| BY BENJAMIN TEDOFF  Melting Toilet by Justin Gurbisz | Flickr Mr. Timmons is having an affair with Miss Chang. If you listen, even now, you can hear the heavy breathing. In the halls and outside in the parking lot and in the janitor’s closet and under the piano in the music room and in the motel outside of town along the freeway, you can feel the temptation and the carelessness in your inner organs and in your nether regions. It can’t possibly end with anything but public humiliation, divorce, and forced resignations, but for the moment, everyone is just too embarrassed and no one is sure what to do. Mr. Timmons is a handsome, silver-haired man. A married man. A heavy breather and a secret affair-haver. Some have said that Mr. Timmons is just too handsome to be a high school English teacher, but not too married for the janitor’s closet. *** PA: “Good morning, students. We’re pleased to announce that this year’s bake sale raised over a thousand dollars towards our Landesdownesville High School junior college-a-thon field trip, but despite some great work by Mrs. Kleinhorst and the student council, we failed to match last year’s total of $1,200. We’d like to thank Mrs. Kleinhorst for the lovely oatmeal-raisin recipe. Her cookies taste of hope. Wholesome raisins and patriotism. A touch of vanilla. It’s just sad that the world can’t even bring itself to acknowledge what we’re offering. Just a little hope. Selfishness leads to ingratitude and ingratitude is the road to Hell and, well, there’s really nowhere to go from there.” |
| *** Miss Chang is the new music teacher. It’s embarrassing to think she is twenty-five years younger than Mr. Timmons. Some of the ladies in the office are pretty sure it’s the fault of her Chinese name and Chinese accent and her slightly-too-short skirts and beautiful legs. Exotic Miss Chang, Musical Miss Chang. Young musical legs opening and closing like a bellows at the piano bench, in the music room, young musical fingers on the piano, titillating and much heavily breathed-on from classroom to classroom and in the halls and in the janitor’s closet. No one wants to be the one to catch them in the middle of it, but it’s obvious that’s how it’s going to have to happen. Let’s just hope it’s not Mrs. Kleinhorst, she has a heart condition. *** Daniella Felder set fire to the second-floor girls bathroom again. It’s not the first time she’s brought a box of kitchen matches and a cigarette lighter and a small can of lighter fluid to school in her backpack. It’s not the first time she’s blackened an already-rebuilt and unblackened toilet stall. Her hair smells of soot and burned acrylic. The school’s previous fire-starters were all male, and it was relatively easy to discern their motives. It is yet to be determined what drives a young girl to set fire repeatedly to the girls restroom on the second floor. Plus she’s a freshman, and burning down the school always seemed to be more of a sophomore or junior thing. The school has spoken with the parents but found no problems at home. So they had her talk to Mr. Krapst, the guidance counselor. He says she is deeply depressed and smells of sulfur and catalysts. *** PA: “We’d like to remind students that setting fire to any bathrooms or other rooms in the school building is strongly discouraged. Really, while we’re on the subject, it’s not a good idea for high school students to set fires in general, except maybe in a barbecue or a fireplace and even then it’s best to do so with adult supervision and very carefully, not by dousing multiple whole rolls of toilet paper in lighter fluid and lighting a handful of kitchen matches with a cigarette lighter and tossing the whole thing in a blazing pile in a bathroom stall. Remember: safety first. Have a great afternoon, everyone.” *** Miss Chang draws the attention of students and teachers alike by wearing skirts that reveal the perfection of her calves. Mr. Timmons follows Miss Chang up and down the halls, allowing for a discreet interval of roughly twenty-two seconds. Mr. Timmons enters the music room after school. Piano music is briefly heard. Miss Chang is seen talking with Mr. Timmons in the school parking lot. Their cars are parked side by side, in spots delineated by yellow lines. They are both trying to act natural. She is hugging a plastic binder to her chest. He stands with his hands in his pockets. But they stand much closer to one another than they should, just behind and in between her car and his. It looks like she’s sweating but that’s just the moisture condensing on her skin from Mr. Timmons’s heavy breathing in such close proximity. *** PA: “Remember, students, if you see any suspicious activities, don’t keep it to yourself: report what you see. Especially if you see someone using drugs or setting fires or fighting, we’d like to know. Communism is also a problem, and it’s usually pretty conspicuous, so please speak up. Also if you happen to see any teachers seducing other teachers or anyone committing marital infidelity, we’d like to know about that too. Sure, we’re all doomed and the world is slowly coming to an end, but it’s still important to do what we can. Thank you, everyone, and enjoy the rest of your morning.” *** Miss Chang draws the attention of Mr. Felder, father of Daniella Felder, who speaks to Mr. Krapst, the guidance counselor, who thinks, since the Felders have a piano and Daniella used to take lessons when she was little, that she might benefit from taking piano lessons again. He recommends Miss Chang as a private teacher. Mr. Felder, who is a married man himself, and has assured Mr. Krapst that Daniella suffers no problems at home, upon meeting Miss Chang notices her long musical fingers and the perfection of her wrists and thighs, although not in exactly the same way that his daughter Daniella notices that Mr. Timmons is far too attractive to be a high school English teacher. What no one notices is that the way that her father looks at Miss Chang and the way that Miss Chang looks at Mr. Timmons and the sight of herself in the mirror in the girls bathroom on the second floor fills Daniella with an uncontrollable urge to burn down the school. *** Billy Marks and Dennis LaMonica, juniors, have a fight every day. They fight in the halls, in the