There is a poet in my bathtub. I went to take a shower,

my first in three days, and found him there, gently

soaking in water perfumed with lavender oils, flicking

through Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. He said he had

been wandering over melancholic hills, composing a

sonnet to a starry-eyed maiden, when he fell through a

hole in the ground and landed in my bathtub. Suds

stuck to the walls. He seems to be staying. I went and

washed my armpits in the kitchen sink.

He’s not exactly an easy guest. He hums and splashes

the water of the bathtub when I’m napping. I try to pee

quietly while he reads out loud from the dictionary:

archetype, jettison, milquetoast… He says he wants to

test my spelling, but I wonder if he is losing his

vocabulary, if some of it got stuck in the fake lashes at

the hole’s edge, along with the monologue about the

maiden, and one of his socks. I offer to paint the

toenails of his bare foot, but he looks affronted: he needs

no such adornment. He tries to read to me and I say I

have to go to work. I don’t know where he gets these

books from, but more of them teeter around the edges

of the bathtub every day.

He likes Bridget Jones, Kerrang! magazine, and the

gospel of John before bed. He eats dark chocolate and

easy peelers, lets their traces shrivel around the edges

of his fingernails. I thought his skin would become

wrinkled from sitting in the tub, but his complexion is

perfect: clear like the world after rain. My cat refused

to go near him at first, but now she sits on the bathmat

and nibbles at his cuticles. I dig out my old film camera

and take a photograph of him looking at her, eyebrows

quirked in a question mark. If he’d taken one of me at

the same time, I’d be in the opposite corner. Spiders

crawling along the edge of the ceiling over my head.

Sometimes I set my laptop up on the toilet and we

watch Gossip Girl. I sit leaning against the edge of the

bathtub. Laughing. He says he’d like to go to New York

someday, I say me too. At times like this I’m not

tempted to quote Sartre to him. We get high at 2 a.m.

and he tries to explain the hole to me, how it seemed

huge and tiny at the same time, both open and closed.

He taps at the little capsule in my arm with his cold

fingernails. He says its bump under my skin makes him

shudder. It’s not inside you, I tell him. You don’t have

to worry about it. You wouldn’t understand, he says. I

stop rubbing my arm and listen.

The scent of lilacs surrounded its blackness. Up close

their rotting sweetness was eye-watering. The air

wavered around the edges of the hole like heat. I didn’t

want to touch, but it singed my eyelashes anyway, so I

cut a birch switch and poked around the edges. The

switch came out slimmer and whiter, like it had been

stripped of its bark. I crouched down to look in, I

overbalanced and toppled forwards. I don’t know what

I thought would be inside – hell, perhaps. Not this.

Candles waver in his sentimental eyes. I want to tell

him I can’t read him half the time. Whether he’s

pleading or contemptuous. Whether he’s scared or

angry at being stuck here, or just hungry. I want to say

that I didn’t choose for him to be here, and most of the

time I wish he wasn’t. How I never took baths before he

got here, and sometimes now I wish he was gone so I

can have a good long soak with a book, one that he’s

never read or even heard of. How I envy him his dark

curls and long eyelashes. How he makes me laugh

when I don’t want to. I think about holding his head

under the water, whether poems would catch in the

bubbles drifting from his lips.