Excretion was an enterprise of pain and effort unparalleled for Charles. He sat on the toilet with a wringed out sweat dripping countenance, breathing heavily and burriyng his head in the trembling bones of his hands. Charles hated his anus for the exact opposite reason that he hated his mind: it constantly spewed out rotten shit, whereas his mind constantly absorbed it. The two were linked to Charles, like his soul was a celestial swallowing black hole that gobbled up all honest emotion and real sensations into the mysterious singularity at its center, then leaked what it had digested back into the universe as toxic radiation, a thin and shadowy string of awfulness that now drained slowly into the toilet in the back of Ed's Appliances. Charles did not feel well that day. His mind, as it usually did when he was alone, looped neurotically around his own unfortunate situation in the world. That morning he had flown in from a two week stay at his grandmother's home in Savannah. One night, after a Casian schmorgusborg of spicy delights shared family style with his grandmother and cousin, Charles disappeared into the restaurant's men's room for twenty minutes before his cousin came to confirm that he had not just dove out of the window to avoid he and his grandmother's company. Charles explained in a hoarse whisper that he had had what he called a "bombastic and evil shit" that had become in the last few minutes, particularly unpleasant in the last few minutes since the flow of soupy brown excrement had turned to hot blood and plead for his cousin to take him to the hospital. Charles had ignored the symptom before, but this time it was much too alarming to leave unchecked and so he found himself in a paper gown in the emergency room for an entire night, where he was invaded by three different doctors. Just after the crack of dawn, the most professional of three doctors sent Charles's cousin out of the room and explained to Charles that he likely had some advanced form of colon cancer. Three days later another doctor was conveying to him with a southern accent thick as the bayou air that Charles had somewhere between ten and twelve months to live, and probably about only four or five before his symptoms would keep him permanently tied to the bed and the bedpan. That was Charles Harms's southern vacation: a bloody shit and a death sentence. His life had never been what he wanted to be, neither had he, and he realized on the north-bound plane ride back home that his dissatisfaction was as irreversible as his malignant colon cancer. He would die without ever caring much about life, without life and the other characters who populated it caring much about him, and he would do it in a very unpleasant and literally shitty way.
Thanks for sticking around for that. Here's a picture of a talented dog:
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