A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Vanity

If you're anything like me (and I hope you're not), the soap in your shower dwindles down to a splinter before you replace it. You only think about it when you're already under the running water. What if, on some random day in the future, you pick up this piece of shrapnel and scrape your arm with it, raising a welt? (This actually happened.) You look at the soap, thinking, "This isn't soap. It's a weapon. A guy in prison could take this away from me and shank me in the shower. I gotta get rid of this thing right now."

Then the fatal oversight. Instead of putting the soap down first, you hold on to it as you reach for the shower liner on your way to the vanity. In your haste you lift your leg to step out of the shower before setting the other leg, which slips. You grab the liner. It's a little slimy around the edges because--let's face it--no one washes them anymore, and you're too cheap to replace it even though they're only $1.92 at Menard's (last time you checked). You lurch forward, falling. Your elbow smacks the edge of the tub and you stab yourself in the throat. Reflexively, you get to your feet as quickly as you can--for a man your age, snatching the soap from your neck. Blood gushes out. Oops. In horror you watch a colorized version of 'Psycho', the version called 'Idiot'.

You say to yourself, "I've always been a spaz." You have a spaz flashback to the apple incident. Three months ago you were talking to an attorney on the telephone while eating an apple, which you squeezed too hard (from talking to an attorney on the telephone), thus snapping it in half, which drove your fingernail into your lip. It bled. It bled for three minutes. You held a paper towel to it. There is still a little scar to remind you of your spasticity. (This also actually happened.)

You may be the only person living or dead who ever stabbed himself with his own finger, so stabbing yourself in the throat with a soap shiv doesn't seem all that farfetched at the moment. You feel faint and clutch at the shower liner again, this time with both hands. You realize you're going to die, but the slime is still grossing you out. The curtain is secured firmly with grommets and sturdy plastic rings. It's the rod itself that gives way. We don't secure them to the walls with screws anymore like they did back in 'Psycho' times, so the entire curtain, liner and rod assembly comes down on top of you. Now it's your head's turn to smack the edge of the tub. You black out, sparing yourself further horror and embarrassment from dying like this.

The shower is still on. You bleed out and everything washes down the drain. The deadly soap dagger dissolves to nothing.

Five hours later your wife Babs gets home. She had a dental appointment, did some shopping, then went to her weight-lifting class. She's been bulking up so that one day she can beat the crap out of you (just for being you). She finds you ashen--from no more blood, lying in the running shower with your eyes open like Janet Leigh. She screams like Janet Leigh in sweatpants. Thinking the murderers are still in the house, she flees to the neighbor's and calls 911. While it's ringing she wonders if your second life insurance policy is still in force. If memory serves, it all totals over $600,000. She smiles just a little on the inside.

The police are stymied. They possess a body with two wounds: The head wound caused by the fall and the mysterious, fatal neck wound. No weapon, no prints, no evidence of forced entry. An apparent struggle in the shower itself, but that's it. The coroner is no help. She can't say what kind of knife it was, or even that it was a knife. She believes the weapon was sterilized, the wound was that clean.

The cops suspect Babs, but she secures an ironclad alibi from the dentist. The crime becomes a dead forensic file. Your son loses his mind trying to solve it and becomes a lunatic crime-fiction novelist. Babs, who is pretty pissed off when she reads next month's water bill, moves out. She tells your family it's because she's afraid the killer may come back for her. In truth, she can now afford to buy a bigger house in a better neighborhood. She gets married again, to a meticulous man who, among other things, replaces the shower soap long before it becomes a weapon of unintended possibilities.