His name is Arwen, and he lives at the sixth house on his street. He tries not to spend his time at home.
You wouldn’t ask him why, ‘cause he’s not the kind of person you ask about their home life, but if you did, he’d complain about the lack of central air and heat, the disney princesses plastered to his walls from girls he barely knew, or the mice.
He wouldn’t mention what’s not in the bathtub. Since he knows it isn’t there, so really there shouldn’t be a problem with it.
He can just avoid using the bathroom at home, run hand soap through his hair in front of the sink before he leaves school, come home and eat cup noodles and a steady rotation of four different potato products, and sleep before the sun hits the horizon.
What isn’t in the closet, tall and knobbly, doesn’t matter to him. He’s made his peace with it, even as it swings between the sliding door to his room, crossing through the hallway to his sister’s room. She burns to death every time Arwen thinks about her, shut up in the cabinets built to hold her bed flush with the wall.
He’s made his peace with the twisted and pink corpse that isn’t in the backyard, watching him from a raised vegetable bed gone to seed long before he’d lived here. It chews at its fingers as it watches him, and Arwen mirrors the gesture unconsciously, drawing blood from a torn and stinging hangnail. What isn’t in the backyard is pretty, almost. Peaceful, with the way fireflies drift above it, burning and twisting at the edges of his vision. Still, Arwen wishes his window had curtains.
It’s what isn’t in the bathroom downstairs that bothers Arwen. The bathroom upstairs simply doesn’t work, and is growing mildew to boot, so it’s best to keep the door closed. But the one downstairs is operational, most days, and Arwen knows he can’t hear what isn’t in the bathtub breathing, wheezing and gurgling. It still sends tension through to where his spine meets his skull. There’s a framed Stevie Wonder poster hanging on the wall, mist clinging to the inside of the plastic and half-evaporated shaving foam sticks to the bottoms of Arwen’s socks when he needs to go inside. What isn’t in the bathtub burbles, craning its neck up to watch him. Arwen’s never seen worse than a second degree burn from the toaster oven fresh, but he thinks this one must’ve been burned bad, the way its skin goes black-red-flash-of-bone, slogging off where it touches the off-white basin, collecting in a circlet around the bathtub rim and trailing back to what isn’t curled foetal, neck straining as the tap drips onto the crown of its round, terrible head, trailing down with what pale brown hairs remain scattered through thin necrotic skin. Arwen knows it isn’t really here, but still its jaw works up and down.
