The Toilet Seat

Leroy was born on a toilet seat, and got stuck. His mother forgot him there for a day till he started wailing, but she couldn't pull him loose. She lowered herself to the floor by the toilet and let him suckle her teat. This went well with the newborn, though soon he began to shiver and tremble with the cool air of the water beneath him. Leroy's mother fetched him a blanket and a space heater, and the shivering subsided. His being stuck saved tremendously on diapers, and with the extra cash his mother could afford to feed the little babeling all the gourmet apple compote his stomach could contain. Leroy grew, though not particularly strong, and he squinted often at the sunlight peering through the window into his small corner of the world. His mother gave him toys until he was old enough to read, at which point he did. He acquired an education in this manner.

When he was four, still stuck, his neighbour Delila, also four, came over to visit. Thus he acquired his first friend, immersed in the confines of his ceramic prison. He learned of fealty and kindness, and eventually abandonment when one day, having lent him her favorite plush toy Boogaloo – who was a furry purple arthropod with long antennae abutted in plastic eyes covered all over with very authentic looking teeth – she left his commode for good. Called away, Leroy wondered, by powers greater than the allure of his simple friendship. His mother still loved him, though, and showered him with gifts and water and breastmilk until he was eight.

At twelve, child services came by to examine his situation. They concluded summarily that a terrible evil had been committed against the child, and the mother for this would be separated from him and imprisoned in a gulag deep below the earth where her breasts would be exposed into a metal crate containing wolf pups, and she would never again see her child for the torment she bequeathed to him by her negligence. The solicitude of child services was limitless towards Leroy, however, and they concluded that freeing him from the eternal preserve of his toilet seat would represent the greatest trauma by far, and thus it was better to leave him be, alone in the bathroom, though sans the security and attendance of his abusive mother. Thus began Leroy's adolescence.

Once in a while a girl would pass by his house, and peer into the bathroom out of curiosity. She might come with friends, and seeing Leroy there, covered in pimples and quite beside himself for shame, they would begin to laugh and giggle and deride him. Leroy blushed during these moments, and wiggled as deep into his toilet as he could. Sometimes the girls would come alone, and on these occasions he found himself more courageous by a good deal, and he even called out to them as they turned around to leave, though none ever stayed long enough to say hello. The state graciously provided Leroy with a computer, feeling it inappropriate for him to be denied any of the modern conveniences that defined his generation's youth. Unsuccessful with girls, though rapturously intrigued by them, he took to distracting himself with video games. His favorite was Super Mario Brothers, which he played on an SNES emulator to the exclusion of more contemporary offerings. He felt a certain idealistic fascination, verging on envy, for the freedom with which the Mario Brothers could submit their bodies to pipes. He marveled at the locomotive possibilities this represented with the youthful exuberance that characterized his age group and gender demographic.

In his twenty-first year of incarceration, a young female student moved into the house. She was studying anthropology at the university and her name was Abelle. She moved in and out of the bathroom with a lithe beauty, and for Leroy she would pirouette as she brushed her teeth, and sing him jovial melodies about the Irish hills (where she had never been, but she was a hopeless romantic for other people's idiosyncracies). Leroy fell hopelessly in love with her, and told her so: she laughed and patted his cheek, and told him roommates must never fuck. He sulked for a week until she made him flower bread out of the petunias growing through the living room floor.

She stayed there for a year and was then replaced by a fraternity. The house filled up quickly with young men carrying kegs of beer and branding each other on the shoulders with hot pokers and cigarette lighters. They indoctrinated Leroy into their fraternity (gamma-gamma-gamma) by making him wear a diaper on his head for a day, which they all considered an ironic gesture considering where he lived. Leroy didn't understand the joke but submitted to his treatment out of a deeply rooted physiological desire for masculine friendship, which thus far in his life he had entirely lacked. He had never met his father, and believed that all middle-aged men wore mustaches and traveled by means of rotary concave propeller caps. The fraternity celebrated his condition by drinking often and loudly. Eventually they left in a terrible conflagration of spontaneous homoeroticism, which neither Leroy nor the fraternists anticipated or would ever admit to thereafter. Leroy had his first homosexual experience at this time, with a man whose name was unpronounceable owing to its origin in the pantheon of Elder Gods. He politely explained, in between blow jobs which he administered for Leroy with his knees planted securely on the ceramic tiles, that for a human to pronounce his name would result in that person's immediate transformation into a monosyllabic manifestation of entropy – into what he further described as the daemonic inversion of the holy word Om.

