One.

He felt like a housewife, albeit with the motivation of a college sophomore to act on his more maternal instincts. An army of empty bottles, cans and compacted fast food takeout bags, what's left of their once precious combo cargo left to decay within, surrounded him on all sides as he sat in a near-ancient brown sofa-chair, upholstered a shade of god-awful brown that only sold during that wonderful moment in time between the fall of Nixon and the rise of Reagan when everyone wore tight pants and powdered their noses before even sitting on the can. From behind, the windowless bathroom sucked in all light and matter and hope, while slowly bleeding a smell that crept up your spine, got in behind the back of your eyes, and did something pretty un-Christian to your olfactories.

It was Suez. It was Ulster. It was Basra and Chechnya and the West Bank in once porcelain white, now a sickly greenish-yellow. Showering was only bearable once the steam clogged his nose, and the water was hot enough to burn even the dirtiest of nights off his body, let alone whatever monstrous bacterial miscreants made the small room home. A ring wound its way around the tub just above his feet as he stood in the bath, the result not of oddly intimate evenings with candlelight, candy and oils of many varieties, but a condition of the clog somewhere down the drain that meant for every minute under the warm water, his feet were submerged another centimeter under the collecting cloudy murk.

The toilet didn't flush. At least not proper-wise. At some point over the year, it had made a secret pact with the bowels of the house to only fully evacuate when something solid could be found. The typical soup that thusly resided most of the day in the bowl, which was promised to have been repaired months ago, was quite recognizably the origin of much of the room's unruly character.

The responsibilities of a Roommate... whose appearances seemed less and less frequent since the fall, when, tired of having to be awake for the arguably early hour of 3:30 pm, dropped out of the one class it was known to be taking, to master the lost ancient art of morbid obesity and tragic lethargy. How he loathed the Roommate. Although many would find themselves in the terribly cliche position of sharing room and board with the unethical and unapologetic, with the same stories of fighting over missing frozen pizzas and having friends over far too late into the night that everyone else had from living in student housing, he found himself in an inexplicably more bizarre situation, locked into an 8 month contract with the Immovable Object, one of the 7 Great Legends of the Undergraduate World. Aside from a back corner of the apartment where it spent much of it's time snoring anemically and the washroom thats doors were strung with police-caution tape for a very good reason, the rest of the apartment remained untouched personally by it's corruption.

He had force fed it an apple once, long ago.
The core quite possibly still sat rotting in It's room somewhere, behind the curiously horded garbage and copies of "Tom Clancy" novellas.
He could clean Its mess himself, he knew. In less than a day of intensive cleaning, assisted only with a full bottle of industrial cleaner and a complete selection of preventative shots for rabies and syphilis, he could turn the whole place around. But the nightmare of the toilet always stopped him short in his tracks. The toilet had been Its job, Its one job, and it had gone worse than Shelly Bryants last Halloween party (which, in all fairness, wasn't that bad once the rioters got it into their heads to reenact the last 30 minutes of Do The Right Thing).
No matter how pine fresh and spring clean the rest of the apartment became, the washroom's toxicity would simply overpower the newfound balance in a matter of days.
If he was going to feel like a housewife, he thought, then he had better start drinking like a housewife.

...

Some people and places are based on real folks and spaces, but every character is a little bit of truth, and a hell of a lot of fiction.

Cheers,
Michael Alexander