Too Much — A Short Story
The gentleman knocks twice on the bathroom door. Inside, her fingers dig into the cold white marble sink for support and her hair flops over her face like jellyfish tentacles grabbing onto its prey. Panting, she slowly lifts her face. Perhaps it is because of her tears, she looks deliciously distorted in the mirror. Her lips trembling, her eyes bloodshot, her mascara bleeding, her whole body a bright shade of pink as if she is allergic to the citrusy bathroom air freshener. She feels violated by the universe, by God himself. But who could she blame? Her pretty face, the only success in her mother’s uneventful life, looks exceedingly inviting of crime especially under its current disheveled state, like a little mermaid stranded on shore waiting for a fisherman who would prize her as the best catch — ten thousand per pound. It was too much.
The gentleman knocks again on the bathroom door. She scrubs her makeup off with cotton pads, it is comforting to know that she is still capable of such ugly sadness. Soon her makeup is gone, her still-pretty face reddens from the rough cotton, and her heart races for absolutely no reason. Even under the constriction of her bra, with the lack of ample bosom — shame on her mother — her jumping heart is as obnoxiously loud as the football chants from popular boys in school. Such she observes from the mirror, her eyes glued disapprovingly to her chest the way an art connoisseur glares at an outrageous stroke on the otherwise pristine painting. She does not enjoy the flatness, and in its immodesty, the vulnerability.
Does the gentleman knock again? Many times, her dying stream of consciousness tugs at her obedience that is so ingrained in her, she almost convinces herself that she will dance out there and comment on the temperature of tea and the rate at which sugar cubes melt in it, maybe she will use very scientific terms for the temperatures. “Celsius” sounds exotic. Or, no, she should use “Kelvin” instead because it is so precise, so flirty.
The gentleman knocks again on the bathroom door. This time he only knocks out of the pretense of civility. The door knob turns. He finds her kneeling in front of the toilet, vomiting half-digested privileges. She feels his hands, cold and smooth as marble, gathering and holding her hair up like a strand of seaweed. She lets the tingly pressure on her scalp control her expressions as if he is playing her as a puppet in a puppet show. What a gentleman, she giggles. Her smile catches a dangling strand of hair that tastes just too salty. She blames herself for having too much hair.
So, she plays along with the gentleman, she knows too well how to play these types of games. It is like the Barbie games she used to play as a child before her brother twisted the doll’s head off. She stands, wobbling, falling in the direction of the bathroom door, her fingers not so accidentally locking the door. She looks up at him with the right amount of horror, sadness, and emptiness — too little would bore him, too much would be honest.
“You drank too much, let’s get you to bed,” he sounds as if his throat is flattened by a gavel.
