The waterdrops landed on the toilet paper in your hand... You wonder if it's only a coincidence.
It's evening during the rainy season. It's drizzling outside. It's possible the raindrops traveling through the ceiling happened to fall on you. That idea sounds more reasonable. There is no reason to obsess about teardrops falling from a face floating above the door. You just had a passing image of a woman's face in your head. Either way, you can look up to easily verify it.
However, the more conscious you become about the motion of looking up, the clearer the blurry image in your head becomes, forming a figure, and the outline of the face floating above the door, in the space between the door and the ceiling, becomes visible. Indented eye sockets hold deep darkness while the face itself is pale. It seems the face is not watching anything in particular but keeping the whole stall in sight.
The face watches you. It's strange you can visualize every detail of its unique expression in your head. I've seen that face before ... Does it belong to someone I know buried deep within my memory?
All you have to do is to look up. You don't need to hesitate. You realize somewhere in your heart this is just your imagination. Look up, see nothing is there, laugh at your own silliness, and leave the toilet. These are the things you should do and while you understand that, you remain unable to move.
It's been a few minutes since you arrived but it feels like the time passed has been much longer. The compressed time brings a suffocating feeling. Entangled in your own net. You become angry with yourself for being obsessed with a delusion and for freezing in place.
At that moment out of nowhere you hear the buzzing sound of a mosquito as if to make a mockery of your irritation. The sound travels along your neck; reaches the back of your head, and makes you feel as if it could touch your skin at any moment. On reflex, you slap the back of your neck with your right hand. In reaction your head tilts back and from the corner of your eye you see a strange object above and to the left.
Once you see it, you can't take your eyes off it. To figure out the identity of the object, you focus on it.
It sits balanced on a T-shaped corner formed by the divider between stalls and the wall of the door.
You hold your breath and stop thinking. Until you understand what you are looking at, you are neither surprised nor frightened. Despite your refusal to look up and the feeling of entanglement in your own net, which you struggled with just seconds ago, you squint your eyes and focus on the object to determine what it is.
What it is? What's been placed up there?
The moment you lift yourself and your bottom leaves the toilet seat, you find out what it is.
A roll of toilet paper?
That makes sense. When you caught a glimpse of it in the beginning you didn't find it frightening or odd since it wasn't out of place in a toilet. People fear objects in an unsuitable place, whatever the object is.
There is nothing unusual about a roll of toilet paper in a toilet.
It's just odd that the roll is placed in such a high spot and out of reach as you sit down. Besides, the cylindrical roll is wrapped in a black package, which you've never seen before. Is it some kind of a prank? Look to the right, look to the left, and look up. With all those instructions just to show this at the end, what does it mean?
You swallow tightly. It appears the package has a picture on it. You may need to move slightly to the right to see and distinguish the picture.
This time you don't hesitate. As you keep your body raised above the seat, you twist your upper torso, move your neck around, and end up peeking at the roll from below. The whole picture comes into view for the first time.
The pale face of a woman floating on a black background, deep eye sockets, appearing to connect to the darkness inside, tears falling down the cheeks... Every single feature drawn there is exactly as you imagined.
With a short scream coming up your throat, you lose your balance, hit your shoulder on the door, and shake the wall.
With the jostling; the toilet roll falls down, rolling the face towards you. You accidentally catch the face with your both hands open and bounce back down onto the toilet seat. You end up sitting down helplessly and embracing the roll. Far from its soft papery touch, the roll has heaviness of a human head, looks real and releases a familiar scent.
As your consciousness faded, you remember the source of the smell. The scent of the hair fragrance you started using recently...
