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Description
I was three when the man in the sink started crying.
He wasn't a man then, of course. He was still a baby. Or he was my age, it was close enough. You have to understand, this sink isn't big enough to fit a man or a baby, so when he started crying, it was surprising. He's in my grandmother's house, the one that's been in the family for...however many years. My grandmother says there was a cricket in the sink when she was a child, and my mother heard the squeaking of a rat.
This sink, it's as old as the house. It's stained with the nasty mineral water that comes from a shallow well, and it smells just off enough that you notice it, and your hair clumps together and never is really clean. It stains everything brown, and when you boil water there's mineral deposits on the pot.

***

We started to feed the baby in the sink. We imagined it being like a cartoon, stretched out to some insane degree, the mouth making the drain, lips puckered playfully. This theory was confirmed for us when the baby started teething and white slowly made its way around the drain. We brushed the baby's teeth too. We started feeding it everything we ate, cutting everything up, one of us sitting on the sink feeding him one piece at a time. We wash it down with the cruddy well water, cooing There there, isn't that better? We give the baby everything. Christmas presents stacked around the S-bend and we talk loudly on Christmas morning. What a lovely bib! The baby will love this! The baby still cries though. Incessantly. My grandmother says it's growing pains.

***

The baby in the sink grows up with me. The baby learns how to talk, and he's homeschooled like us. My mother will sit on the sink, and all of the kids sit on the cold tile, with tree rings of brown all over, and we're staring at my mother's reflection, which is slightly brown from when you brush your teeth and flecks of water and toothpaste and plaque fly onto the mirror. The baby in the sink starts talking, but never like I talk. The baby is always screaming, crying, complaining. I hate all of you, I hate this, get me out! The baby screams all of this, and his voice sounds metallic and echoey in the bathroom and because of the fact that the baby is in a lead pipe.

***

The baby's voice changes with mine. When I leave home, the baby doesn't. When I inherit the house, the baby is still there. The baby is a man now, and he still cries. Men don't cry, I tell him when I shave in the morning. So stop. The man still cries, boo-hooing all day. I imagine the tips of his toes wiggling in the bigger pipe, feeling the freedom of a 6 inch pipe, and the endless hoping and trying. The man is trying to move backwards, I realize. The man is trying to get out.

***

My kid's kids, they find the man in that 6 inch pipe under the house, still crying, saying It's dark down here, not at all what I imagined it to be. And they say Just a little while longer, and you'll make it to the septic tank and then we'll open it and you can get out. I'm old now, so I can't go under there easily. The man in the sink is old too, and he realizes this, and he says I'll be dead before I make it there. And my kid's kids go We'll tap on the septic tank. You can hear how close it is. And this makes the man happy for a little bit.

***

And then one day I'm in bed sleeping, or trying to, and my kid's kids come in now, and they're so big, and they say The man in the sink is gone! We can't hear him anymore. And they say the septic tank man is coming and we'll get to the bottom of this. And I say that's nice, and I get out of bed and finally, finally, cut off that lead pipe, and it falls to the ground with a bang and some of the tree ringed tile is cracked, and the pipe spills out brown water and 80 year old carrots and food and hair and baby teeth. And I say Huh, so there really was something in there. And I put my eye in the hole in the wall where the pipe went, imagining that I'll see an open mouth, and I'll breathe the man in the sink's air and we'll share something finally, and I put my eye up to that hole and everything's dark for a while, and my glassy eye is trying to see something, anything. And I see this glint, and I move away from the wall and my grandfather's glass eye falls out onto the tile, and this marble looking eye cracks. Underneath the dark paint of the pupil is white.
I stand up slowly at the point, and the hole belches once again and more waters comes out, along with browned and soaked papers: 70 year old spelling tests, letters from my mother to the man in the sink, the deed to the house.

