5.1 KiB
Content warning: Depictions of public bathrooms & potty humour.
“They ran out of tofu!”
“What?” Yanfei whirls around in her chair, miserable dumpling forgotten. “But there was such a big tray out earlier!”
“People must have taken it all.” Hu Tao shrugs. “That was fast. Maybe they’ll have more later.” A stomach gurgles, and she chuckles. “I guess I’ll have to get something else — wait. That wasn’t me.”
“Bath…room…” Xingqiu’s face is pale as he queasily stands, clutching his stomach. Without another word, he dashes off in the direction of the nearest restroom.
“Huh. He always had a sensitive stomach. I guess the fish did him dirty. Wait,” Hu Tao pales, “I also had the fish…” Another stomach gurgles, and she bolts after Xingqiu.
“The chef must not have properly cooked it,” Shinobu says. “Well, I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to make rice give you food poisoning, and the fish was the only thing both of them ate.”
Yanfei’s stomach gurgles and she reflexively looks in the direction Hu Tao and Xingqiu hurried off to. She pales.
Shinobu snaps her fingers. “Oh, right. Also the tofu.” She pats Yanfei’s shoulder sympathetically. “Maybe you should catch up before it’s too late. It’ll come rushing out all at once.”
Shinobu is a liar. It does not come rushing out all at once. Yanfei buries her face in her hands, butt planted firmly on the toilet seat as fluids intermittently fall into the toilet bowl. The yellow kind stopped falling long ago.
“Yanfei,” Hu Tao croaks from the stall next to her. “The tofu got you too?” She flushes the toilet, but Yanfei knows that she won’t be getting up anytime soon.
Yanfei empties her own bowl. It soon fills up again to accommodate the recent group of refugees from her body. “It’s not the tofu,” she insists weakly, squeezing her eyes shut. “It’s never the tofu.” Tofu wouldn’t cause her physical pain to stand up. Tofu would embrace her and tell her everything’s okay, that her stomach isn’t the one cramping out and vomiting in the wrong direction, that the mouth on her other end isn’t retching gravy and spitting all over the bowl of chocolate soup.
“I thought plants couldn’t give you food poisoning!”
It doesn’t stop. A river is flowing through her body. She imagines all of the microbes going whitewater rafting to exit her system. Only the water is neither white nor water. And the raft has spikes on the outside, as if designed to cause her the most suffering possible. She grits her teeth. “Hu Tao.”
“Yeah?”
“Shut up.”
“Gotcha.”
Yanfei supposes she might be an avatar of sorts. Earth. Water. Air. The three elements lived together in harmony, expelling themselves one by one, until the Fire Nation attacked. Now there is nothing but pain and chaos. She wills it to stop.
Evidently she’s still an avatar-in-training, because the elements don’t obey her and continue to push past each other in a race to the finish line. Earth makes it first, but Air shoves right past it in a terrific blast of sound as Water tries to catch up.
The bathroom door opens. “Oh, god —” someone curses, and the bathroom door closes. She can’t blame them.
Yanfei loses track of time. Has it been five minutes? Twenty? An hour? The occasional sound of ripping toilet paper and toilet flushes breaks the monotony of collective discharge. She’s ascended to a higher plane, she feels. It’s freeing — until her stomach brings her back to reality with a cheerful mrrgle as if taunting her.
“Yanfei?” Yanfei doesn’t respond. “Do you have more toilet paper?”
There’s a second roll inside the compartment, but she’s already used up half of her current roll. “Yeah.”
“Can you…pass it over?”
Struggling to concentrate in her fevered state, Yanfei manages to unclasp the toilet paper roll holder with some effort. “I…can’t. Do you think you can —” she gasps as more of her temporary tenants evict themselves, “— get one from the next stall?” Where do they all come from? There never was this much space in the housing market in the first place.
“I can try.” Hu Tao doesn’t sound terribly enthused. “It…” she grunts, “it just doesn’t stop…” A beat later, the stall door beside Yanfei’s bursts open and she sees Hu Tao’s shoes shuffle over awkwardly to the opposite stall. Her heart fills with dread when she hears a drrbl in the midst of Hu Tao fiddling with the toilet paper mechanism. “No, no, no —”
The stall door beside Yanfei slams shut and Hu Tao gasps with relief when she throws herself back in the stall. She can’t even spare several seconds, Yanfei despairs. She’s going to be trapped here forever. Here, in this dungeon, against a dragon inside of her that constantly feels the urge to breathe fire.
She hangs her head, resigning herself to her fate.
Hu Tao supports Yanfei after they wash their hands — thoroughly — and pulls them out of the women’s bathroom. As they exit the bathroom together, Xingqiu stumbles out from the opposite door, eyes haunted. “I am never eating here ever again.”
“Xingqiu,” Hu Tao’s eyes well up with tears as she embraces him. “I understand. You’ve been through so much alone.”