Black Discs

With no other answer available after weeks of investigation, my husband concluded that the black discs in the downstairs bathroom are black helicopter poop. Or nanite poop. Small robotic creatures developed by the Pentagon or the Centers for Disease Control had infiltrated our house and were staging operations from our downstairs bathroom. I found that explanation so compelling that I was moved to get the ladder out and resolve the issue once and for all.

The downstairs bathroom has been the location of several incidents during our ten years in this house. The first incident occurred in May 2003, when we had been living in the house for nine months. I found little transparent insect wings, just under half an inch long, all around the floor. No bodies, just wings. I thought some ants might have swarmed outside and wandered into the house somehow. I swept up the wings and they kept appearing for several days. Then finally some little bodies, which we had identified. They were dry wood termites from the cabinet that held the sink. They had probably been in the wood when the cabinet was made, the termite man said. The cabinet maker said that's impossible, and so it went. We treated them for years and finally, this year, no dry wood termites hatched. They are very slow chewers and fortunately the cabinet still has enough integrity to stand after 24 years of chewing from the inside out.

The next incident was the water in the walls. Source: upstairs shower pan. Then there was the water in the ceiling. Source: Repaired upstairs shower pan. When the black pellets appeared I was ready to believe the downstairs bathroom needed a separate cure. Several years ago, during round after round of repairs, we learned some details about the original construction of our house, and as a result we had a ceremony to bless the house after the repairs had been completed. Friends of ours, a married couple of Sufi ministers who conduct multi-denominational worship services, came to the house and performed a series of prayers and cleansed the house. After that, the repairs were reasonable for the age of the house-- replacement of water-damaged wood siding on the outside, a new roof, new gutters, new air units. I thought we were in the clear.

The black pellets appeared on the floor, always near the cats' litter boxes. They are about three eighths of an inch across, opaque black, apparently plastic, domed on one side and dimpled on the other. They are fairly uniform in thickness, a sixteenth of an inch, but some are a little thinner. We swept them up, and they reappeared, but not in numbers or at intervals that fell into any sort of pattern.

Could they be filler which had fallen out of something we carried into the bathroom, kayak gear or garage towels used for car and boat clean up? No. Were they insect poop? No. We were out of rational theories. My husband thought they might be coming out of the exhaust fan in the ceiling. Whereas the dry wood termites found the cabinet homey, the black helicopters would be comfortable in the exhaust fan. I got the ladder out, climbed up with a strong flashlight, eased the cover off the fan, and looked. No black pellets hanging on the ledges waiting to fall out. No black pellets coming through the cracks in the plaster around the fan housing.

I put the ladder away and went back into the bathroom, turned on the light, and took out the whisk broom and dust pan to clean up the accumulation of black helicopter poop from the day before. As I swept the pellets onto the dust pan, more pellets appeared. They were falling out of the handle of the whisk broom. It was full of them. A breach had opened through the straw and out they came. Why a broom maker would fill the handle of a broom with little black plastic disks, or from what other industry they are a byproduct, I can't answer without further investigation. It is a phone call I may never get around to making. I am simply relieved that neither the dry wood termites nor the black helicopters will be hatching again any time soon.