[Content warning for historical effluvia.]
Twelve years after I moved away from the old block, a legion of yuppies gobbled up two-flats and three-flats just to knock them down. The telltale orange fence went up. Excavators thundered in. Then maximalist hyper-colonials and modern farmhouses dominated every inch. Nothing looked the same except a few familiar oaks destined for a date with the chainsaw. I needed a souvenir brick before my childhood home vanished to dust. Our neighborhood corner granny was long gone, her cherished perennial bed carpeted with lava rocks and solar bulbs.
The new yuppie mothers snapped at toddlers with fibrous names. Kicked aside the few remaining strands of vinca vine. Parallel parked enormous vehicles that looked straight from a safari. Sickened by designer wrought iron gates, pining for the calm of corner granny’s pink powder room, I thought about the mysterious drain charmer of yesteryear who traveled door to door every November. His timing was strategic: handy for holiday clogs, but with enough leeway to make it home for New Year’s dinner in Detroit. The charmer was always a welcome sight, never a stranger.
The yuppies installed fashion mailboxes that looked like miniature art nouveau banks. Corner granny would have shaken her head. A thing should be the thing it is, she often said. You had to press a button on the yuppie fence to get buzzed in. Their front room windows had a reflective tint that forced you to confront your own face. Growing up, every stoop on that street doubled as a chair. Each upstairs window framed a set of watchful eyes. Every mailbox displayed a house number and family name in stick-on letters.
The drain charmer needed none of this information to connect with his clientele. He remembered which kid belonged to which stoop, tapped his canvas rucksack and made eye contact with the lady of the house, who knew exactly which miracles he could perform. His first stop was corner granny’s house, likely because her teakettle was forever ready on the stove. I thought it miraculous that the charmer always headed straight to the main drain, not understanding that every building on the block had an identical blueprint.
Our neighborhood was home to plenty of plumbers, but they serviced office buildings in the loop or glamorous lakeshore mid-rises, private homes where one family occupied all three floors. Instead we relied on spells, the drain charmer laying hands on pipes, gazing down a kitchen sink reciting something impossible to replicate. As he worked, corner granny spoke to him in Polish and laughed like a cartoon violin. She claimed the charmer’s voice once liquefied an inexpensive brooch blocking a tub drain, unclogged the corner bar toilet after everyone got sick from funeral food.
Walking the alley behind my old building, I attempted to swoop my arms like the charmer when he arrived in his musty shearling. What tools might he have used to extract a brick from a doomed two-flat? He never carried a plunger, but brandished an assortment of metal strings and clamps, allegedly self-forged. I tried to hammer the building’s back wall with a hunk of broken concrete. An annoyed tech bro shouted into a cell phone in the alley, something about servers and being served. I swore I caught a wave of corner granny’s lemon verbena on the breeze.
The brick wall would not give. So, I called upon the spirit of the charmer——rumor said he’d perished in an accident near the Indiana border——to reverse the years and years of spells. Open the floodgates, loosen waters and muck, then shut the drains tight. Historic grease and coffee grinds and waist-length hair and earring backs. Phlegm clots and beef barley soup and period blood. Diluted gasoline poured haphazardly down a storm drain in 1983. Bring it back and surge onto the luxury travertine. Soak the sparkling media rooms and wine cellars. Spatter the conservatory and its untouched instruments. Rock the low-flush commodes until they spilled like my favorite fountain in corner granny’s yard: the little stone girl who held a watering can that never ran dry.
Mary Biddinger walks the line between good and evil in Akron, Ohio. Her novella-in-flash, The Girl with the Black Lipstick, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in July 2025. She is co-editor, with Julie Brooks Barbour, of A Mollusk Without a Shell: Essays on Self-Care for Writers, and author of numerous poetry collections, most recently Department of Elegy. She teaches creative writing at the University of Akron, where she directs the Northeast Ohio MFA in creative writing program. Her favorite revenge story is Wuthering Heights.
