Soup and a Shave

And when he picked up the scepter from its roost, and when everyone around him was finished laughing at his ineptitude he had advertised on full display the day before, he came online again, set down the remote control and the voice box and the headset, and walked into the bathroom. The bathroom, where he gargled and gargled and gargled with mouth wash, and then proceeded to lather up his face with shaving cream. And he brought a straight razor up to his Adam’s apple, and then his chins, and then his cheeks. His nice and rosy and stubbly cheeks. 

A straight razor on the lather, an echo of eternity on the mundanity of existence.

His gaunt face in the smudged mirror, a smooth baby face without any blemishes or unnatural marks, a smooth puffy face that had just gotten off eight and a half hours of virtual online chaotic time.

Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz. 

Was it the phone, the headset, the front door, or the entrails in the pockets of the mind? 

He stopped stock still in this place, cluttered with suds and debris and urine stains, waiting to detect where the source of the buzzing noise was coming from.

The electric toothbrush in his medicine closet. The electric toothbrush with the one, two, three, four, check. Needing to be recharged in a certain number of days, or else. Or else there would be hell to pay. 

He extracted the electric toothbrush from the bowels of the medicine cabinet and thrust it on the charging station which was positioned on the lid of the tank on the toilet. There were other toiletries and accoutrements on the toilet tank lid, but he didn’t even have to rummage around to find the charging station and place the electric toothbrush on it. 

In the midst of all this, he hadn’t cut his face at all with the straight razor, and the shaving lather upon his face remained perfectly untouched and undisturbed. He finished up the shaving, washed the straight razor under the tap, and placed the razor back in its chosen and haphazard place in the medicine cabinet. 

He washed his face with the cold running water, looked at his reflection in the mirror, and then dried off with the hand towel that was hanging from a metal ring near the bathroom mirror.

Smooth. So very smooths no wrinkles or bumps, no cuts or abrasions. Baby skin smooth. Very nice.

He left the bathroom, walked through the living room and into the kitchenette area. He opened the cupboard door, extracted a can of soup, and then closed the cupboard door. 

He turned the stove top on, the top right burner, and poured the contents of the soup can into the small pot that was resting on the stovetop. The stovetop on the right hand side began to heat up – he could hear it and he could feel it – and he stepped away from the stove. He removed a water glass from the overhead cupboards and drew himself a glass of water from the faucet in the sink. 

The water tasted tepid and murky. He gulped the water down in three gulps and drew more water from the faucet in the sink. The second glass of water was just as tepid and murky as the first, and yet he gulped it down just as quickly as the first glass.

The soup in the small pot on the top right part of the stovetop began to gurgle and bubble, and as the bubbling rose to a fever pitch within the next few moments being set on “high”, he moved the small pot of soup from the top right part of the stovetop to the bottom right part of the stovetop to let it cool.

He removed a medium sized bowl from the overhead cupboards and a large spoon from the drawer beneath the sink, and he poured the contents of the warm soup from the small pot into the medium sized bowl. He brought the medium sized bowl of soup and spoon with him to the small, personal-sized dining table nearby.

The kitchenette was not a full size kitchenette – it was barely more than a stove, a few cupboards, and some significantly limited counter space. 

The medium sized bowl had just enough space to hold the contents of the soup from the can. There wasn’t even that much noodles or meat in the soup – mostly just broth. 

The large spoon was one of four spoons he had in his entire silverware collection. He was doomed to do an excessive amount of hand-washing or dish-washing until he purchased more silverware. 

He ate the brothy soup in silence, staring out the window onto the street below him. He finished the soup in five minutes, and washed the bowl and spoon in the kitchen sink.

After that, he didn’t quite know what to do with himself.