The D300 Log
I was behind the Bruce front desk, with my back to the Bowling Alley and my nose buried in the building’s maintenance log. I finished up my work for the evening and closed the log. Turning around, I was taken aback by the steady stream of people walking left past the desk and up the front stairwell. I checked the time. Because it was late enough in the evening that no programs should be in progress, I walked outside to check out the scene.
Stepping into the front stairwell, I looked up and saw these people were walking up to the second floor.
I stepped out of the stairwell onto the D300 wing. The line of people stretched as far as I could see. I asked the nearest person, “What’s going on up here?” His response was to look at me and snicker at some joke I wasn’t yet privy to.
I eventually traced it to the community bath located at the center of the hallway.
At the door of the bath was Aaron, the D300 RA. In his hand was a can full of change. He was charging admission for people to enter the bathroom.
The residents at the front of the line recognized me as the Assistant Hall Director and began to get nervous, like kids whose dads have shown up to shutdown their delinquent behavior.
“Alright, what’s going on, Aaron?”
He waved the can in front of me, jingling the change in a clear communication that I was also expected to pay admission. He smiled sheepishly and said with his voice rising, “Umm, 10 cents?”
I glanced at him without saying a word. Then I stepped past him into the bathroom.
Bruce Hall community baths were ancient yet simple in design. In the center of the room were two sinks, flanked on the right by five shower stalls and on the left by an equal number of toilets. Whenver I stepped foot in there, I always recalculated the amount of my life wasted in that room when I was the D300 RA myself. I even thought about my favorite graffiti, which was written in Stall #2. Scrawled low on the left stall wall and written partially upside-down, you would have to sit on the pot, lean over as far as you could, then crank your head to read the simple words, “You are now shitting at a 45 degree angle.”
The bath was empty except for one person standing up in the far left toilet stall. The stall door was open, but the man standing in there wasn’t going #1. Instead, he was giggling. He popped out of the stall, and whatever smile he had disappered when he came face-to-face with me, his AHD. I told him not to worry, that I was just checking things out. He smiled and giggled, then slinked out of the room.
I entered the last stall and saw before me the biggest piece of shit I’ve ever seen.
Its circumference compared favorably to my upper arm. It stuck up out of the water, even to the edge of the toilet seat. Measuring its total length was problematic, since the other end snaked to some unknown distance down the hole, like a ghost shit that tore open the fabric of space/time.
Seriously, you should have seen this fucker! It still haunts my dreams.
Whoever did this must have turned themselves inside out, like “Screamers”. There should have been a trail of blood leading somewhere, but no clues were found. Analysis of the most-recent cafeteria menu was discussed amongst the crowd, but no one could correlate anything served with the end product before us. The next several days were spent keeping an eye on the Bruce Hall population, to see if any strange hospital admissions or obituaries were sighted.
The money that Aaron collected, he spent on a pizza party for his guys, the consumption of which probably contributed to Son of D300 Log at some point 36-72 hours later.
