He grabbed the plunger. Not the good, heavy-duty one with the flange—that was under the sink behind the bleach he was afraid to touch. No, he had the decorative plunger. The one shaped like a cute duck. It was useless. The duck’s beak made a sad squeak against the surface of the brown water, accomplishing nothing.
“No,” Kevin whispered.
The old toilet in apartment 4B had seen a lot. It had weathered the curry nights of the ‘90s, the disastrous “flushable” wipes incident of 2008, and the time the neighbor’s cat fell in. But nothing—nothing—had prepared it for what happened on a humid Tuesday night in July. toilet stopped up with poop
Twenty minutes later, Kevin sat on the edge of the bathtub, defeated. The bathroom floor was a swamp. The cute duck plunger floated mournfully. And in the bowl, the Great Logjam remained, a monument to poor life choices. He grabbed the plunger
“How much poop, Kevin?”
He poured half a bottle of Dawn into the bowl. Then a pot of boiling water. The water level rose further. Now the bathroom smelled like lavender-scented disaster. The one shaped like a cute duck