puzzle pieces

short story

I took a huge shit on Saturday morning, one that escaped the odor-reducing membrane of the bowl water in length and was also considerable in girth. Having forgotten to turn on the fan and also forgotten that Rachel was waking early that day and would presently need the bathroom, when she turned on her straightener, the smell was like a hot iron skewered through dirty diapers at low tide.

“Where are you going, getting ready so early?” I asked, my forgetfulness revealed through a mouth full of toothpaste, a toothbrush, and my own fecal particles.

“What do you mean? I told you, Jack won his game Thursday so they’re in the playoffs. I told Marissa I’d go. Since it’s close by at the dome over in Wilton...” She said in her annoyed tone, her eye wincing from the smell. Jack was her ten-year-old nephew who I knew cheated at every single game he ever played. I wondered how he managed to cheat at lacrosse and get in the playoffs.

“Oh, right,” I said, feigning remembrance as I spat into the sink.

“Sorry I won’t be able to visit your uncle with you,” she said, in her sincere tone this time, the tone I liked considerably more.

“Visit my uncle?”

“Yeah, I told your mom you’d visit Uncle Paul today? Honestly, do you retain anything I tell you?”

The crack of realization when you’ve double-booked yourself is unrewarding at best, self-immolating at worst. I did, at some point, know I was supposed to visit my Uncle Paul at the nursing home, where he was recovering from knee surgery. But between then and scheduling my next haircut appointment, this knowingness had dissolved into the vastness of my brain-ocean.

I had no choice but to concede defeat.

“Shit. I forgot and scheduled myself a haircut for this morning,” I admitted.

“Well, then. Do you get a haircut? Or visit your hurt, disabled uncle?” Rachel said, locking eyes with her beautiful self in the mirror as she toasted her hair into oblivion.

“Haircut?” I ventured meekly, but her superior moral compass would, of course, point me elsewhere.

“The nursing home is like, one of the most depressing places on earth, you know. Have fun.”

---

I drove down to the nursing home in the disassociated state that arrests me whenever I become dysregulated and thrust into unexpected situations.

It felt lately like life was continually under the assault of things and happenings somewhere between mundane and middling and major, and I was as ungrateful as I could be about them, as was usually the case come the holiday season. There was always some appointment, some obligation to friends or family, some task or reservation or order to place. What was life without these things?, the world seemed to ask, and as long as you didn’t know the answer, it would continue to keep you busy with them until you died.

Surely I could forgive myself for double-booking amongst this myriad of happenings?

Now I would have to get my haircut some day next week, and I’d have to take time off work to do it. We had an ugly sweater party with friends the next weekend as well as a gathering with extended family, both of which would involve pictures being taken. Somehow I had reached a point in life where I expected to always be expertly coiffed in some ridiculous sixty-dollar haircut I needed every month just to feel okay about myself.

And what was it I had to do later that day? Gifts, maybe one for my young nephew Jack? Dinner with my parents? Or was it Rachel’s parents? Plus, we had that hot yoga lesson that was supposed to help with my bum hamstrings. It was all so frustratingly cloistered and overwhelming.

I had to slam on the brakes to avoid running a red light.

---

The nursing home looked like the world’s least secure prison. A sign on each sliding door read ‘ABSOLUTELY NO GUNS OR WEAPONS ALLOWED’, which seemed like an obvious rule but implied previous issues. I think I was supposed to sign in at the front desk, but in my mindless daze, I walked straight by and no one stopped me nor seemed to care. It smelled like stale butts and menthol and it was about a thousand degrees inside.

Seeing my Uncle Paul presented no issue or annoyance for me other than a nostalgic melancholy for youth gone by, like visiting a rusted old playground or playing an N64 with a broken controller. My Uncle Paul, autistic as he was, remained essentially unchanged in all the years I knew him, especially since he moved out of my parent’s garage and into his group home. He even mostly looked the same, except now he was bald. His only desires in life remained eating, watching the Game Show Network, completing puzzles, or, ideally, all three at the same time.

My mother had texted me the room number, and there I found my uncle in his wheelchair beside his bed, an enormous, mostly incomplete 1000-piece puzzle on the table tray before him. The muted television in the corner playing Wheel of Fortune was bigger than the one I had in my room at home.

He must have thought he died during his knee operation and went to heaven.

