IT’S A WONDERFUL DEATH / spider hacksaw / ©2013
IT’S A WONDERFUL DEATH ©
story series by spider hacksaw
Young Franzy Milton, a nine year old boy in third class, traveling to America with his family, got up and went to the public lavatory shortly before midnight. He only had to pee. He yawned and stared distrustfully through the crevice of his limp eyelids at the crapper before him.
Franzy had heard of these fancy new outhouses built indoors, but until this time, he’d not had to use one. He liked the idea, but was still a little uneasy about using something that he was so unfamiliar with. The whole thing was a bit too posh for his liking. It made him anxious. He’d been told some spooky stories about them. How they could blowup inside and return people’s piss and poo to them. Especially if someone was to unload too much dinner in them all at once.
His friend, Chauncey Parker, back in England, had told him that he’d seen it happen once at his wealthy Uncle’s place in Wolverhampton. He called it “overflowing” or “flowing-over”. Franzy did not like the sound of this, nor the idea of it happening. Something so fiendish could never occur with an outhouse, his father had stated. And Chauncey had said the new indoor crappers were fine to whiz in, but you shouldn’t crap in them. A good old outhouse was best if you had to do the number two. They had laughed at this little poem about poo, as nine year old boys do.
When Franzy flushed the toilet. There was a jolt that almost knocked him down, and a horrible sound that carried upward from somewhere deep inside the bones of the structure that was transporting him and his family toward a wonderful life in a city called New York. The vibration echoed up from the porcelain hole into which he had just urinated, with a rumble and a gurgle that made Franzy think of a haunted ghost, growling. The dark porcelain hole sucked air and then seemed to belch as the bowl began to quickly fill up with water.
Before he even realized that it was happening, Franzy felt the cold wetness crawling onto his bare feet, as he stood there, transfixed in terror at the sight of the crapper water spilling over the sides of the bowl and onto the floor. His heart immediately began to thump and thunder in his chest.
“I only peed,” he whispered, and crossed himself, as if this might help. But the water kept coming. Because it did not care. And all he could do was turn and run.
Franzy hurried back to his family and crawled into his bed alongside his brother. He would simply go to sleep and never say a thing about it. He would never mention his trip to the lavatory. No one would ever know that it was him that had broke and overflowed the indoor outhouse.
It was 12:47 on Sunday, April 14th, 1912. Within two hours and thirty minutes, Franzy, his whole family, and hundreds of other people would be dead.
In the chaos and the commotion that followed, Franzy never got to confess to any living being what he had done. He died, thinking that he had caused the sinking of the great ship known as the Titanic.
Only god heard his distraught filled whispers, drowned out by the screams of people and the roar of angry cold black water, as it swallowed everything.
“I only peed,” Franzy whispered. “I only peed. I only peed. I only peed.”
© by spider hacksaw / 2013
spider hacksaw eats & is eaten 
Leave a Reply