No Soap

For me, winning isn’t the priority when I enter a writing contest - truthfully, it feels amazing just to be acknowledged by the creative community in any regard. So, that’s why I am pretty excited to get an honorable mention from Pulp Literature; a piece of flash fiction I wrote, titled “No Soap,” made their Bumblebee contest shortlist. The full story can be found below!

No Soap

In Hope, there’s pee all over the toilet seat in the gas station bathroom, and the stall wall in front of me reads suck love spit laughter swallow life. You would have thought it was criminal. A glimpse of your quiet smirk offers a brief distraction from the burn in my legs as I hover above nine bulbous drops of neon urine. You would casually wipe the seat, a good person, but I will leave the stained porcelain the way I found it, because I am not a good person, in fact, I am filthy, I am bad.

Outside of Calgary, I see a man amble across a highway overpass near dusk, up against a mottled sky. I feel sick; he is cold, he is sad, but perhaps, and more likely, not as sad as me, which only makes me feel worse, because I have nothing to be sad about, not really, and meanwhile, the bridge man is walking nowhere from nowhere else, and has nothing to live for.

Near Regina, I feel angry at the woman on the stereo for singing quarter with an over-exaggerated drawl; each time she says qwah-ter I flinch and imagine you beside me, dissecting this song’s inflection, and then searching the next song for love messages from the boy who sent it, or discussing how the song after that reminds us of the smell of rubber or the feel of new socks or the taste of overripe cherries but we can’t figure out why, and I realize when the music changes that I am not angry anymore but sad again, and all I can taste is tears and metal.

Caught in a traffic jam on the outskirts of Winnipeg, I wonder if every person in this 3-hour delay is like me, being punished for their wrongs through this inconvenience, if this hold up is their penance, too, or if there are kind people trapped in this mess, people who got wrapped up in the karmic result of my badness. This is all my fault.

At my Hamilton motel, I consider writing a review when the hot water doesn’t come, a two-star, because on top of the tepid shower, there’s no soap, I can’t get clean, and the room smells like cigarettes; even for the dirt-cheap price, I know that hot water and soap are a basic hotel decency. But the review will never be written. Instead, I will remain entitled, greedy, and eventually forget about you; the funeral will come and go, and just like each night since you’ve been gone, I’ll take a pill and wash it down with wine, and hope that sleep will come and be a reprieve between this day and the next one, and the next one after that.