The Christmas Eve experience

Do you know how much water is in a toilet bowl? I do.

         Last year on Christmas Eve my older sister and I were forced to go to ‘bed’ at nine. Neither of us liked this very much; after all we were 13 and 19 years old, and being told to go to bed so early was almost offensive, more to my older sister of course as she was 19 and a legal adult. But we went anyways, knowing that the reason we had been forced to go bed so early was so that my father and our mother could wrap presents.
         When we retreated up the stairs to my room, (my room is in the FROG, or finished room above garage) we obviously didn’t go to sleep, why would we? We just spent our time talking as we only did every so often when she was home from college. We can almost always find things to talk about, and when we can’t we are comfortable in the silence, (or music, if it’s playing) we don’t need to fill the stillness with noise to be at ease. 
         When we had gone up to my room we had just gone, we hadn’t prepared or anything. We both had un-brushed teeth, and hadn’t gone to the bathroom. This was fine for the few hours, but when we hadn’t gone to the bathroom in over ten hours then it started to be problematic. It started out innocently enough as a simple comment. “I have to use the bathroom.” I can’t remember who said it first whether it was her or I, but one of us started it. After this pronouncement the person who had not made the remark the first time agreed with “You know what? I do too.”
         The first time we went through that it wasn’t that urgent or anything, but when we got to about the third and really, really, had to go.  We decided that the time had come to ask my father and our mother if we could cross the house to use the only working bathroom. We retreated down the stairs and when we were in the laundry room we started yelling through the door.
         “We have to go to the bathroom!” We shouted.
         “Go later! Hold it!” My father yelled back.
         “Please, we really have to go!” We begged.
         “Use the bathroom over there!” He called back.
         There was a bathroom in the laundry room. Although the floor underneath it was rotten and every time you flush the toilet there was a chance of falling through the floor.
         “But it’s broken!” We protested.
         “Use it anyways!” He exclaimed.
         We looked and each other and shrugged; we really had to use the toilet.
         “You go first,” My sister said.
         “You sure?” I asked.
         “Yes,” She replied.
         So that’s just what I did. I used the bathroom, flushed the toilet, (carefully) quickly washed my hands and went up the stairs to tell my sister that she could now go. So she hurriedly went down the stairs to use the bathroom. I thought I would play a kinda trick on her. So I waited on the stair right above the door so that I could jump out at her went she came up.
         When I first looked at my watch one minute had already gone by; so I wasn’t expecting it to last much longer then that. So I waited some more, this time, three minutes had gone by. I had starting thinking, “Okay, this could take a while.”  and prepared for a seven or eight minute wait. The next time I looked at my watch, five minutes had gone by. Then ten minutes, thirteen minutes, fifteen minutes. By then I had started to worry. I wondered what the hell was wrong. So I decided to investigate.
         When I opened the door to the stairs the door to the bathroom was open. I was curious what was going on; she appeared to be franticly going back and forth from the sink to the toilet. When I asked her what she was doing she told me that there was no water in the toilet bowl and it could not flush. I found this very, very, very amusing, and it took me a while before I could decided what to do, because I had almost crumpled to the ground. I looked around and decided that however funny it would be if she had to do the whole thing herself with me just watching I would be nice and help.
         I looked all around the small bathroom that had turned into a kind of storage room over the time it had not been in use. I knew there had to be a container bigger then the laundry soap lid, which my sister was using to fill up the toilet bowl. After digging around for a little while I found a dehumidifier that we hadn’t used in ages. I decided that that was as good as anything and better then a cap for laundry soap. I put it under the still running sink and waited for it to fill; however this did take a while as every two seconds or so my sister filled up the little cap. While the dehumidifier was filling I looked into the toilet bowl.
         “I though you were filling up the toilet bowl, there’s hardly any water at all in here.” I said to my sister.
         “You know how long I’ve been doing this,” She said dumping in few more cups of water. “this toilet bowl is never going to be all the way full.”
The dehumidifier finally was full and I carried it to the almost empty toilet bowl and poured the water into it. I looked down and saw that the water level had not risen at all.
         “Oh man, if that didn’t make the water level rise I don’t know what will.” I said to my sister who looked over my shoulder and groaned
         After what seemed like a life time of hauling water. The water level appeared to rise, a little. This time had only been lighted by the occasional joke or conversation.
         We kept going because we had no choice. If felt like we had been doing it for an eternally and that our job was everlasting, but eventually it had ceased. Although the water was not to the water line, and came really close to not flushing, it did finally flush weakly.
         We were both exhausted when we were through and could barely drag ourselves up the stairs. When we looked at the alarm clock in my room we were amazed to find that only an hour and a half had passed by. The only thing we could do was sit/lie in our beds for a few more hours talking about the ‘adventure’ despite our tiredness.

         Sometime later at dinner the next day we brought it up to my father.
         “You know there’s no water in the toilet bowl?” My sister asked me father, while I tried hard not to fall out of my seat.
         “Yeah, I turned it off,” My father said conversationally.
         “Why would you do something like that?” My sister said in exasperation.
         “It’s easy to turn it back on; all you have to do is turn the lever underneath it.”
         “And why, did you not tell us last night?” I asked utterly confused.
         “Because I thought everyone knew that.”
         My sister and I exchanged glances and later decided that my father had caused us the trouble on purpose. Who would know something like that? And, after all, he didn’t even tell us that the water was off.
         Even now, almost a year later we still laugh and groan at the memory of filling a toilet bowl with water.

Word count: 1,287