HE WAS HAVING TROUBLE WITH THE TOILET in the smaller bathroom upstairs. There was a larger bathroom upstairs but he wasn't having trouble with that. In the smaller bathroom, the toilet wouldn't shut off and the water kept running. He didn't know much about toilets but he figured if he mucked around with it, he might be able to figure it out without having to call in a plumber, having to pay him or her all that money that they didn't really have.

Taking the lid off the top of the toilet, he looked in. He sat down on the side of the tub, staring as the water in the tank rose and a small stream of water poured through a plastic pipe down into a larger pipe. The water rose until it stopped rising but for some reason the water kept running from the little pipe into the larger pipe. This all seemed attached to a black float that was connected to a piece of wire. He pushed the float up and the water flow shut off.

He flushed the toilet again and left the bathroom, going downstairs into the living room. His wife wasn't there. On the side table next to her chair was a wine glass about half full of red wine that wasn't really red but more of a dark purple. He didn't know anything about wine. He had stopped drinking two years ago when he couldn't get the burning sensation in his chest to stop. Three dead fruit flies floated in her wine glass and he picked it up and carried it into the kitchen where he poured it into the sink, the purple blanching the metal of the basin its pale color.

The water was still running from the upstairs toilet. He could hear it. Running down the pipe that also carried the wastes out of the back bathroom that was right next to the kitchen. He stopped and listened, hoping that it would shut off by itself this time. He didn't know how long it would take. He knew the toilet once shut off on its own after a few minutes but it had already been a few minutes.

He cleaned up the plates that were in the sink and put them in the dishwasher. The dishwasher was old and made a wheezing sound as it washed but it mostly worked. Often there were still crumbs on the plates when it was finished but the plates were almost clean. She had several wine glasses sitting next to the sink, two empty, two with wine still left in them. He didn't know if she had planned to go back to them or not so he poured them out into the sink. Behind the glasses were several corks from various wine bottles that she had opened in the past week. One cork was still threaded on an opener that looked like a Boy Scout knife. Through the back door she came in, her lips purple, and walked past him to get a new bottle of wine off the counter. "You going to come out?" she asked. He nodded. She quietly walked by and disappeared outside.

He walked up the stairs and took the back off the toilet. The water was still running and he moved the float up and stopped it. What he didn't know was that the float was adjustable. All he had to do was pinch the metal clip that ran along the thin wire alongside the side of the float and pull it down. He had tried to do something with the metal clip a few days ago but he couldn't get it to work. He couldn't get it to move so he thought that either it didn't move or it was broken. He didn't know any better. He didn't understand it.

From outside he could hear shrieks of laughter. She was drunk again. She had been in the kitchen, cooking for her three friends from work who had come over and were now in the backyard, talking loudly. On the marble counters in their small kitchen were the dirty dishes heaped on top of each other that he would have to clean up because she would go straight to bed. Remnants of soiled saucepans and burnt skillets, pieces of fleshy potato and limp spinach salad.

He took a used cork and jammed it onto the metal part of the float to help. But that wasn't the answer. He wasn't sure if this thing was broken because of something he did or if that's just the way it was. No matter what, the damn thing kept running and running and running, and he watched the water flowing into the little pipe, the toilet filling up endlessly, and he knew he wouldn't be able to set this right again.


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