Jack & Jill by Kealan Patrick Burke Read Free Book Online Page A

difference to the turmoil that had my subconscious cocooned. From here, I had no recourse but to permanently erase him from my life, and now that I knew he was lost to his own lies and therefore incapable of change or remorse or salvation, it would be that much easier.
    I shook my head, took one last look around the room, which not only looked much smaller now, but sadder too. There was a film of dust over everything as if it had resigned itself to being permanently forgotten and believed it should look the part. I had no connection to this place anymore, or anything in it. It had never been a home, just a stage where people acted their parts until the curtain was forced to close.
    "I'm leaving," I call ed out, and made my way to the bathroom.
     
     
     
    THIRTEEN
     
     
    The first thing I notice d was the smell of urine. The toilet hadn't been flushed and the water was a dark, unhealthy amber color beneath a ring of rust-colored grime. Specks of fecal matter clung to the back wall of the bowl. Empty toilet roll wrappers, cardboard tubes and used tissues overflowed from the small white plastic wastebasket to the left of the water tank. Sports magazines were scattered about the floor. They looked like they'd been there quite a while.
    As I gently close d the door behind me, I caught a glimpse of myself in the water-stained mirror above the sink, which was veined with gray hairs and spotted with dark green buttons of hardened toothpaste. The woman staring back at me looked old and haggard, eyes beady, face an unhealthy pallor and framed by lank black hair. The repulsion on my face at the smell and the condition of the bathroom made me look ugly, witch-like. I was wearing the same jeans and blouse I'd worn the previous day, which made any harsh judgment of my father's slovenliness seem ironic. Luckily, I resemble my mother, which has kept me from seeing him in my reflection all these years or I’d most likely have been unable to live in a house with reflective surfaces.
    I flush ed the toilet and tugged free some lengths of toilet paper, which I placed around the seat as a makeshift barrier against whatever filth might linger there, then shucked down my jeans and sat. Even through the paper, the wooden toilet seat was cold, bringing a shudder and gooseflesh to my skin.
    The only light in the room came from the stained, naked bulb built into the molding above the mirror and the small rectangular window over the bathtub to my right. The daylight was fading.
    As I sa t there, shivering slightly and listening to the inordinately loud sound of my pee hitting the water, I noticed something that hadn't registered on the way in. Directly in front of me, too far to reach out and touch from where I sat, was the door. When I'd lived here, that door had been solid wood, but sometime since, it had been replaced with one that had a glass panel inset in the top. That alone, would not have been enough to trouble me.
    What did, so much so that I froze, my pee stopping painfully mid-flow, was that through that glass I could see the head and shoulders of someone standing outside the door, a shadowy figure, hands cupped around the face that was pressed against the warped glass. Peeking.
    "What the hell are you doing? I'm in here!" I yelled, hoping that of the many emotions evident in that exhortation, it was the outrage not the fear that reached the voyeur.
    With a sound of crinkling plastic, the face pressed closer to the glass and my bladder lost its previous reservations. For the moment, I was stranded on the seat, and willed the stream to hurry.
    "I sai d there's someone in here." I was alarmed at the fear in my voice; it belied the forced confidence I had managed to maintain thus far.
    The fi gure at the door did not move away, but turned its face to the side as if listening. Again, the crinkling sound, as of a freezer bag being crumpled.
    Nothing about this made sense. It had to be my father out there, but the idea that he was deliberately