Round the bend

The flu like symptoms, which had dogged Rupert the previous week, eventually forced him to call in sick to work, the following Monday-and uncharacteristically retire to his slumber pit.

A rare occurrence for a man who, by his own admission more than anyone else's, had a constitution like a rod of iron.

In this state, the world made little sense to him outside of the snug, womblike cocoon of the duvet-which he ensconced himself in, like a man sized foetus-waiting for whatever little nasties, which were re enacting the germ equivalent of The Battle Of The Somme, in his system, to bugger off and bother someone else.

As the subsequent days of the illness unfolded, getting up for a piss went from being a chore to an absolute mission-and, when he did piss, it felt like the end of his penis was going to drop off, and plunge into the murky, ochre coloured liquid he’d urinated into the plunge pool at the bottom of the porcelain.

As a child, Rupert had always had a fear of falling down the toilet- and being flushed out to sea with the turds.

The latter part of his fear he had bolted on, sometime after finding out where sewage went, once it had been jettisoned by its maker.

He mulled this part of his life over, on finishing the deposit, and thought about a faded magazine cutting that he’d seen stuck in the window of a derelict shop, when he was but knee high to a grass hopper; it'd shown a sepia photo of a kid falling head first down the loo-with just his pert little bum, and short legs, sticking out of the lip of the toilet bowl.

The image, he recalled, had morbidly captivated him-and was finite evidence that it was indeed possible to be swallowed up by the water closet!

Rupert giggled to himself, at the thought of such silliness-and then coughed painfully.

After composing himself, he washed his hands which, in his current condition, felt like they were attached to the ends of long stalks, and headed in the direction of his bed room, with the speed, grace and litheness of a microwaved corpse.

It was at the moment when he was exactly fifty percent down the hallway that his guts started gurgling away like old drains, and he did a number of farts, which filled the bathroom with the stench of rotting vegetables.

Mere milli-seconds later, a sudden stabbing pain, in his stomach, announced, ready or not, that a chocolate train was due on platform two- and if he was going to make it in time, he would have to hurry!

Rupert rushed for the toilet bowl, as fast as he could and, with his pants around his ankles, and with his bum about to dock on the rim of the privy (so he thought), Rupert unleashed the power of Grey Skull...

*

The strange thing is that no one saw Rupert again, after that day.

When his girlfriend came to see how he was, the next morning, there was absolutely no sign of him, other than the pair of pants, that he’d been wearing, which sat, like the underwear version of the Marie Celeste, calmly abandoned on the toilet floor.