most beautiful cascade of light coming down. It was dappled by the branches of the tall trees in the backyard. Quite magical. I felt like I was standing in the nave of some great cathedral.”

Heather had tuned Maggie out again. She was staring at an electrical outlet on the wall. The top screw had fallen out of the plate and it hung slightly askew. It was a minor thing, really, but her eye was drawn to it.

Bill and Heather followed Maggie into the kitchen. All of the appliances were matching black. There was an island beneath an impressive pot rack. The cabinets in the kitchen were either cherry wood or cherry stained — Maggie wasn’t sure which — but Heather thought they were pretty either way. She ran a couple of fingers through her Jennifer Aniston shag and nodded her appreciation.

The two smaller bedrooms shared a Jack-and-Jill bathroom. They seemed perfect for the family that Bill and Heather Hollon planned to start as soon as Bill got his promotion at the bank and Heather had put away some money from her job as a receptionist for a garden seed company. Heather looked out the back bedroom window and noted the large backyard. “A lot of room for a garden,” she said to Bill.

“Or for a couple of Golden Retrievers to romp around.” Bill winked. He drew Heather to his side and gave her a little squeeze about the hips.

The master bedroom was spacious. There was crown molding around the room and a large walk-in closet nearly the size of a fourth bedroom.

Maggie led her clients into the master bathroom. It was roomy as well. There was a large soaking tub in one corner and a separate shower. The toilet was sequestered in a closet. Bill stepped over to the closet. The door was open. The lid to the toilet was down, but in keeping with his inquisitive nature, he leaned over and lifted it. There, floating in the water, was a large umber-colored turd. It was solid, yet discernibly segmented. There was nothing else in the bowl. No toilet paper. Just the floating turd.

Bill closed the lid, but not fast enough for Heather and Maggie to miss seeing the turd.

Had he been alone in his discovery, Bill would simply have dropped the lid and walked away. But the fact that there were other witnesses to his find required that he do the thing this situation customarily required: he flushed the toilet.

For a long moment no one spoke. Bill could not keep himself from looking at Maggie. Maggie looked at the wall. Heather, for her part, could not avert her eyes from the toilet as hard as she tried. The toilet took its time emptying its tank and then refilling itself with fresh water. The sound of lavatory hydraulics echoed throughout the cavernous bathroom.

Eventually, Maggie led the couple out. A minute or so later, the Hollons and their real estate agent were standing in the backyard, looking at a few of the beautiful oak trees that had given their names to the subdivision: “Towering Oaks.”

Maggie, who had previously been sunny and quite chatty in her description of the many winning features of the house, now spoke in dull monosyllables. “Well-kept lawn. Um. Nice deck here.”

Heather cast an uneasy glance over her shoulder at the part of the house where the master bathroom was. Where the toilet closet was. Where they had all seen the big, brown, floating fecal log.

Not much was said in the car. Nor did conversation pick up in the fourth house that Maggie showed the Hollons. Bill avoided looking at either of the two toilets in this house, although Heather found herself staring at the closed lid of one of them, her face rigid with worry over dangerous possibilities.

That evening, after Bill and Heather had finished their slices of pizza and Bill had downed almost all of his second beer, the new husband said to the new wife, “So which house did you like the best?”

“The third one,” said Heather.

“The one with the shit log?”

Heather nodded. Then she said, “Bill, was that her shit log?”

“We’ll never know, honey. But probably.”

“Why would she leave it there?”

“Maybe it didn’t go down when she flushed. Try not to think about it.”

“I love that house, Bill, but it had a turd in it.”

“I know, angel.” Bill put his arm around his new wife consolingly. After a moment, he drew back. “As embarrassing as it was for us, it must have been doubly hard for Maggie.”

“I can only imagine,” sighed Heather.

“Do you want this last piece of sausage?”

“No,” said Heather. “I could not possibly eat it.”

Later that night, Bill awoke to the sound of Heather’s soft sniffles.

“Are you okay?” he asked with whispered tenderness.

“No, Bill. I’m not okay.”

Bill rolled over and enfolded his wife’s convulsing body. The tears flowed freely now, great moans of sadness emanating from deep within her throat.

“Oh God, how I loved that house!” she keened, her voice crepitating with pain.

“I know you did, angel. Go ahead and let it out. Let it all out.”

Randi Bryce didn’t like the interrogation room. The overhead light was harsh and the dark concrete walls made her feel as if she were sitting in a prison cell. It was a sobering reminder of her potential fate.

None of it made sense. It was as if she had entered her own Twilight Zone episode or one of those stories by Kafka in which one is doomed by circumstances both menacing and illogical. Randi Bryce had stood at the kitchen window and watched her husband burst into flames. She had rushed out with an afghan snatched from the daybed in the adjoining sunroom. Josh was rolling upon the ground, howling in a primal voice she had never heard before. She threw the afghan upon him to put out the fire that still consumed him. Her hands were singed.