office, outside in the parking lot, in the burning bathrooms, in the classrooms, in the bushes out behind the library wing. First, in silence, they point at one another. Then they remove their shirts and paint their bare, hairless upper bodies and faces in garish colors while casting insults and brandishing loaded handguns at each other. Finally, one leaps, the other evades. They throw fists and hurl themselves through the air. Shots are fired. They howl with rage, like animals. They fling shuriken. Blood is spilled, organs are ruptured, viscera splatters the walls. Bystanders are injured and emotionally traumatized. Once the boys are separated, Mr. Krapst is summoned. Billy and Dennis are made to write essays describing three things that they admire about one another. *** Mr. Timmons: Silver hair, once light brown. A slight paunch. Boredom. A long-established ability to hide boredom. A small pecker. Reluctant generosity. A blue mid-sized sedan. A wall-mounted flat-screen TV. Two sons, who will soon attend a high school other than the one at which he teaches. Chronic dyspepsia. Nocturnal flatulence. Inexpensive suits. A new appreciation for Asian women. A wife with short blond hair. *** Miss Chang has a corgi named Norma, for her favorite opera. Miss Chang’s mother wanted her to be a concert pianist. Miss Chang’s father didn’t care what she did as long as she married someone with money. Miss Chang’s mother’s grandfather was the father of three daughters, and no sons, and after his third daughter was born, he waited for several days. And one day when his wife was out of the house, he took his infant third daughter into a quiet room and smothered her with a pillow. *** Mr. Timmons prefers the music room after 4 p.m. and the Starlight Motel on the weekend. Miss Chang prefers the back of her car after school and her apartment on the weekend. Miss Chang objects to the music room because the door doesn’t lock, and the motel because it’s cheap. Mr. Timmons objects to the car because it’s cramped and hard to pull his pants on or off, and her apartment because the entrance is in plain sight right across from a little salon where one of his wife’s best friends works as a hairdresser. Neither has any real objection to the janitor’s closet. *** PA: “Miss Chang, please report to the office, you slant-eyed little slut. How dare you seduce a silver-haired married man with your titillating tits and your musical fingers and your slanty slit, you ching-chang piano-sonata-playing little commie skank. We really should send you and your goddamn piano back to the mainland where you came from. Ni hao, bitch.” *** Mr. Krapst, the guidance counselor, is a single man. He is an exceedingly homely man, with a mediocre education, but a man of great compassion. He once rescued a baby crow that had fallen out of a nest. The crow now lives in his house, and calls him a fool in his own voice. *** PA: “Attention, students: due to another attempted arson on the second floor, today will be a half day while repairs are made. While we hope you all enjoy your afternoon off, we strongly recommend you do something useful with your day. Put out a fire, somewhere. Read to the blind. Tell someone who you really don’t like what you admire about them. Sing a patriotic song. Purchase a raffle ticket. If you really have nowhere to be, and you’re feeling the temptation to shoplift or attack the elderly, go to the library or the youth center and just sit there. Or, even better, go to your place of worship and talk to your pastor, priest, or rabbi. The end-times are upon us.” *** Miss Chang, filled with post-coital ennui, falls asleep next to Mr. Timmons in the bed at the Starlight Motel on a Saturday afternoon. At the same time, Daniella Felder, weighed down by depression, falls asleep in her room at home. Daniella dreams she is being chased through the halls of the high school by Mr. Timmons. He is on fire. Miss Chang dreams that she is naked, and is wandering through the school, looking everywhere for Mr. Timmons. She cannot find him. She smells smoke. *** . . . Because the janitor’s closet is well out of the way of all the classrooms, the main office, and the nurse’s office. It can be locked from the inside. The janitor is a little brown woman with watery eyes who has spoken a total of twenty-two words in English in her life. She only comes in the evening. The closet has a bare, overhead light bulb, is filled with paper towels and toilet paper, and smells of cleaning fluids. Mr. Timmons has fucked Miss Chang, standing up, twenty-two times in this room. *** Mr. and Mrs. Felder are happy to see Miss Chang on Saturdays when she comes to give Daniella piano lessons. Mr. Felder, especially, continues to notice the perfection of Miss Chang’s calves, thighs, tits, wrists, and fingers, and he may even believe he is the first to have noticed these perfections, and the first to wonder what else she can do, beside play the piano. And now, even when Miss Chang is not in his house, Mr. Felder gets an erection when he hears his daughter practicing the piano. *** PA: “Attention, students. The following are now strictly prohibited on school grounds: lighter fluid, body paint, guns and bullets, ordinary matches in numbers greater than ten thousand, live crows, shuriken, lawn darts, hypodermic needles, raw sulfur, dynamite and other explosives, coils of rope longer than twenty feet, portable containers of motor oil or gasoline, ethyl alcohol, nitroglycerin, car batteries, live bears or raccoons, and any anti-American and/or communist propaganda in leaflet, audio, or video form. Woe, woe to the unpure.” *** Daniella Felder wonders what it would be like to be beautiful like Miss Chang, to be the object of Mr. Timmons’s desire, to have a sultry Chinese accent, perfectly formed arms, and beautiful black eyes. Sometimes, when Miss Chang asks her for a three-octave ascending and descending B-flat-major scale, and sits watching and waiting for her to play, she is tempted to ask Miss Chang if she is in love with Mr. Timmons. Or whether she has ever been tempted to start a fire. |
| Benjamin Tedoff is originally from New York City, and now lives somewhere in New Jersey. He is working on a collection of short stories. This is his first published story. |