***

I hobble outside to the septic tank man, who is leaning against this shovel in some suave pose, and we both nod solemnly and he starts digging. There's this sense of urgency in the air, which I know shouldn't be there. And after a while, there's this big red crater in the earth, revealing this septic tank. The septic tank man pries the lid off and we both reel back from the stench. He pumps the septic tank, and I climb into the muck, finding bits and pieces of my childhood too. I stand up fully, and right at eye level is this pipe where everything comes from. And sticking out of this pipe is this toe.
The nail is long and uncut and yellow, and there's the coarse white big toe hairs on it. I feel this toe, and begin to pull. The man in the sink starts laughing now. And I'm pulling and pulling with the septic tank man helping me, and, once again, like some cartoon comes a foot with the same coarse white hairs. And we expect, of course, a naked leg, a naked body, a naked man in the sink, but we find black slacks. We keep pulling, and more of the man comes out.

***

The man in the sink is dressed in his Sunday best. His tie is outdated, and his shirt is dirty. He's huffing and puffing, breathing air. He says between gasps This isn't. What it's supposed to be. It's. Dry. And I smile and ask Well, what did you expect? And the man in the sink just smiles, because we both know that he didn't know.

***

We pick the man in the sink up, and he weighs quite a bit. And at this moment, I think about what's happening. I wonder why there's been a man in the sink. I wonder if he's my brother or twin or guardian angel. And I wonder all of this, and I have no time to ask him. We hoist him out of the septic tank, and put him on the dry red ground and he looks around, soaking all of this in, still gasping for breath, and trying to say so many things at once that they don't sound profound at all. So. Big. And I say, Well, you certainly didn't expect this, did you? And I like to think that maybe he expected a 14-inch PVC pipe, but I know the man in the sink too well to believe that. We're hoisting the man to the well, and he probably knows this too. And we hoist him up like he's Lazarus or something, and my kid's kid shove off the old millstone that covers the top of the well, and down he goes. There's no satisfying splash, no receding scream. Nothing. The man in the sink goes into the well like some fairy tale character, and for a while, we all stand around the hole waiting for him to say something: Thank you for restoring me! Thank you for broadening my horizons! Bless you forever! I lift the curse off of your house! But we don't hear anything. We shove the stone over the top of the well, closing it off to everything but a tiny speck of light and atmosphere that comes from a hole in the middle of the millstone. It's what the man in the sink is used to.

Description
I was three when the man in the sink started crying.
He wasn't a man then, of course. He was still a baby. Or he was my age, it was close enough. You have to understand, this sink isn't big enough to fit a man or a baby, so when he started crying, it was surprising. He's in my grandmother's house, the one that's been in the family for...however many years. My grandmother says there was a cricket in the sink when she was a child, and my mother heard the squeaking of a rat.
This sink, it's as old as the house. It's stained with the nasty mineral water that comes from a shallow well, and it smells just off enough that you notice it, and your hair clumps together and never is really clean. It stains everything brown, and when you boil water there's mineral deposits on the pot.

***

We started to feed the baby in the sink. We imagined it being like a cartoon, stretched out to some insane degree, the mouth making the drain, lips puckered playfully. This theory was confirmed for us when the baby started teething and white slowly made its way around the drain. We brushed the baby's teeth too. We started feeding it everything we ate, cutting everything up, one of us sitting on the sink feeding him one piece at a time. We wash it down with the cruddy well water, cooing There there, isn't that better? We give the baby everything. Christmas presents stacked around the S-bend and we talk loudly on Christmas morning. What a lovely bib! The baby will love this! The baby still cries though. Incessantly. My grandmother says it's growing pains.

***

The baby in the sink grows up with me. The baby learns how to talk, and he's homeschooled like us. My mother will sit on the sink, and all of the kids sit on the cold tile, with tree rings of brown all over, and we're staring at my mother's reflection, which is slightly brown from when you brush your teeth and flecks of water and toothpaste and plaque fly onto the mirror. The baby in the sink starts talking, but never like I talk. The baby is always screaming, crying, complaining. I hate all of you, I hate this, get me out! The baby screams all of this, and his voice sounds metallic and echoey in the bathroom and because of the fact that the baby is in a lead pipe.

***

The baby's voice changes with mine. When I leave home, the baby doesn't. When I inherit the house, the baby is still there. The baby is a man now, and he still cries. Men don't cry, I tell him when I shave in the morning. So stop. The man still cries, boo-hooing all day. I imagine the tips of his toes wiggling in the bigger pipe, feeling the freedom of a 6 inch pipe, and the endless hoping and trying. The man is trying to move backwards, I realize. The man is trying to get out.

