My older brother has never had much luck. Wherever he goes, whatever he does, misfortune invariably follows. Such was the case years ago during my brother’s first year of university.

    For the first year of university, my brother wanted to be in residence, because finding and paying for an apartment in a new area without any roommates to help seemed a daunting task. So, when the residence application forms arrived in the mail, my brother filled them out that same day, double-checked themed to make sure that he filled them out correctly and sent them off to the university. The university, of course, rewarded my brother’s diligence by promptly losing my brother’s residence application. They eventually found the forms, but informed my brother that it was much too late to put him in residence and that they were very, VERY, sorry for the mix-up. This didn’t sit well with my brother, considering that by the time they found his application he no longer had any time to find an apartment. After my brother called the university about thirty times trying the resolve the issue, they finally decided that they had room for my brother, but only in the overflow residence instead of the regular one. The overflow residence, in actuality, was not a residence at all. It was a floor the university had rented out in a run-down, stinky, old hotel.  My brother was forced to live in conditions just slightly better than a European hostel, with disgusting communal kitchens and bathrooms and for some unknown reason, a sink in every closet. Needless to say, after providing their students with these wonderful luxuries, the university was too bereft of funds to spring for adequate security.

    One day, a hobo, drawn possibly by the stench, wandered into the hotel, past the security desk (no one was staffing it) and travelled up the elevator to my brother’s floor whereupon he rapidly took a vigorous shit on the carpeted hallway outside my brother’s door before heading back outside. The shit lay undisturbed outside my brother’s door for about three days before the janitor finally decided that the best way to clean it up was to pour bleach on it. This, truth be told, is not in fact the best way to clean shit off a carpet. Pouring bleach on shit merely causes it to dissolve slightly and seep into the carpet, while the bleach seeps into the carpet surrounding the shit giving the shit a strange corona of lighter carpet. Day after day, the janitor would return to pour bleach on the shit and everyday the shit’s carpet halo would grow brighter from the bleach. This went on for about a month before one of the students took it upon themselves to pick up the shit and stick it in the trash. No one ever bothered to try to clean up the brown stain and the bleaching was irreparable without replacing the carpet.

    The shit may be in a landfill, but there will forever be a circular brown stain surrounded by bleached white carpet in that hotel…

                                               …And in our hearts.