Robot Parts

I was visiting this elderly couple that I knew.  I was helping them go through some old junk that they had stored in a large overstuffed closet upstairs.  We carried some wooden chairs up from the kitchen and we sat half-buried in the brown suits and dresses hung up around us as we sorted through boxes of old papers and photographs.  There were papers from the old man's war service, along with metals and citations.  There were letters that the old woman had kept, correspondences from friends and relatives who had passed away.

In one of the boxes I found a bunch of small, loose, mechanical parts.  I wasn't sure what they were.  The old man explained that he had patented the design for a toy robot many years ago.  The parts were from the prototype that he had made.  He had taken it apart and stored it up in the closet.  He had forgotten all about it.  He reached out eagerly for the box.  He wanted to show me how the whole thing fit together.  Then we could wind it up with the brass key and watch it hobble around on the hardwood floor.

As I went to hand him the box, I noticed that there was some kind of green goop on my hands.  I sniffed at it.  It smelled rotten and sweet and foul.  The old man told me that some of the battery acid must have leaked out from the battery compartment after sitting in storage for so long.  I could feel it burning on my hands.  The old man tried to tell me not to panic.  But the more I tried to wipe the acid off, the more of a mess I made.  I had spread it to my arms and there was even some on my face.  I felt it burning in my throat, and I felt like I couldn't breathe.  I got all tangled up in the hanging clothes trying to get out of the closet.  I felt around for the doorknob and I burst out the door and ran down the hall clawing at my skin.

From the Bridge

It was in the middle of a winter night and my car broke down on an icy bridge over the freeway.  I got out of the car and the car disappeared.  The night was perfectly still and quiet and there was a strange comfort in standing there in the open.  There was no traffic on the bridge; no traffic on the highway below the bridge; no lights from the town nearby.  It was just dark and quiet; just my breath steaming in the frozen air.  Everything was shut down.  Everything was done for the night.  Everyone was asleep everywhere, curled up somewhere warm, wishing all their silent wishes and dreaming all their silent dreams, and the stars twinkled in the sky above without the moon or the city contending for their light.  There was nothing there on the bridge but the cold crystal radiance of the cosmos and the rising clouds of my breath as I stood there amazed by it all.      

Outside Line

We got home and the house was dark.  This teenage kid from down the street had knocked out all the phone lines and power lines in the neighborhood.  There was trouble at home with his parents and he was upset about it.  His mother had gotten a letter in the mail informing her that she had a cancerous growth on her right eyelid.  She didn't want to talk about it and she had thrown away the letter, but the father ended up finding it in the trash.  They avoided one another after that, the mother in denial, the father not knowing how to approach the subject.  He stopped halfway down the stairs one morning, and through the bannister and the crack in the bathroom door, he could see see her in the shower.  She caught him looking at her, her right eyelid drooping noticeably and uncomfortably, and she turned away so he wouldn't see.  The father just stood there in his blue pajamas halfway down the stairs, not knowing which way to go or what to do.  I guess the kid figured that if his parents weren't going to communicate, no one else in the neighborhood was going to either.

I felt bad for the kid, for his parents, for his family, but I was still mad that he had knocked out the phone lines.  I gave up and slammed the dead phone down on the hook.  My wife suggested trying our old answering machine that was built into the phone.  We could at least pick up our messages.  I shrugged and figured it was worth a try.  There was only one message on there.  It was from my daughter's old high school principal.  He was droning on and on about something, making endless digressions that began with, "When I was your age," trying to make it clear that he sympathized and understood.  I was about to erase the message, but my daughter said that she wanted to hear it.  She said that everyone always got a kick out of the principal's long boring stories.  I handed her the phone and she put it to her ear and listened, laughing from time to time.    

The Ballroom

There was a party of some sort, a formal occasion.  I was dressed in my black suit, sitting at a round table laid out with glistening silverware, surrounded by other guests chatting and sipping from champagne glasses.  The women wore satin dresses and leaned affectionately against their dates as they laughed.  Our table was in the middle of a vast ballroom, the ceiling vaulted far above and murals of grape vineyards painted high on the walls.  Candles flickered at every table and the evening light shone down from the windows, casting a soft haze about the room as though this were all already taking place in a memory.  People got up here and there to dance, and the brass band up on the stage would launch into another number with a sharp blast of their instruments.

A fat, balding man in a white suit and a bow tie, some local big shot, came in with a brunette draped on his arm.  There was a blonde in a glittering dress at the bar.  Her face fell when she turned and saw the fat man walking in with the brunette.  The blonde was apparently the man's wife and the brunette was his mistress, or perhaps it was the other way around.  At any rate, a huge screaming fight broke out between the two of them with the fat man in the middle hanging his head in shame.  The blonde and brunette sniped and clawed the air at each other, while the bartender stood by, not saying a word and hoping that none of his glasses or bottles would end up broken.  Over at our table we raised our glasses and whistled and yelled as someone proposed a toast to all of them.  They stopped and stared over at us.  The blonde sneered with disgust.  We didn't care.  We all laughed.  The music started up again, the drummer rattling the cymbals, the trumpets and trombones piercing the air.

