By Jessica Mohsen-Crellin
The indent between the tiles contained multitudes of miniscule nothings: fibers of short, curly black hair scattered like seeds from his razor; strands of blonde, fallen from the hairbrush, long enough to wrap themselves around the tiles; fibers of floss decaying into the grime; layers of dust gathered from years of being passed over by the bristles of brooms; small splashes of urine diluted and spread by the overflowing bathwater containing particles of sweat, skin, and feces; ejaculate dispersed across the grid as it dripped off her leg; specks of blood from the tampon dropped on the floor; a colony of microscopic bacteria that floats in the bathroom air and settles in the unreachable crevices—where meritocracy and capitalistic ambition have no hold on its citizens, and the reigns of anarchy are unleashed in the confines of the perfectly straight grid of intersecting in-between spaces.
Jessica Mohsen-Crellin is a fictionist and essayist from Stonewall, Manitoba, Canada. She graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in European Studies in 2018 and later received an MFA in Creative Writing from BYU in 2024. During Fall 2022 and Winter 2023 she worked at Inscape as the Assistant Nonfiction Editor. Her work has previously been published in Inscape Journal and is forthcoming in The Tusculum Review. She currently lives in Utah with her husband and their plants.
