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Writer's pictureClem Ieaudd

Tram Stories: The Soap Dish

There’s now a gap in the grouting above the sink in the bathroom, the tiling surrounding it chipped and jagged. It’s where the soap dish used to be.

The two minutes it takes to brush my teeth in the mornings and evenings are, to be sure, the most boring 4 minutes of my day. Sometimes I roam around the house while I’m brushing, but before I know it my mouth fills up with viscous white foam, and I have to rush back to the bathroom sink to spit before swallowing any of it. So mostly I just stand in the bathroom, barefooted on the cold tiles, brushing and brushing.

It was on one of these twice-daily occasions that my eyes were scanning the room and came upon the soap dish mounted to the wall in between the grouting. Dish is a weird word for it, I thought. Also, why does it have to be for soap? Just because it’s called that doesn’t mean that I have to use it for that. I can change the meaning of things by changing how I use them.

I imagined I could use it for all sorts of things: for my phone, various beverages, whatever I had in my hand that I normally wouldn’t take into the bathroom because I had nowhere to put it.

The next morning I threw the soap in the sink and put my mug on the soap dish while I was getting ready. Because I hadn’t properly cleaned the remnant slippery scum from the concave surface of the dish, the mug inched its way to the edge and slid off, shattering in the basin and dispersing scalding coffee all over me.

I would have kept a tube of Savlon on the soap dish to apply to my burns each day until they healed, but I’d already tore the stupid thing right out of the fucking wall. So now there’s a gap there in the grouting, which I look at every morning and evening. The sharp angles in the broken white tiles above and below remind me of teeth, the gap an open mouth, and I brush a little more aggressively.

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