It was there, on the cold bathroom tiles, completely out of place: silent, strange, and slightly disturbing.

 

It was wings, above the cold tiles of the bathroom, completely dislocated—silent, strange, and slightly disturbing.

My beloved, and we manage to stare at the eagle for much longer than we should, unable to explain why such a small, deformed mass was so strange to us. It looks like a moist organic mass, the kind of thing that shouldn’t be in a sleek, modern bathroom. The more we looked, the less we felt.

We consider all possible explanations, each time more disturbing than before. Um, parasite? Some kind of alien mofo? Something you have inside the walls? The more we speculated, the more the bathroom seems like a place where something has silently given way.

Even as we trembled and whispered, a part of us knew we were exaggerating, but the discomfort didn’t go away.

Two adults, completely baffled by a lack they couldn’t identify with anything. It was a foreign piece of what is fragile and can be our notion of normality when something disjointed appears in a place we thought we knew.