“Hey, Uncle Paul!” I said, breaking what looked like deep concentration. He shuddered in surprise and alarm as I wrapped my arm around him, but then laughed and leaned into the warmth of my armpit. I rubbed the fuzzy hairs remaining on his head, an inside joke from when he had it all lopped off.

“Heyyyy,” he said in the way he always did, like Fonzie from Happy Days.

“How’s your knee?” I asked.

“Wha?”

“How is your knee!”

“Huh?” He cupped his ear. I came around the other side of him to yell in his good ear.

“HOW IS YOUR KNEE?”

He gave me his Fonzie-like thumbs-up. “Good. Don’t hurt,” he said. “They let me go home soon.”

“Oh yeah? Your friends at the home can’t wait to have you back, I bet.”

“Yeah, oh yeah. They come visit me. Bring the dog,” he said, gesturing with a petting motion. I gave him a thumbs up of my own.

We talked a bit, to the extent that he and I could carry on a conversation. He twice suckered me into getting him something from the vending machine, first a Fanta and some Doritos, then a Snickers bar, then asked again, and I had to deny him on the grounds that it was too close to lunchtime, which he accepted with his usual smile and dismissive hand wave.

how is he?—my mom texted.

happy as a clam, like usual—I replied.

I decided to forgo my phone for a while and focus on the puzzle with him. It was a Norman Rockwell painting, the one of the family at the table for Thanksgiving. He had only managed to piece together a couple of the edges. I found it useful to declutter the table of all his previous snacks so that we could dump more of the pieces out of the box and sort them right-side-up. Our conversation petered out, and together we sorted and re-sorted prospective border pieces with an efficiency that sent me into a thoughtless meditation.

After we had completed one of the corners, a fat orderly with big ear gauges who smelled like weed came in.

“I love this dude,” he said, nodding to my uncle as he dropped off some laundry into a cupboard.

“Hey, uh, I was wondering—should I help him up to go to the bathroom? Or is that something you do?” I asked. I’d never been with my Uncle at a nursing home, and this concern crept up as I watched him drink his entire Fanta in less than ten minutes.

“Oh, I don’t help do that, you gotta get one of the nurses or whoever,” the orderly said. “Honestly, though, he’s probably wearing a diaper. They come in every couple of hours to change ‘em...if you’re lucky.”

“Wouldn’t that leave them susceptible to like, UTIs? If they didn’t?” I asked. The guy shrugged as he wheeled out his laundry bin.

“UTIs are like assholes here, everyone’s got ‘em,” he said as he walked away.

I sat in shame of my naivety as my Uncle Paul belched loudly and excused himself, a trademarked Uncle Paul move. It grounded me, and we got back to the puzzle.

It started imperceptibly, a twitch of the nostril, a scalding of the nose hairs, like the moon dragging the tide along the beach, until it hit me with a wave of stench. I looked up to see Uncle Paul with a satisfied look of finished exertion.

“Hey Paulie,” I said, shooting up, eying a package of adult diapers on the windowsill that I hadn’t noticed before. “I think we gotta head to the bathroom, bud.”

---

“How was it?” Rachel asked me over the phone on the drive home. She’d called to remind me that I had agreed to buy my father one of those AI birdhouses that took pictures of the birds or whatever for Christmas.

“Depressing, like you said. Fucking a million degrees in there, too. Uncle Paul’s good though, seems fine.”

“Aw, good I love your Uncle Paul, I’ll come see him next time. We’re still going to yoga later, right?” She asked.

“Actually, I think I’ll pass,” I said.

“But remember, didn’t we discuss how this would be good for you? For your hamstrings? Because every time you hurt your hamstrings, you don’t work out, and then you’re miserable.”

“Yes but...it’s just that...well, I still need to get my haircut, after all,” I explained, and she accepted this.

When I got home, I dug out our old electric clipper we bought during the pandemic and shaved myself bald.

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thanks for reading this story about shaving your head. even if you didn’t like it, maybe click the little heart button so that people who might will find it.

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BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS:

Do you think the story critiques modern life’s endless errands, or is it simply capturing a moment in time?

What does the story suggest about the tension between individual desires and social responsibilities?

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thanks for reading PNP, where we love puzzles and the Game Show Network. if you liked this story, you might also like my novel, the big T, posted here on Substack:

the big T