There was water in my livingroom an inch deep. I was standing at the doorway in the hall watching the flotsam and jetsom of dismantled television parts and street detritus drifting around on the surface.
I went to my kitchen and returned with sponges and tissues. I threw the sponges into the room then got to balling up rips of tissue and throwing them in. I realised immediately that they wouldn’t soak it all up. There must still have been sedative residue in my neural receptors.
I went to my spare room, then returned with a drill in my hand and workboots on my feet, then sploshed and splashed a couple-and-one steps in, knelt down, and pressed the drillbit into the water and against the floor.
I pulled the trigger and drilled through the layer of faux floorboards. Then when the drillbit hit concrete underneath it stopped spinning. The force rattled and shuddered up my arm until I let go of the trigger.
When I raised the drill out of the water there was a thin beige thread coiled round the bit and carrying on down into the water. I raised the drill further and drew more of it out of the water. I wondered if it was a length of wire or some structural part of the floor, and then it suddenly moved like I’d flicked it and a surge of adrenaline flooded my veins.
My hand opened and I jumped back and the drill splashed into the water. The thread uncoiled itself and slipped under the surface. I lifted a foot and tilted it up and saw another wriggling in the boot’s tread. I yanked at the bootlace and the knot came undone and I kicked so the boot flew off my foot and landed with a splash upright in the corner.
I hopped to the doorway and put my unshod foot in the dry hallway and untied my other boot and took it off and flung it toward the other.
Small bubbling ripples kept appearing on the water’s surface and travelling a few seconds and then disappearing. Each one roused a sense of nausea up my spine and a primordial disgust in my backbrain that eventually compunded and compelled me to secure the area and then abandon it.
I held onto the doorframe and leaned in reaching for the door opened into the room with my other hand. My fingertips got purchase on the handle and I pulled it slightly and felt water lap over and through my socks and wet my feet. I took my socks off and balled them up and threw them into the room, then I found a screwdriver and took my kitchen door off its hinges.
I dragged the door to my hallway and propped it up as best I could in the livingroom doorframe. Then I removed my bedroom door and brought that through and rested the bottom of it against the skirting board and let it fall against the kitchen door so it rested wedged diagonally against it.
Satisfied that the situation was secure and simultaneously concerned that it wasn’t, I put on a new pair of socks and a pair of shoes and went out to the pub.
Catpissalism 