Unfamiliar shower gothic

Staring deep into the void of the unknown

By Rebecca Peterson, Humour Editor

This is not your bathroom, and you are afraid.

It is not your bathroom, but it is the only option, unless you want to spend the next three days in a state of greasy despondency. You are going to have to learn how to use the shower.

This is not your shower.

“It’s easy,” said the shower guardian, only hours before, as they showed you around the place. Where the towels are, which drawer belongs to whom, where the Q-Tips are kept. The shower guardian, who manipulated the knobbery and faucet shenanigans with such deft skill and ease, is no longer present. The shower guardian has, in fact, fucked off for greener pastures, leaving you here to deal with the Gordian knot of plumping hardware before you.

You are afraid.

You know, logically, that the shower cannot do you much harm. You know, logically, that you cannot do the shower much harm in return. Still, part of you figures that if anyone is going to die by accidentally causing an otherwise benign showerhead to explode like a grenade, causing shrapnel to imbed itself into bathroom tile and flesh alike, it’s going to be you.

It’s one of those showers where there is only one knob, and the hot and cold labels are not clearly identified. You have no idea how to actually make the water start flowing.

It becomes the Devil’s game of Bop-It, as you twist and pull and flick and shake and sob to no avail. There is still no water, and you are still no smarter than a fifth grader. You sit down on the edge of the bathtub with a sigh, your knee knocking into the shower fuckery.

You are instantly drenched in a freezing cold downpour.

After letting loose a screamed curse that could easily be heard from space, you tumble out of the stream of glacial water and begin fiddling with the taps and knobs again, trying desperately to improve the temperature. The shower swings wildly from Antarctica to the Fires of Mount Doom and back again, all the while you try to avoid catching frostbite and receiving third degree burns, almost simultaneously. Eventually you settle on a temperature that is just a bit colder, or just a bit hotter than you would like.

The shower stream is not what you’re used to. It either feels like a bare misting of rain against your shoulder blades, or a violently sadistic German masseuse named Grenda taking out her anger management problems on your back muscles for $150 an hour. Either way, you don’t like it. You don’t like it at all.

Finally, you feel just clean enough to interact with humanity again, and you turn to shut off the steady flow of rapidly cooling water.

Except… you don’t know how to turn it off. You turned it on by accident in the first place.

So you stand there, burned and frozen and drenched and soapy, and you know that when the shower guardian eventually returns, all they will find is a tiny, shrivelled, prune of a human. There will be nothing left of you. The shower has won.