Expulsion

‘A sight to behold, indeed, ‘The Leaking Man Fountain’ in Southern California is criminally undersold. The man, a statue, does not leak so much as he forcibly propels water from every conceivable orifice, largely overshooting the shallow basin in which he is installed. This means that within a day, ‘The Leaking Man’s’ water supply tends to dry up, at which point the mixture of air and residual moisture being forced through ‘The Man’s’ systems takes on an outrageously flatulent sound for about an hour before the water is truly all gone. Then the noise becomes a keening whistle, loud enough to disturb those who live nearby. 

For this reason, locals begrudgingly tend to ‘The Leaking Man’s’ liquid needs, feeding the basin with buckets of water from their homes and keeping the supply free of detritus that might clog the pump. Blockages have proven to be dangerous: a penny lodged itself in ‘The Leaking Man’s’ systems in 2016, leading to a week of dry silence, during which the statue was seen to tremble on its base. The coin was violently expelled into the head of a passerby on the evening of September 17th. The man survived but refuses, to this day, to say from which end the penny emerged.

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside