A Short Story In The Making:
a genre based on real events & embellished with creative liberties.
Title: The Bathroom
In the Norwegian Arctic we lived on a tiny island together. We worked ten hour days and at the end of those days the three of us would often convene in the bathroom we shared. Everything in the bathroom was white and it was tiny, but we fit perfectly. Them and me, Ingrid, Philip and me. We had become something of a club amidst those of us that shared the island, all friends and colleagues, but our bathroom meetings were a secret coziness. Three and the bathroom was at capacity.
The exclusivity of our bathroom club was not by design, it was simply that only the three of us shared this bathroom in the back of the hotel’s laundry room, the hotel where we worked. It was used by us because it was perfectly between our bedrooms: theirs, an attic room at the opposite end of the long wooden building that housed the bathroom, mine, the cabin of a sailboat tied up at the jetty. Neither of these spaces belonged to us, they were a part of our work contracts. I had volunteered to sleep on the sailboat because the vessel had supported the first complete circumnavigation of the Arctic, a feat made possible by the tragedy of a steadily melting ice cap. In the summer I often laid out on the netting, in the sunshine of both day and midnight, and pretended I was on that expedition, one of a four man crew sailing day and night, at the mercy of the fierce North Sea. I had also volunteered to sleep on the boat because I wanted my own space. A sanctuary to escape to if needed, for we lived and worked on a tiny island, we lived and worked in the same place and with the same people every day and though our small team got along very well, island fever is like cabin fever, there were moments where one needed to disappear.
It was never planned, but more often than not we visited the bathroom at the same time. Sometimes so serendipitously that I would round the corner and find the two of them walking at a pace that would deliver the three of us to the door at the exact same time. We would laugh and enter in a single file, passing by shelves of fresh white hotel towels to one side, cleaning supplies to the other. Sometimes I saw them walk to the bathroom as I finished up work, waiting for bread to bake. I admire them, framed by a window they walked as if one person, shoulders touching and talking softly to one another. Though from across the way and on the other side of the glass I could not hear them, I knew exactly the sounds they were speaking. A hushed English that was the language of their coupling. With hints of his German and her Danish they talked as if they shared one mind, speaking in broken sentences where gaps were intuited by the other, with subtle touches and expressions only people with a deep knowing of one another can communicate through. Other days, I opened the door to find them already inside, sometimes coming out of the shower together, the pair of tea light that lived on top of the toilet alight, or mid conversation, Ingrid sitting on the toilet talking and Philip learning against the wall listening. Yet, never did I feel I was intruding upon their couple and however it happened that we ended up in the tiny white bathroom together, it was my favorite night cap….