For all his promises, it had continued, the toilet running on for weeks, flushing itself at regular intervals, a gushing vortex, a gurgling refill, followed by a brief hiatus during which a persistent trickle echoed through the dank walls, before it all began again and inevitably made me have to pee midway through whatever task might be at hand so that I could complete nothing in a straight line, my accomplishments few, my complaints many, my requests meeting with myriad excuses until the situation grew dire, the toilet flushing with greater frequency and vigor and thus deemed worthy of his attention and a trip to the garage where he unearthed his toolbox from the morass of odds and ends, and lugged it purposefully upstairs to the bathroom, my hopes rising as I watched him extract his tools, inspect each in turn and lay it on the floor beside the others like an offering or a dowry to prove his worth, whether suited to the task or not, wrenches and ratchets, pliers, hammers, saws, of every make and model, some oddly shaped things for which I had no name, with purposes beyond my grasp, and I suspect, his as well, most pristine with disuse yet impressive all the same, especially the headlamp he’d acquired for emergencies, floods and earthquakes and the like, none of which had happened and likely never would, so he took this opportunity to affix the bulbous protrusion to his deeply furrowed brow, its bright intensity equal to his demeanor, serious as any surgeon as he removed the lid from the toilet tank to peer inside before plunging a hand into the water with a great splash, an awful clanking and a small flood and, with a flourish, one by one removed the entrails, gaskets, gizmos, and thingamajigs in assorted shapes and sizes, only to sit back at last, with a prolonged and heavy sigh, to announce he needed something more, a special tool or piece of some kind requiring further research, likely an expedition to the hardware store as well and, with that, pieced back together what he was able, slapped his hands together, as if to declare the operation a success, rose from the sodden mess and departed, his trove of tools and remaining toilet innards steeped in a pool of water on the bathroom floor, and, for all his many promises of return and efforts to repair, the toilet continues as it had been, running on and on forever more.