Battle of the Senses
By Abbie Doll
You’re in the bathroom taking the longest whiz of your life when the microwave starts hollering that your food is done, hollering so, so loud that it might as well be one of those rare-but-true reluctant mothers, one who downright resents her child’s very existence and refuses to expel any kitchen-based effort beyond nuking those cardboard-flavored television dinners, night after night, maintaining a lit cigarette in one hand, flicking ash into the sink and occasionally a speck or two atop that rubble pile of peas; she shrugs, not caring if you notice or not (you do), the flakes pass for pepper anyway. You, in turn, resent her, this imaginary mother, but also the goddamn microwave for its incessant beeping, annoying assertion, and invasive insistence—its undying need to insert its loud-ass wail into your otherwise uninterrupted stream of golden consciousness. You’re on the spectrum and sensitive to these things, sensitive to a lot of sense-based things, which is tolerable until it’s not, which means you and this confounded contraption have got major, major beef—the greasy, grey, tasteless, off-putting kind that makes you regret still consuming meat because if you’re not striving to prepare something Top Chef worthy, something tastebuds memorable, then why the hell bother. So, you’re sitting there still, monitoring the speed of your stream, waiting for the flow to die down, toes tapping the tiles with a fluttery impatience while the microwave continues to beep; it’s the Road Runner—a perky purple bird, an agile optimist with the distinct coloration of Frosted Wild Berry Pop-Tarts, passing through with its bubblegum tongue stuck out to gloat; and you? Why you’re Wile E. Coyote, of course. Miserable. Famished. Bested. And about to fall off the cliff of your very own sanity because you made the irreversible mistake of looking down; you, of all creatures, ought to know better than to acknowledge the existence of gravity in such a prickly predicament. Superior intellect and clever traps can’t save you now. BEEP! BEEP! The blasted thing shrieks. You curse its mechanical war cry under your breath, hoping it hears your plaintive plea and shuts the fuck up for once. You’re regretting all the decisions you made that led to this particular precipice, wishing just this once that you hadn’t tried to optimize this basic process, that you weren’t such a shameless slut for efficiency. Given the fifty seconds you had up against the storm brewing in your bladder, you woefully underestimated your window of opportunity. Usually, your judgment is better; usually, you hover right beside the microwave, finger ready, stopping it precisely at the one-second mark—before it gets the chance to beep at you and assault your ears with its oh-so insistent “I’M DONE!” proclamation in its robotic, tornado-siren blare; usually, you get to it in time, do everything you can to ensure you’re there on time, sprint to the kitchen if you’ve got to, but you’re not typically glued to the toilet with the earthy, fennel-forward musk of mushroom ravioli wafting in, conflicting with that warm, buttery scent of popcorn urine bubbling between your thighs; the two smells swirl around one another, forming this invisible double helix—quite the perplexing potpourri for your poor nostrils. You’ve never once needed the microwave to beep. You can smell your food two, three, four rooms away; your nose works better than it should, better than it has any right to half the time, and besides, it’s not like you’re going to forget your lunch out there anyway; you’re the one that stuck the leftovers in that gnarly gadget in the first place, your attention span isn’t so short as to forget after a minute or two. In the gaps of silence (which are much too short, much too few and far between), you continue to plead with it: begging with a gentle whisper, don’t you do it, don’t you dare do it, as if your cosmic chanting ever stood a chance of preventing the inevitable, but the appliance ignores your request, beeping loud and proud to announce a job well done, its mundane mission complete. It keeps beeping and beeping and beeping and you keep peeing and peeing and peeing and none of it is ending and you’re stuffing your fingers in your ears, trying to listen to anything but that annoying-ass interval of high-pitched gunfire, but the beeps persist, slicing through your defensive barriers like a knife through citrus, and you can’t take it anymore, aren’t even hungry anymore, just need the madness to end, so you hop up off the bowl and make a mad dash to the kitchen to silence the infernal thing, and your partner, who’s been standing at the sink the whole damn time, who could’ve jumped in at any point and eased your pain, is taking it all in, staring at the cartoonish site of you with your pants down around your ankles in this frantic state, laughing their ass off like you’re the crazy one. And the worst part? The ravioli’s still cold and clammy, nowhere near done, so you gotta yank your pants back up and hop back on this Groundhog Day merry-go-round. You start her up again, forehead plastered to the glass, eyes spinning, you spiraling ‘round and ‘round and ‘round.
About the Author
Abbie Doll (she/her) is a writer residing in Columbus, OH, with an MFA from Lindenwood University and is a fiction editor at Identity Theory. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Door Is a Jar Magazine, Full House Literary, and The Bitchin’ Kitsch, among others. Connect on socials @AbbieDollWrites.
