One day I found a soap I didn’t know in the wall groove of my shower stall. It was blue and white in a marble pattern, it was not mine, and I had not had any visitors that I knew of. It wasn’t there the night before. I would have noticed. No?

I was afraid to pick it up in case there were hairs on the bottom or in case the bottom was soft and slimy. So I didn’t. I leaned in close to stare at it, holding my breath as if it were a dead animal or my own stool I was studying in the toilet bowl for signs of anything unusual or signs that I might be dying sooner than expected.

Then I remembered it was okay to breathe. It’s only soap. I opened my mouth and let out the air I had held back and took in new air through my nose carrying the scent of the soap. It smelled like one of those unscented soaps. The scent of un-scent.

The soap was whole and bean shaped, facing right side up, the side where the logo should be. But there was no logo. The top of the soap was smooth, wet, glistening, and unmarked. The soap looked new so the logo shouldn’t have been dissolved. I wondered if this soap was unusual in that the logo was on the concave side of the bean, though checking would have required me to pick up the soap. I wasn’t ready to do that.

Instead, to kill time but also because you never know, I tried to read the blue and white marbled pattern of the soap, if the logo was embedded in that. Maybe it was one of those unique soaps. But the marbling was random, as it would be on true marble.

It was time to pick up the soap. There was no way around it. I could never leave some strangely-appearing unknown soap in my shower soap groove indefinitely. I supposed if I left it there, unless it disappeared as quickly and mysteriously as it had appeared, it would eventually dissolve from all the water splashing on it from my showers without my having to touch it. I would have to ask overnight guests to please not use it, but I couldn’t trust them to respect my wishes. And you can’t really tell if a soap has been used once because it doesn’t change shape from just one use. Unless you drop it. Then the damage is irreversible. Same if you dig your nail into it by accident or leave hairs on the surface. Pubic, most likely, although you’re not supposed to use soap down there on your genitals, if you’re female, that is. I don’t know about males, and it’s most likely to be a male who would not respect your wishes. Right? But would he care to cover his tracks so much that he’d go to the trouble of carefully pinching out with the edges of his short fingernails the pubic hairs he’d transferred onto your blue and white marble unscented-scent soap? He might be that kind of male. Careless about your wishes but careful to hide evidence that he ignored them.

That all may be so, but that was not a problem I was going to have because I didn’t know any kind of male who would become an overnight guest. But, never say never. Sometimes I fantasized about making some unfortunate’s day by asking him if he’d like to be my overnight guest, just for one night. He could have a bath, a shave, a good meal and a good sleep. But what if he refused to leave or killed me in my sleep or robbed me before leaving or robbed me while I slept and then left before morning.

Forgetting his soap. Ha ha.

No, my only overnight guests would be female, and I didn’t know any female anywhere who would use an opened bar of soap on her body, especially her genitals. Not me anyway. I only use water, or shampoo if it feels or smells like it needs it because of blood or accumulated oils and sweat and mucus and discharges.

Bottom line is, I didn’t want to leave the soap there. I had to pick it up and look at the underside. In my mind I quickly ran through a list of what I could pick it up with. Layers upon layers of toilet paper? A towel? A plastic bag used as a glove? Housecleaning gloves? A fork? Salad tongs? Whatever I used, I would have to throw away. I could run out to the dollar store and get one of these items, either to use or to replace the one of my own that I would have used and then had to throw away.

If I used my own, I wouldn’t have to go out right away, I could replace it later. I didn’t have to do anything at all right then.

I could do what I came in there to do. Brush, wash, release, the usual morning routine.

Shower, eventually.

Every day, and sometimes every night. It all begins or ends with a shower.

Unless I did something about this soap, I would end up in the shower with it. Naked and alone with it. Microscopic bits of the blue and white marble ingredients would splash onto me when the shower water hit them, either directly from above or bouncing off my body.

I went to the kitchen and got one of those clear plastic produce bags which I have dozens and dozens of, rolled into tight balls tucked into themselves, filling up a bottom drawer in my kitchen. A drawer-full of proof that I get my fiber.

I placed my hand into the plastic bag, tied a hair tie around my wrist to make sure it wouldn’t slip off and also that I’d be able to see what I was doing, and put my hand on the soap. I first made sure I had a good grip on it with my plastic mitt, which was tricky since the soap was slightly damp. I picked it up.

