Flotsam

I spent an extra half hour in the bathroom yesterday morning, and not because I was applying extra mascara and trying to impart a non-whorish flush to my pasty cheeks.
Instead, I was crouching on the toilet holding the door closed with my foot, wondering what I could use as a weapon.

At six o’clock yesterday morning, I woke next to a soundly sleeping fiancé and shuffled to the bathroom to commence my morning ablutions. It was while I was peering forlornly into the mirror over the sink that I heard the creaking.
The unmistakable creaking of footsteps in the hallway.

There have been a string of muggings in my neighborhood in the past few months. Also, the lock on the front door of our duplex is broken. Of course, there is a deadbolt and a chain on our door, but for a skilled burglar/rapist, these things are but the work of a moment.
I have several persistent fears. Among them are dead bodies, rats (wild), and Someone In The House. Dead bodies do not have the requisite motor skills to make the creaking noises I was hearing this morning, and a sewer rat would have made more of a skritchy, snuffly sound.

The only possible weapon I could see was the curling iron. I could smack him with it, I mused, or jab it at him like a sword. I never did hit upon what now seems the obvious idea—plug it in, and use its burning properties. Apparently I am not as clever as I like to think I am, a fact that would have been aptly illustrated if I had indeed burst out of the bathroom brandishing a cold curling iron, the cord dangling behind me.
But I didn’t. What I did do was sit, as previously described, on the toilet, my foot holding the door closed.

Creak! Crrreeaak.
There it was again. A flurry of thoughts whirled through my mind: disturbingly, I felt a jolt of something like glee realizing that if I were attacked by an intruder, I wouldn’t have to go to work that day.

In the spring of my freshman year of college we discovered a square opening in my roommate’s closet, a passageway previously covered by a piece of plywood. The day the plywood fell over, we stared into the hole, which led into the open roof of the house in which we lived. Almost all of the dorms at Sarah Mawr were converted mansions—our room was up a spiral staircase, on the third floor. The hole led into a dark, peaked expanse, with beams for a floor.
No one could live in there, my roommate assured me. Between the slats was dead space—only a tightrope walker could live balanced on the beams.
Or a diabolically clever hobo, I thought to myself.

I did not sleep a full hour alone in that room for the rest of the year. Over time, I personified the hypothetical resident of the closet-accessible loft, referring to him simply as The Man In The Hole. He was in there, waiting for me to go to sleep so that he might emerge and have his way with me.
For whatever reason, the presence of another person in my room instantly restored me to rationality—but on nights when my roommate was out I slept holding my cell phone, with the door to my room propped open. Occasionally I managed to doze off for a moment before I snapped awake again, heart thumping, eyes darting towards the hole. It never occurred to me that the imagined danger of The Man In The Hole was probably considerably less than the very real danger of a scrumptious young coed like myself sleeping WITH THE DOOR OPEN, but then it was only my freshman year. It would take more college before I was clever enough to figure that out.

I remembered all this yesterday morning as I perched atop the toilet and eyed my curling iron.
But I couldn’t stay in the bathroom forever.
When there had been no creaking for ten minutes, I yanked open the door and dashed into the bedroom, crawling on top of the Actually and hissing “There’s Someone In The House! There’s Someone In The House!”
“Grbrlrjshrbrg,” he mumbled.
“There’s Someone In The House! I heard footsteps in the hallway!”
“Wha?” he murmured blearily, “Who? Where?”
“Footsteps! In the hallway!” I was whispering directly into his ear now, clutching the sheet in my fists, my shoulders hunched and my eyes shut against the image of a man raising a bloodied scythe above us both.

“That was me,” said the Actually, “I had to pee, but you were in the bathroom. Now can you please take your knee off my testicles?”