The music was still pounding in my ears after the event was over and we started hitting the town in a long black hearse that had been converted into a limousine.  The back of the hearse, where they used to keep the caskets, had been made into a small lounge with a bench that wrapped around the sides and windows that still had the little pleated white curtains hung over them.  We all crammed onto this bench, smoking cigarillos and passing bottles around till morning.  I peeled back the curtain and looked out the window over someone's shoulder and I could see that we were parked outside of a convenient store somewhere, rocking the vehicle around on its springs, and I felt the flush of normal, sober life come back to me.  I started thinking about getting home.  Everyone else was still half drunk, and they argued over who would drive the hearse.

Someone took the wheel and started weaving their way towards my house.  About a mile from the house there was a point where the driver almost veered off of a cliff and I had to lunge up front and grab the wheel.  I looked around the car at everyone laughing, and I realized that they were all on this drug that made everything seem like a cartoon.  Either the driver hadn't seen the cliff, or they had all thought that some cartoon physics would come into play if we went over the edge.  Maybe they'd been on the drug all night.  Maybe I was on it too and didn't realize it.  I asked them to let me off at the curb.  Faces and hands popped from every window as they all yelled and waved and the hearse drove away.

At the Street Corner

It was a very dark night.  I was sitting on the front steps of a brick building in the city, hidden in the shadow of a doorway.  I could see a man coming up the street with his little daughter walking beside him.  He had on a tan overcoat and a hat and tie.  He looked like a businessman of some sort, as solid as they come.  The little girl clutched one of her father's fingers, and she kept dragging her heels, pointing at something back the way they came.  She kept going on about a puppy she had seen.  The man turned and crouched down, resting a gentle hand on her shoulder.  "We'll have to talk to mommy about it, okay?"  The girl nodded, pressing a finger to her chin and looking back uncertainly.

I smiled at this interaction, but as they started away, the girl kept on about the dog, pleading and pouting, and the father's manner began to change, devolving right in front of me.  He began to snap at the girl, yelling at her in a spiteful, ugly way.  "You're never getting a dog.  Just shut up about it!"  He jerked roughly at her arm, dragging her with him.  As they came under the beam of the streetlight at the corner, I could see that even his clothes had changed.  His overcoat was ratty and wrinkled and full of holes.  His hat was even gone now somehow, and his hair looked like he had just woken up.  He teetered about drunkenly on wobbly legs.  My whole sense of the girl's safety and security vanished in an instant.

But yet, somehow she finally got him to agree to go back and see the puppy.  She was leading him now, still clutching his finger, and he stumbled along, listlessly inebriated, all the fight gone out of him.  And I watched them head back the way they came, and I had a feeling the girl would be alright.  I could picture her back at the house where they'd seen the puppies, giggling and kneeling down in a warmly lit room and picking her favorite one.  They would take to each other immediately, and the puppy would grow up big and strong.  He'd growl when the father lost his temper like that.  He'd get between them, baring his teeth.  He'd look out for this girl in his simple, loyal way and things would be different.  He'd keep her safe.

Drawing Flies

My wife and I were trying to find our way around this apartment complex.  There was a unit we wanted to look at.  We had the number, but we couldn't figure out which building it was in.  A bright eyed little boy appointed himself as our guide.  He waved his hand back at us, signaling for us to follow him.  He led us down a winding sidewalk, passing through a series of arches and doorways, always looking back to see if we were keeping up and making impatient little hops in place whenever we fell behind.

As we went along, I compared the number I'd written down on a scrap of paper to the numbers of the buildings we passed, and I began to figure out the layout of the complex, and I realized that the boy was leading us the wrong way.  There was another winding sidewalk just across the way from the one we were on and there was just a little plot of grass between them.  I caught up with the boy and pointed out that we could just cut across the grass and head the other direction on the other sidewalk to get to the building.  I could even see a shaft of sunlight breaking through and shining down on this other stretch of sidewalk as though it were especially provided to light our way.

The boy just shook his head and pointed along the same path that we had been traveling.  He said that this was the only way he knew.  He said that there would be seven doors to pass through and then the sidewalk would loop around and join up with the other sidewalk across the way and take us to where we wanted to go.  I tried to explain that we could get to the other sidewalk right now, that it was just over there, and we just had to cut across the grass.  It seemed like a needless detour to go all the way around.  I appealed to my wife on this, but she just shrugged and said, "Well this is the only way he knows."

So we followed him.  Finally we came to the last of the seven doors.  This one led to the apartment's laundry room.   Before he opened it, the boy shushed us with his finger, explaining that his mother was sleeping inside.  As he quietly slid the door open, I could see the figure of a woman with dark hair sitting in the shadows across the room.  There were an inordinate number of flies buzzing around this figure.  It's mouth gaped open and showed that most of the teeth had fallen out.  One eye stared, still and dead, while the other festered with a swarm of maggots.

We had to pass through this laundry room to get the door on the other side and continue along the sidewalk.  It was the only way to go.  My wife crept forward, trying to be careful not to bump into the boy's mother and knock any loose rotting parts off of her.  I kept my head down and my mouth shut tight.  I didn't want to accidentally swallow any of the flies that had been feasting on the corpse.