The State thereafter underwent a transition to severe Randism, and a few of its representatives eventually came to visit Leroy, who by then was twenty-five. They told him him he was no longer eligible for social assistance, being a theoretically able-bodied man with no inherent physiological, psychological or scatological issues. They told him he would have to find work or otherwise find himself out on the street. When they said this he noticed the balding head of a man peer around the corner of the bathroom door. “That's Hobart, the landlord,” explained the State representatives. “He has an acute bathroom phobia and until now has never visited, but this morning he overcome his fear out of an even greater hatred for the ideological contempt your behaviour demonstrates towards the social weal.” Hobart nodded tacit agreement.

Thus compelled by the simultaneous disapproval of various authority figures, Leroy began producing elaborate harmonic melodies using the limited but poetically austere harmonics of his stomach and ceramic toilet. With the assistance of friends, he established what he dubbed the “Symphonic Atrium” in the bathroom, and coupled his body-toilet music with other percussion instruments, and charged passersby five dollars an hour to sit and enjoy his performances. The New York Times wrote glowingly about the experience in their Arts column, “Leroy's performance is a marvel of the auditory and the olfactory. He has combined the smells and sounds of human defecation with the pure resonance of undilute percussion. The two harmonize with each other in unanticipated ways, drawing depth from one while at the same time a stochastic tremolo from the other. It is their interpermeation that transforms the simple rhythm of one, and the disgusting physicality of the other, into a transcendent synecdoche of shit-sound.” Leroy didn't understand the review at all, but appreciated the naked photographs the reviewer continued to send him afterwords.

Eventually a man with revolutionary tendencies called Ponquist began to paint a portrait of Leroy with his words. The gist of it was that Leroy represented all the frailties of humankind, and was an extant martyr for the suffering everyone must endure. Already a popular conversation topic among hipsters, the addition of messianic qualities elevated Leroy to an unparalleled degree of public renown. An endowment fund was created for his benefit, and quickly grew glutted with the enthusiastic donations of those who had come to adore the toilet as a receptacle for human misery. In a matter of minutes his house was torn down around him and the toilet seat raised up onto a dais. He was surrounded on all sides by transparent glass, and a rich, gold trimmed carpet cascaded down marble steps in his new apartment, where he had been placed by a freight helicopter.

An attack came a month later by the Anti-Toilet Mafia, a group that had formed in direct opposition to the confinement imposed upon Leroy. They perpetually drenched their heads with fresh urine and considered it their solitary function in life to liberate Leroy from his confines. On the other hand, they were arrested by those adherents who slept in an entanglement of limbs around Leroy's feet, an adulatory posse, who rose up at the slightest sound of intrusion and brandished sharpened plungers and razor sharp floss wire: what they called the Filaments of Dread. A terrible battle took place at the entrance to his lavish bathroom, and all his attackers and defenders perished. The very last one to go, with his dying breath, unknowingly spoke the inverted word of Om and set in motion a tremendous sequence of entropic discombobulation.

All the bodies that had accumulated in the space between Leroy's toilet and the entrance to his mansion spontaneously erupted into a blood-water river of human juice. Leroy was swallowed up, and the force of it tore loose his toilet from its moorings. He was washed to sea where he sat in perfect buoyant calm upon all that remained of his previous life. The last remnant of his childhood clung to his ass like the vice-grip fingers of an extremely large and plastic man. He paddled intuitively in the vast waters around and below him, having acclimated to the aquatic through many hours of deep meditation on the nature of liquidity. He proceeded to enjoy his newfound freedom by getting moored on a small tropical island.

At first he believed he was the only resident of the island, and composed long eulogies to himself which he recited forwards and backwards to maintain strong mental acumen. He contemplated the many men and women he had loved in his life up to that point, and wept tears for each of them that mingled into the salty brine of the sea. He thought fondly of his mother, who must long ago have perished in her wolf-box, and of the wild Ponquist who transformed him into the vessel of divinity. He wondered at the world that it had never known the quality of life that being embedded in a toilet seat produces, and he began to laugh at the marvel of his existence as it had thus far unfolded.

“Excuse me, sir, but would you mind not laughing so loudly. There are some of us who have been here for a long time and grown accustomed to a certain level of decorum, you understand. It's only polite to defer to your seniors in all matters of etiquette, as we've lived long and hard lives and have only the deference of those younger than us from which to draw comfort,” said an old man behind him. With great difficulty Leroy turned himself around and for the first time beheld a dozen other men and woman, all stuck firmly in toilet seats, all witheringly old, and all sitting on the ground. Their heads pointed in different directions to the sea and sky. At this point Leroy became enlightened, and devoted the remainder of his days to carving the sanguinary principles of mortality into tablets made of sand, which he placed reverently at the limit of the waves. When he died his soul discovered that the universe was an enormous toilet seat, which his spiritual posterior continued to occupy for some time thereafter. THE END.