Holding it face down, I accepted I made physical contact, indirect yes, but still, with the stranger who put it there. I turned it over slowly. For a split second, I thought the blue and white marble streaks moved, but it was only the light slipping on the moisture.

The bottom was wetter than the top. Other than that, there was no marking, no logo on the bottom either. Just streaks of blue and white. The shower stall was dry, of course. The shower is always dry in the morning. Even if I showered before going to sleep, the shower would be dry in the morning. It wouldn’t even take that long, because the second thing I do with my daily fresh towel after I dry off my body is dry off the shower stall top to bottom, all edges and corners, and the curtain (which I sometimes throw in the dryer if I’m in a hurry). My shower is wet only when I am in it and for a few minutes after I’ve left it. For there to be a moist, bottom-wet soap in the groove means someone purposely kept this soap wet and transported it here as close to my wake-up time as possible so I would find it still wet when I woke up. Someone who knows my routine.

But someone who could have also moistened the new soap at the sink, while I slept.

I opened the cupboard under the bathroom sink quickly, to surprise the box that the soap came in. My own refuse—hair, floss, razor blade, balls of toilet paper I’d used to squeeze out the ridges of my nose because those strips are too expensive—that’s all there was in the trash, because I changed the garbage bag which used to be a grocery bag a few days ago. Anyway, the box that the soap came in wouldn’t be hard to spot. It would be sitting on top of the trash.

With the soap still in my plastic-gloved hand, I pulled the hair tie back towards my upper arm, freeing the plastic, obstructing my blood flow, then flipped the plastic over, ending up with the soap in the plastic bag. I closed the bag by tying the hair tie around it, then knotted the bag for extra good measure.

It was a sloppy job. I don’t like sloppy for anything. I unknotted the plastic, removed the hair tie, and with the soap slipping and sliding inside I flattened the plastic on the countertop. I folded it lengthwise first, flush against the soap, then two more lengthwise folds to the other side of the plastic, then I folded from the bottom up, again keeping flush against the now triple-padded soap inside, all the way to the opening. I used the hair tie twice around the middle of the soap, then another hair tie in a crosswise direction. The soap was now a perfectly wrapped gift, except for all the slime inside, because of all the shuffling, like ejaculate in a condom. Nothing to be done.

I took the gift to my living room and put it on the floor next to my purse. I returned to the bathroom to have a shower, picking up that day’s towel from the cupboard as I went. The moment before I entered my bathroom again I had one heartbeat of fear that I would find another soap, or the same one, in the soap groove. It was like that fear that today might be the day I see myself across the street again.

In the shower, I reached for and picked up my bottle of shower gel and my hand stumbled. It was like continuing to climb a step after the stairs have finished—that disorientation, then the snap of understanding. Most of the energy I used to pick up the bottle fell away unused and useless because I only needed a fraction of it. The shower gel bottle was empty.

When you miss a step or lift and drop your foot for a step that is not there, you look around and smile wanly at your goofiness, maybe chuckle. If your heart took a leap, you put one hand out to steady yourself and the other on your chest to reassure yourself. I turned off the water.

I yanked the top off the bottle and turned it upside down to shake it out. Not a drop. Empty and dry as if the bottle were still on the conveyor line in a factory. The message was clear. Use the soap. The hard soap, not this liquid. So you can know how hard I washed myself? You could mark the level of gel in a bottle and get as good an idea, if it’s so important to you, bastard.

In the name of all that is normal and female, I will not use a bar of soap that appeared in my bathroom out of nowhere. I would rather use shampoo. It’s good enough for my genitals, it’s good enough for the rest of me. I would rather use nothing. I had to find out who didn’t like how I wash. I had to trace where this blue and white marble patterned unscented-scent wet kidney-shaped soap with no logo came from. Even before I finished rinsing and began my toweling process, I knew that I would call in sick.

Rebecca Fisseha is author of the novel Daughters of Silence (Goose Lane Editions). Her short stories, personal essays, and articles appear in Selamta, Room Magazine, The Maple Tree Literary Supplement, The Rusty Toque, Joyland, The Puritan’s Town Crier, Lithub, Medium, and Addis Ababa Noir. In Fall 2021, look for her new work in the Humber Literary Review and in Tongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language, an anthology of creative nonfiction essays (Book*hug Press).