***

My kid's kids, they find the man in that 6 inch pipe under the house, still crying, saying It's dark down here, not at all what I imagined it to be. And they say Just a little while longer, and you'll make it to the septic tank and then we'll open it and you can get out. I'm old now, so I can't go under there easily. The man in the sink is old too, and he realizes this, and he says I'll be dead before I make it there. And my kid's kids go We'll tap on the septic tank. You can hear how close it is. And this makes the man happy for a little bit.

***

And then one day I'm in bed sleeping, or trying to, and my kid's kids come in now, and they're so big, and they say The man in the sink is gone! We can't hear him anymore. And they say the septic tank man is coming and we'll get to the bottom of this. And I say that's nice, and I get out of bed and finally, finally, cut off that lead pipe, and it falls to the ground with a bang and some of the tree ringed tile is cracked, and the pipe spills out brown water and 80 year old carrots and food and hair and baby teeth. And I say Huh, so there really was something in there. And I put my eye in the hole in the wall where the pipe went, imagining that I'll see an open mouth, and I'll breathe the man in the sink's air and we'll share something finally, and I put my eye up to that hole and everything's dark for a while, and my glassy eye is trying to see something, anything. And I see this glint, and I move away from the wall and my grandfather's glass eye falls out onto the tile, and this marble looking eye cracks. Underneath the dark paint of the pupil is white.
I stand up slowly at the point, and the hole belches once again and more waters comes out, along with browned and soaked papers: 70 year old spelling tests, letters from my mother to the man in the sink, the deed to the house.

***

I hobble outside to the septic tank man, who is leaning against this shovel in some suave pose, and we both nod solemnly and he starts digging. There's this sense of urgency in the air, which I know shouldn't be there. And after a while, there's this big red crater in the earth, revealing this septic tank. The septic tank man pries the lid off and we both reel back from the stench. He pumps the septic tank, and I climb into the muck, finding bits and pieces of my childhood too. I stand up fully, and right at eye level is this pipe where everything comes from. And sticking out of this pipe is this toe.
The nail is long and uncut and yellow, and there's the coarse white big toe hairs on it. I feel this toe, and begin to pull. The man in the sink starts laughing now. And I'm pulling and pulling with the septic tank man helping me, and, once again, like some cartoon comes a foot with the same coarse white hairs. And we expect, of course, a naked leg, a naked body, a naked man in the sink, but we find black slacks. We keep pulling, and more of the man comes out.

***

The man in the sink is dressed in his Sunday best. His tie is outdated, and his shirt is dirty. He's huffing and puffing, breathing air. He says between gasps This isn't. What it's supposed to be. It's. Dry. And I smile and ask Well, what did you expect? And the man in the sink just smiles, because we both know that he didn't know.

***

We pick the man in the sink up, and he weighs quite a bit. And at this moment, I think about what's happening. I wonder why there's been a man in the sink. I wonder if he's my brother or twin or guardian angel. And I wonder all of this, and I have no time to ask him. We hoist him out of the septic tank, and put him on the dry red ground and he looks around, soaking all of this in, still gasping for breath, and trying to say so many things at once that they don't sound profound at all. So. Big. And I say, Well, you certainly didn't expect this, did you? And I like to think that maybe he expected a 14-inch PVC pipe, but I know the man in the sink too well to believe that. We're hoisting the man to the well, and he probably knows this too. And we hoist him up like he's Lazarus or something, and my kid's kid shove off the old millstone that covers the top of the well, and down he goes. There's no satisfying splash, no receding scream. Nothing. The man in the sink goes into the well like some fairy tale character, and for a while, we all stand around the hole waiting for him to say something: Thank you for restoring me! Thank you for broadening my horizons! Bless you forever! I lift the curse off of your house! But we don't hear anything. We shove the stone over the top of the well, closing it off to everything but a tiny speck of light and atmosphere that comes from a hole in the middle of the millstone. It's what the man in the sink is used to.