Another pause, longer this time. “All of it.”

“No,” Kevin whispered.

“Mom, the toilet’s stopped up,” he said, his voice cracking.

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. Then, the sound of a heavy sigh. “I’ll be there in ten minutes. And son? For the love of God, open a window.”

The wire hanger was his last stand. He straightened it, took a deep breath, and plunged his arm into the abyss. The sensation was warm. And wrong. He fished around, trying to break up the monolithic deposit, but it was like trying to stab a stone with a toothpick.

“With what?” she asked, already knowing.

The old toilet in apartment 4B had seen a lot. It had weathered the curry nights of the ‘90s, the disastrous “flushable” wipes incident of 2008, and the time the neighbor’s cat fell in. But nothing—nothing—had prepared it for what happened on a humid Tuesday night in July.