Stepping in It

I feel like I’ve been dealing in shit all night. I finally came home from taking Maisie to orchestra in Edmonds, with ten minutes all day to eat a dinner, which is ten minutes more than I had for lunch, more than I had for breakfast, though I was able to eat cookies and little donuts by the sink in those ten minutes, and later, while I was waiting for Therese and Maisie, a Blizzard at Dairy Queen while I graded eight more papers after the fifteen I graded when I returned to school from the field trip and the pouring rain on my bike; when I finally came home after the three and half hours out towards Edmonds, the kitchen was a mess, the yard waste container was overflowing, and the plugged-up toilet, which Stephanie noted before she left for accompanying a rehearsal and I left with Maisie to orchestra, was still full of thick floating turds.

But Therese had also stepped in what seemed like eight cubic feet of shit before she got in the van; and me, having eaten only once at 5:30 in the morning and then some salami and cookies and donuts just before driving tonight, was in a spiritual-fast state, my senses utterly heightened, so that, for every stop light, of which there were maybe twenty along the way, and for every cycle before each stoplight, of which there were usually at least two or three thanks to the backed up traffic of rush hour further clogged by power outages and the chaos of I-go-you-go intersections all through the city, were already urgently aware of every car’s small lurch and slow start, and I was more aware than ever of every little sound, and the sound that was happening was Therese, who’d never been in a car with me, whispering, scream whispering, but not clear enough so I could understand, but what she was whisper screaming was about the poo on her binder and on her shoes, the shit somehow smeared thickly down her notebook, and what I later found was more shit glopped and scraped onto the floor of the van; in my fasting spiritual state, I was aware of the lights, the whisper shouts, and, at every warming stop before a stuttering traffic light, in the oven of our van as it belched out its heat, the shit the shit the shit, even when I opened the windows and the rain and wind came in.

“Can I leave the notebook in the car?” she asked when I was dropping them off. I stared at the hardening bulges of shitdust on her binder.

At Dairy Queen, after eating the Blizzard and grading the eight papers, I brought her folder to the bathroom and scrubbed it clean, went to the car and scrubbed what I could; retrieved Maisie and Therese and drove everyone home; and then, in my kitchen -- the full sink, the spilling yard waste, and Maisie coming down to say that the toilet upstairs was still plugged up.