Dropping the Needle

My wife figured out that if you synced up a certain album with a certain website, you would be able to physically enter and inhabit the internet. I walked through it as though it were the streets of my old hometown on a grey dismal evening. I could feel the air stir around me and I could feel the light patter of the drizzling rain on my shoulders. It was completely immersive and real. But right away, I noticed that something was a little off with the sound. When a car rounded a corner, the splash of its tires came a little too late. I walked past a house where a dog was penned up behind a chainlink gate in the back yard, and when the dog barked, it reverberated from the wrong side of the street, bouncing off the wrong walls of the wrong houses.

I decided to stop in and use the payphone at this neighborhood diner, so that I could call my wife out in the real world and let her know about the problem. There was a cacophony of misplaced noise as soon as I stepped in the door. The busboy dropped a dish and I heard the howl of a passing train blowing its horn in the night. I saw one of the diners wave his hand in the air and call to the server and point to the empty coffee cup sitting on the table in front of him, but the only thing I could hear was the intrusive crackles and beeps and buzzes of the emergency broadcast system breaking in to make an announcement.

The payphone was in a narrow hallway in the back by the restrooms. I picked up the phone and fed a quarter into the slot. I had to make a very deliberate effort to concentrate on what numbers I needed to dial, because I kept hearing the random beeps and clicks of the buttons just before I hit them or just a moment afterwards. My wife answered the phone and thankfully her voice was matched up with mine as we talked to one another. I explained to her that she hadn't quite synced everything up the right way. She told me that she had dropped the needle on the record at the exact moment when the lion logo was roaring for the third time, just like she was supposed to. I rubbed my hand over my eyes and shook my head. "Lion logo!? There's no lion logo. You're thinking of something completely different." I looked down at my watch and told her that I was heading back. I hung the phone up on the hook and I heard my coin dropping through miles of the payphone's inner mechanisms, clattering down through endless caverns of metal and machinery, until it finally landed with a wet plunk in a pool of water somewhere deep down in the dark. 

By the Dozen

I was walking through the countryside, carrying a box of donuts, headed for a meeting that was going to be held at the town hall that evening. I kept worrying because I had stopped by the side of the road along the way and eaten two of the donuts in a moment of a greedy hunger and now the box was short. There was nothing more embarrassing than showing up with a box that was missing donuts. I kept wiping at the corners of my mouth with the back of my hand as though the glaze and the custard would still be there for everyone to see as soon as I walked through the door.

Around dusk, I came across a meadow overgrown with soft grass. On a piece of high ground in the middle of this meadow, there were two large boulders which marked the gravesite of two twin boys that had recently died of a fever. The boulders were polished but roughly hewn. There was a flat area on the face of each boulder that had been smoothed and cleared for the inscriptions, and the boulders were turned so that the faces of the stones were angled slightly away from each other, giving the impression that the two boys were turned away from one another and sulking like they had just had a fight but still sitting together in peace and silence, still brothers after all.

Sitting on the back of the boulders, bridging the gap between them, someone had left a gift basket that was wrapped in rose-tinted cellophane and tied with a blue ribbon. The basket was filled with donuts. A crowd of black crows had gathered around the basket and they were picking at the cellophane, trying to get at the donuts inside. One particularly sharp crow had climbed on the back of another crow, and he had a piece of the ribbon in his beak and he was trying to pull the knot loose. This was all by design, of course. The donuts had been left there specifically for the crows to eat. By some process of transubstantiation, the nourishment provided by the morsels of dough and sugar would imbue the crows with the spirit of the twins, and they would carry that spirit across the sky and back to their nests as they flew back and forth from the basket until the basket would finally sit battered and empty, picked clean of every crumb.

I stepped forward to have a better look at the donuts. The crows dispersed in a protest of caws and a clatter of wings as I approached. They flew back to the trees and watched and waited. I picked at a loose fold of the cellophane and I stretched it out tight so that I could have a clear view inside. Sitting on top of the pile of donuts, there was a glazed donut and a custard donut, perfect to replace the ones that I had eaten. I set my box aside and I studied the knot in the ribbon, looking for a strand in the binding that I could slip free.

I almost had it loose when I noticed my long shadow stretched out across the rock and trailing off into the waving grass, and I felt the chill of a curse on me. And I knew that if I desecrated this burial site, the curse would be on whatever unsuspecting person ate these two replacement donuts as well. I pulled my fingers back from the knot and I gently bunched up the cellophane in my hands, trying to restore its disordered shape, trying to leave it all the way that I’d found it. I stepped back, treading lightly, barely breathing. I took a wide path around the stones, leaving them be. And when the calm settled back over the site and the crows felt comfortable, they flew back and continued their work on the basket.

Upstairs Room

The whole family slept in this big farm house. It was in the earliest hours of the morning, and the shapes of the house and the fence and the cars parked in the driveway and the tire swing that hung over the worn dirt patch in the back yard were all black against the first red hints of daylight. The family was scattered in beds around the house, my grandmother and grandfather snoring away on a king-sized bed in the master bedroom at the front of the house, and my aunts and uncles in various rooms above. There was a big bedroom in the back off the kitchen that I shared with three of my cousins, twin beds fitted every which way into the corners with my bed right under the open window and the curtains tickling at my ear as I dozed there still half-asleep.

