Slippery When Wet

“God damnit.” Wilson grumbled as he pushed the shower door open and glowered at the towel-less hanger on the back of the bathroom door. The air let in licked his spine and sent a chill to the bottom of his tailbone. He would have cursed again had he not thought that only crazies narrate their lives aloud. The cold was biting at his nipples, which stood erect like the bumps on the bottom side of a chair mat. He despised the feeling. It reminded him of that month or two when he was a young teenager and titty-twisters were a thing. Melvin, or some other asshole he hadn’t thought of since middle school, would pinch and twist his nipples until he squealed like a pig. For those couple of months, every boy at Charlotte Wood was on high alert. It was not uncommon to be ambushed in the lunch line and succumb to the raw chaffing pain. Wilson was sopping wet and naked with one foot out of the shower, desperately wanting to be warm and dry. 

He abandoned the shower’s shelter to make a break for the linen closet. The tile beneath his feet was cold. It was winter. He took two steps and grabbed his towel. The floor was starting to puddle. What concerned him most about the situation was time; he didn’t have time to clean up the water mess that was coming off him and onto the floor. He held the towel in his hand. He had to get back to the shower as quickly as possible. He tried to leap forward. As soon as he pressed his bent toes from the floor, his knee popped. It felt like someone got his tendons with a pair of pliers and snapped them against his knee cap. Automatically, he countered the tenderness of his injury by shifting his weight onto his good leg but the floor was too slippery for that, and Wilson slammed to the ground, which was hard as ice. His ass hit first, then his back. His head followed. Naked on the floor with a bum knee and a knocked head, his first wince came from the shock of the bitter cold (and wet) floor. Soon after, just a breath or two to survey himself, the pain from his knee served as the replacement and became everything.

 He pulled himself off the soaked tile and sat on the edge of the tub. He’d never used the tub and it was his first time sitting on the edge of it naked. He didn’t like it. His towel was drenched from being dropped on the floor. He wiped dripping water from his face with his shaking hands and looked at his knee, which was the shape of a jumbo yellow onion. The pain at that moment felt like someone was slicing into the onion and somehow cutting the exact same spot over and over again. It and the visual trauma (swelling) of his knee took precedent and he knew immediately he needed to ice it.

Dropping from the edge of the tub to the floor and landing on his one good knee was a necessary sacrifice. Crawling was the only safe way out of the bathroom. Attempting to hop on the sodden floor was too much of a risk, yet, he couldn’t really crawl either as there was too much weight on the one knee and the ground was too hard. He knew what he had to do. He lowered his nude body to the floor. It was like being hit with a taser gun or jumping into a lake in the middle of January. His penis shrunk inside of itself on impact, the rest of him became populated with goosebumps. The scene caused a spike in adrenaline that mashed the pain he was feeling together with a strange and unexpected sense of pleasure. He dragged his body forward. And again. And again. And by the fourth time, any sense of pleasure he might have peaked at a moment ago was gone. Scrapes on his chest and genitals were appearing from dragging himself out of the bathroom and across the wooden floorboards of his master bedroom. The materials tore at the tip of his penis and plucked belly hairs in batches. Still, the pain didn’t compare to the violence happening in his knee. His desire to find comfort in icing it made him endure.

When he reached the hallway, he lied his cheek down on the wood and looked. There were three rooms to pass. He estimated it to be twenty-five yards to the living room, which was just before the kitchen in the open concept layout of his home that was then empty. He shuddered at the distance. The hallway was impossibly long. In the time it took him to lift from his stomach to being seated he considered hopping down the hallway. It was dry there and was worth a shot. He managed to get up on his one good knee and then hopped forward. His bad knee bounced on the landing. The pain vibrated outward from the back of his knee to the rest of his body. No, he thought, he wasn’t going to do that again. He went back down to his chest, which was raw from the friction with the wood. He flung an arm forward as far as he could throw it and then pulled himself towards the end of the hallway, his body skidding on top of the wood like a boat running aground. He flashed to a memory of something shitty he once saw on the internet; sixty grit sandpaper rubbing against a man’s scabbed forearm.

His arms were fatigued and sore when he finally made it to the end of the hallway and stopped.  His efforts caused the water from the shower to be replaced with his own sweat. He could see the fridge, but he still had to cross the living room to get to it. “Fuck!” He shouted. He pushed himself up from the ground, got his good leg underneath him, and, with his arm against the wall, stood up. He couldn’t drag himself any further, it would need to be hopping from here on out. With the anticipation of great pain, he jumped. It was torture but he persevered. 

At the refrigerator, Wilson touched the big toe of his bad knee to the ground. It only kissed the floor but he yelped in agony. He pulled the ice packs from the back of the fridge and slammed the door. He was one on leg, leaning against the refrigerator and looking at the distance to the couch. It was the final stretch, maybe fifteen feet away, but then, why in his mind did it seem like he was being asked to journey across a Kohl’s parking lot? He cried out to his empty house, “Help me!” knowing no one was home. Knowing he was acting crazy. The room fell quiet for several moments, only the hum of the fridge was with him. Then, he broke for it and after only three hops, he was close enough and dropped to the couch with such force that his tailbone touched the springs. He laid there breathing heavily. He was still naked. He looked at his leg, which was limp. It didn’t feel like something he owned. It was only something that he had to take care of otherwise it would die. It dangled there like the last branch of a decaying tree before he manifested the strength to lift it up and onto the couch. He put the ice pack on his knee and felt the blood run away from the cold like a wild animal flees the one who just saved it. The abuse subsided with the power of cryotherapy. There was a pillow behind him that he threw his head into. He grimaced. 

Later that day, after he’d been to the hospital and back, he lied in his bed with his leg elevated and in a soft cast. His knee, with the help of the pills, hurt less. And though at that moment, the shadow of pain it cast was the dullest it had been since before the fall, it was still painful and it got Wilson thinking. He pondered on the different levels there are to things like pain. What’s a type of pain that hurts but less than this? The first thing that popped into his head was Tittty-twisters.