Bath-Time Reckoning

Some days ago—never mind how long precisely—having little else to do on a dreary Sunday eve and finding my spirit weary from the endless scroll of screens, I thought I would bathe—take to the tub and scrub away the world. If they but knew it, almost all souls in their time, when the weight of existence grows too damp, seek the solace of warm water and a loofah.

I filled the tub, a porcelain vessel of modest girth, its white expanse marred only by a faint ring of scum from battles past. The steam rose like a ghostly shroud, and I lowered myself in, a captain embarking upon a voyage of suds. My rubber duck, a yellow sentinel, bobbed beside me—my first mate in this watery domain. All was calm until I spied it—him—the beast.

Beneath the surface, lurking amidst the bubbles, was a sliver of soap—a pale, elusive shard, slick as a whale and twice as cunning. Its whiteness rivaled the driven snow, and its refusal to grasp mocked my every effort. From the moment I saw it, an obsession gripped me—not to cleanse with it, no, but to conquer it, to seize it in my fist and prove my dominion over this miniature leviathan. I thrust my hand into the depths, fingers splayed like harpoons, but it darted away, a slippery phantom propelled by some unholy current of bathwater.

“Aha!” I cried, “Thou art mine, thou wretched flake!”

The duck bobbed in silent judgment as I lunged again, splashing water over the edge, soaking the bathmat in my fury. The soap evaded me, sliding beneath my palm, taunting me with its silence—for soap, unlike whales, utters no bellowing cry.

Days it seemed, I pursued him—though the clock claimed mere minutes—my knees pruned, my temper frayed. I cursed the fates that made soap so slick, the cruel chemistry of lye and fat that birthed this foe.

“All the tubs in the bathrooms could not contain thy insolence!” I roared, though Spanish Springs was but a shower stall in my mind. The water grew tepid, my resolve hot. I devised a stratagem: a towel draped over the tub’s edge to corner the beast. With a maniacal grin–I drove it forward—closer, closer—until, with a triumphant splash, I seized it!

Victory! I held the soap aloft, dripping and diminished, its once-proud form worn to a nub by my relentless chase.

“I have thee now,” I whispered, “and the tub is mine own.”

Yet as I sank back, triumphant, the duck floated near, its plastic eye glinting with what I swore was mockery. Had I won, or had it, in a final dissolution, claimed my sanity? The water stilled, the bubbles popped, and I laughed—a wild, watery cackle—for in the end, I was both conqueror and fool, adrift in a bathtub sea.

Then from a distant shore, from behind the bathroom door, my wife shouted, “Quit screwing around in there, you’ll getting water all over the floor!”