There was a room that was in a kind of nest at the top of the house that I wished I could have had to myself, but my one uncle had claimed it already. I thought about this room as I laid there and heard the muffled ringing of his alarm clock bell going off two floors above. It was a great little room that rose up out of the roof of the house and it had windows that could look out over the land on nearly all sides. It was a cozy room with just enough space for the bed and the dresser where my uncle left his cigarettes and laid out a set of folded clothes for the next day. The alarm bell was cut off abruptly, followed by the crackle and buzz of an electric guitar amp being flipped on. This was what he had to get up for every morning. This was the basis of his claim to the room at the top of the house. I knew I would have to learn to play at least as good as him if I wanted that room, probably better. The first few licks peeled out, breaking the quiet, and I knew he was up there, sitting on the edge of the bed and watching out the windows at the sunrise creeping around the houses and into the fields and the roads for miles around. 

The Slightest Bit

It was late on a Friday night, and I was hanging out with some stand-up comedians that I was friends with. We were all sitting around in the dark, riffing on this terrible movie that we were watching, when we heard someone knocking at the front door. The owner of the house got up to see who it was. When he opened the door, his next door neighbor burst in, frantically waving around a torn envelope and a handful of handwritten pages. The neighbor explained that this woman comedian that we were all friends with had sent him a letter, claiming that he was the father of her illegitimate child and informing him that she was suing for child support. A photograph had been included with the letter. He handed it to the comedian that owned the house. As the comedian held it in his hands, the neighbor kept jabbing it with his finger to emphasize the patent absurdity of it.

The photograph was a picture of the female comedian holding her baby, and it had been very obviously and very crudely doctored. Someone had clearly just cut out a picture of the neighbor’s face and then pasted it over the face of the baby, mustache, glasses, bald head, and all. The comedian flipped the photograph around to show everyone, and the whole room broke out laughing. But the neighbor didn’t find the situation funny at all. He snatched the photograph back out of the comedian’s hand and shuffled it back into the pages of the letter, the paper rustling and trembling in his hands. He said that didn’t know this woman. He had never met this woman. He certainly wasn’t the father of her child.

The comedian pulled the neighbor aside and tried to calm him down and explain the situation to him. He told him that this was just part of a bit that the female comedian was doing. It was all just an elaborate joke. But the neighbor insisted that it was all very real. There were court documents included with the letter. She had really gone to a judge about all of this. There was a specific dollar amount that she was demanding from him. There was a monthly payment schedule. There were back payments. The neighbor said that he couldn’t see her going to such great lengths just to have a bit to perform on stage.

“But it isn’t for the stage,” the comedian explained to him. The neighbor was dumbfounded by this. He stared down at the photograph, as though it offered some further clarification. “She doesn’t do a stand up act on stage. She hasn’t done that in years,” the comedian continued. “This is a bit that she’s doing in her day to day life. That’s the kind of thing she does now. It’s kind of experimental, I guess. It’s like the world itself is the stage that she’s performing on.” He capped this off with a nod, ruminating on the audacity of the whole thing as he seemed to really admire it for the first time.

The neighbor didn’t like this at all. He began to enumerate the problems with the situation. Who was the actual father of the child? Did she have the baby just for the bit? What about the money that she was demanding from him? Most of all he was upset about the money. “Well, she needs to get paid somehow for the bit, right?” the comedian replied. “I mean, she’s got to make a living, doesn’t she? You get paid to do your job, right?” But the neighbor glumly hung his head. He didn’t see why he should have to be the one to finance her joke, especially since he didn’t find it remotely funny. The comedian’s face lit up with a warm grin. “Well of course you don’t find it funny. That’s why they say the joke is at your expense.” 

A Little Music

My wife and I were looking at a house that we were thinking of buying. But as we went from room to room, we became more interested in how the house was decorated and furnished than we were in the actual house itself. We were intrigued by the lives that were lived there, by the framed family photographs hung on the wall by the stairs, by the checkered pot holders coordinated with the soft blues and bright yellows of the kitchen, by the books arranged on the mahogany bookshelves in the study. In the master bedroom upstairs, we liked the cozy way the bed was situated between the front window that looked out onto the shady street and the smaller window in the corner with the bedside table next to it. In the hallway outside the bedroom, we stopped to admire the large prints of medieval paintings that were hung on the wall, depicting the gathering of saints and the madonna with the child on her lap.

There was a second bedroom in the back where my wife noticed a nice little jeweled music box sitting on the dresser. She picked it up and opened it so that it would play. But just as the figurine dancer began to turn to the halting labors of the music box's tinkling mechanism, my wife looked up and noticed a little girl with a blue ribbon in her hair standing in the doorway. The girl startled her and the music box slipped out of her hands and fell to the floor. The little girl's face scrunched up into a smoldering angry glare. The figurine had come loose and it lay on the floor beside the music box. My wife picked them both up and reattached the dancer to her mount inside the music box and she tried to show the little girl that it wasn't broken.

But the little girl was not satisfied with this, and her anger was not assuaged. She demanded to know why we were in her room messing with her things. My wife tried to apologize, but the little girl insisted that by touching anything, anything at all in the house, we were violating our legal pretense of being there as prospective buyers of the house. The second we touched something with the slightest finger, we went from being buyers to being trespassers in their home. As the little tyrant began to list off a number of statutes and precedents that bolstered her case, my wife gently returned the music box to its place on the dresser and we both gave each other a look, agreeing that it was probably a good time to leave.

The little girl followed us downstairs still reciting all the laws we'd broken and the minimum sentences we could expect to receive for our crimes. We found the girl's mother in the kitchen preparing dinner. We told her that the home was wonderful but we were probably going to have to pass on buying it. The little girl was still there at our heels continuing her stream of legal invocations against us, but the mother didn't pay her any mind. She just nodded and said that she understood our decision, and she went back to stirring her pots and slicing her vegetables. The little girl followed us out the door and across the yard to the driveway. She stood there by our car, still chastising us for messing with her music box. We rolled up the windows, muffling the sound of her voice, and she was still there in the driveway yelling at us as we pulled away and drove off down the street.