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Charlie’s Creation

Westley O. Heine

    Charlie ex-hailed long and hard. It was time he took a bath. It was Sunday night and he had school in the morning. The sweat and grit of a late night beer-bash Saturday still clung to his skin like dried birth tissue. It was a good time. Almost his entire class was there celebrating that soon they would graduate high school.
    His mother walked in the room, “Charles! Go wash up, I can smell you all the way from here!” His mom had a supernatural sense of smell. She always knew if Charlie had been drinking, smoking weed, or where his fingers had been.
    “Fine, I’ll go already.” He got up off the couch.
    His Dad peaked over his newspaper, put it down, and began to applaud.
    Charlie stepped into the bathroom and began peeling off his clothes. They fell in a trail on his way to the tub. His Mom and Dad called their house an antique. Charlie called it a piece of shit. It’s so old that it doesn’t even have a shower spigot, just this big old tub.
    Charlie hated the time and effort it took to take a bath every day. It seemed like such a monotonous ritual. Waiting for the big old basin to fill with water instead of just stepping into a shower was frustrating.
    But once he got in it was hard for him to get out. The hot liquid squirmed around his body, caressing it like heavenly jelly. Charlie lay completely submerged, except for his face protruding just above the water line watching the lazy steam rising as if a wizard was blowing smoke out of a water pipe.
    The hot water was melting Charlie’s muscles down, and his pores began to open and breathe in the moisture until he was so relaxed that he became part of the water. His eyelids slid shut. The water and him sat so perfectly still that it seemed as though all the atoms in the universe were instantly magnetized forcing them to cease their living vibration. Eyes closed, ears submerged, time evaporated.
    His eyes cracked open again, careful not to fall asleep in the tub and drown. He looked around. The only thing moving in Charlie’s universe were the mountains of tiny bubbles churning on the surface of the water. These mountains looked like undersea sponges slowly but steadily changing shape as some bubbles popped and new bubbles were perpetually blown into existence. Strange topographies of oil, lye, and other dead organic molecules squeezed together by soup companies, now swirled on the tiny surface of the bubbles. Each perfect little dome had intricate rainbows spiraling like weather just above a visible world, fractals temporally alive due to some unseen velocity.
    “Not unlike my world,” thought Charlie. “It’s a soup bubble of galaxies expanding for a moment and then popping. A short blink of time seen from above, but eons of time from the perspective of the tiny human lives within the bubble.”
    Yes once Charlie was in, the bath seemed like some kind of steamy heaven, a blank, white, calm Nirvana. Charlie was naked and curled up in the warm and loving fluids of the womb like Eden. He was back inside his mother and he never wanted to come out. Here he was safe, fed without even chewing, warmed in this fleshy egg without clothing, and blissfully ignorant in a place where he never had chores, homework, work, or even had to take a bath ever again.
    He was at peace.
    “Speaking of womb...” Charlie’s young hormones fired like flash bulbs in the center of his brain. He suddenly had a reason to come alive. In response to the warm and yielding water, his manhood began to come out of its potential hibernation. It rose and stiffened like a gymnast arching its back.
    Charlie began stroking himself slowly creating little ripples across the surface of the water. The ripples from his self-gratification fanned out like a great sound wave before it reached the sides of the tub and bounced back crossing the refractive waves in a crescendo of tiny in-audible surf.
    The ripples shimmered like a gong being struck to symbolize the sound of creation, “AhhhhOOOhhhhhmmm” as Charlie almost came, when...
    Bang! Bang! Bang! ....
    A crude knock on the bathroom door was followed by the voice of Charlie’s mother, “Charles, leave your bath water in the tub so I can take one after you! There’s no hot water! The water heater is on the fritz again!”
    “Son of a bitch!” Charlie thought. He was just about to finish. Nothing makes a boy go limp faster than his mother’s voice. “I hate this stupid old house where we don’t have a shower spigot, and the water heater always breaks, and we have to share the bath water like it’s still the fucking wild-west or something!”
    Charlie took another deep breath, squinted his eyes, and began coaxing his member to stiffen again. Soon the cross harmonies of the ripples in the water returned and aided Charlie in imagining the wondrous and almost surreal curves of a female body. Great waves of hips, legs, breasts, lips, flowing curls, and flowery swirls drifted past his mind’s eye. Disjointed frames of some erotic and macabre film struggled to enter his practiced fascinations, his forced hallucinations. Jump-cuts of a dark but angelic woman flashed across the back of his eyelids. Gobs of light splattered into his vision and oozed down revealing a hourglass body as threatening as the red symbol on a black widow’s back, but as eager as the very first living cell ready to divide. Charlie’s ultimate idea of womankind was revealing itself from deep within his subconscious. A long silky neck arched back, strained back stretched like elastic, but hiding the face of the girl in a shadow as she flexed back, back, back, with ecstasy. It’s almost over, it’s almost beginning, and finally the Big Bang erupts in white sticky light... fooling the forces of creation, sex, and life with his self-induced orgasm, Charlie peaked in a brief thoughtless moment. He became lightheaded with the release, as the spirits of his sexual tension left his body.
    Charlie let out the third great sigh of the evening. He was so busy with finals at school and the party this weekend that he hadn’t masturbated in six days.
    Bang! Bang! Bang!
    The disturbing knock returned, and so did Charlie’s mother. “Charles! For Heaven’s sake you’re taking all night! Get out now!”
    Charlie sprang out of his bath cursing under his breath, wrapped a towel around his torso, and went out the door passing his mother in her bathrobe. He didn’t say anything to her and stormed into the next room, his room, and slammed the door to let her know that he didn’t like being disturbed.
    Charlie was back to life. He was back in this world.
    He was violently drying himself off, which was always becoming harder and harder as his matured body kept sprouting more hair. He thought, life can be like such a beautiful thing, but sometimes it can be such a nuisance! In Biology class he saw the pattern of life broken down. Everything is eating and feeding off everything else to maintain bodies and allow cells to reproduce. Everything is rubbing, swarming, spawning, and pollinating to make copies of itself. How vane, thought Charlie in his fit of anger. Even sperm cells race and fight each other like violent little bastards just to get to the egg... Wait? Charlie thought of sperm cells.
    A horrific thought crossed Charlie’s mind. “What if? No, that’s impossible! Could I impregnate my own mother with the sperm left in the bath water?” He thought back to Biology class... What was the temperature that sperm needs to maintain in order to survive? ... He couldn’t think... Was the bath water hot enough? Charlie gripped the sides of his scalp and pulled at his hair. He scanned the room for his biology book.
    What a mess his bedroom was in. “If only I had cleaned it like mom asked... Oh, mom I’m sorry!”
    Then he spotted his backpack. Charlie rushed over and dumped it out on his bed. The biology book fluttered out but Charlie grabbed it before it even hit the linen.
    He leafed through the pages madly trying to put his fears to rest. He slapped the pages violently unable to focus, and finally threw the book across the room. He didn’t even know how hot the water in the tub was.
    Charlie collapsed to the floor hitting himself in the side of the head three times. Then with one hand he caressed the wall praying that nothing so horrible was happening on the other side.
    Nine months later Charlie’s mother gave birth to a baby boy. Charlie’s father was overjoyed. Charlie never spoke to anyone about his suspicions.

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