Frickin' War

This Sunday, I cleaned my bathroom.

It was not a decision I took lightly. There were things in there. Things that H.P. Lovecraft on an acid trip couldn’t have imagined. Things that the English language cannot adequately describe. Indeed, no form of communication ever used by humans could come close to describing what lurked in the vast recesses of my bathroom.

And yet, these things had become familiar to me. Friends, almost. I would walk in and immediately hear the skittering of hundreds of tiny, misshapen feet. If you left the light off, they would venture forth, slowly, chanting in their strange, alien tongue. They called me ‘Oomfu,’ which I understood meant ‘He Who Makes the Smell.’

They would leave little gifts sometimes. Small, delicate, flower-like growths that exploded if exposed to direct sunlight. Wistful constructions of toilet paper that resembled three-winged birds with snake heads. And most strange of all, little tiny mints like you get on a hotel pillow. We had an understanding. I used the bathroom, but did not disturb their intricate ecosystem. But then it all changed.

They grew hostile. The delicate gifts were replaced with tacks and small, bitey things that looked like the spawn of a fly and a miniature tube of toothpaste. I weathered their attacks, but did not retaliate. I expected that at any day, we would go back to our former amicable relationship.

But then I found one of my comic books in there. Its cover was wrinkled, its pages smudged by hundreds of tiny little pedipalps. That my friends, meant frickin’ war.

Armed with a can of Comet in one hand and a scrubby sponge in the other, I went in. Their slings and tiny spears were of no use against my massive bulk. I was the Godzilla to their Tokyo. The Gort to their National Guard. The Galacticus to their Earth and they were fresh out of Reed Richards.

I’m not proud of what I did. Well, yeah, just a little, but my bathroom is clean now. Sterile almost. The pictographs are all gone, as are the tiny houses made out of dental floss and towel lint.

I do kind of miss them, in a way. I miss the cries of ‘Oomfa!’ and the strange, reedy music they would play between 4:13 and 4:18 am. I realize that their marvelous mold-based civilization is gone forever now and I’m saddened by that. The world will never again hear the strange burbling sounds they made nor see ever again the crude running shoes they manufactured out of toilet paper tubes. I will miss many things about them, especially the pillow mints.

Those things were fantastic.

Cheers,
-Jason