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| The Bathroom Stall |
| So he'd guessed correctly; there'd been an accident in the shower. He'd have to go in there. Crimson. It's one of those words that reaches down into the pit of your being... Water from the shower was trickling across the tiles. Not much, just enough for him to see it. Or was it water? even though you know what the word means. Its just a color: worse than rust, better than burgundy. That's all, nothing more than a color. WAater isn't pink. Water doesn't have tiny threads of red in it, tiny threads of red like veins. But that's just if you know what the word means. You've never seen Crimosn. He stood in the center of the bathroom now, and he began to tremble. It reaches into you and pulls out something vital. Something's missing like... His clothes were a mess. Blood on them, of course, and water, and then he'd been sick all over the bathroom floor. maybe your liver or one of your kidneys and you know it's not just a color. A dead girl. The girl his mother had killed. Not a pretty sight nor a pretty notion, but there it was. That's not just a color splattered all over the floor, not just paint. |
| He had ripped back the shower curtains and stared down at the hacked and twisted thing sprawled on the floor. And you close your eyes so you don't have to see it anymore, but it's still there. He found the butcher knife almost at once; it was under the torso. Throbbing relentlessly in the back of your neck and inside your bones. Norman locked the door behind him and went up to the house. This time he was going to do something about it, once and for all. This was tragic, dreadful beyond words, but it would never happen again. And suddenly you find yourself opening your eyes even though you didn't want to... But walking away wouldn't bring the girl back to life. Because you could see it in the back of your mind, you could hear it screaming, wailing. He couldn't hold back his nausea, his dizziness, and his dry, convuslive retching when it came to actually going into the shower stall. It's no longer a color then. "No. I can't do it. I can't look at her again. I won't go in there." Now you've seen Crimson. Now, try seeing something else. Back in the bathroom now. As long as he concentrated on scrubbing, it wasn't so bad (even if the smell sickened him). He just couldn't open his eyes. |
| Portions of this poem (those not in italics) were taken from the novel Psycho by Robert Bloch. They were taken completely out of order from the first three chapters and re-arranged to fit my liking. My Creative Writing teacher told me that is not stealing. |