Archive for the ‘Luc Reid’ Category
Where the Light Bulbs Go
Monday, October 26th, 2009
Laura stood on a kitchen chair and shined the little red flashlight at the top closet shelf, but the only thing she saw was the yellowed contact paper: no light bulbs.
“Angie!” she shouted, stepping down. Angie poked her head in from the home office, formerly a pantry.
“Hmm?”
Laura walked over and put both her hands on Angie’s cheeks. “Sweetie, did we or didn’t we talk about the light bulbs?”
“Light bulbs … ?”
“About if one of us used the last one, we would write it on the grocery list.”
“Oh that! Sure we did. Do I get to call you anal again?”
“No, you do not. Because one of us–not me–used the last light bulb and didn’t write it on the list.”
Angie took both of Laura’s hands in hers, kissed her, then turned back to her computer. “Not guilty, sorry.”
“It wasn’t me,” Laura said. “I replaced a bulb three days ago, and there were still two left.”
“Still not me.”
“You know you don’t always pay attention to these things–and this is the third time we’ve been out since Christmas!”
“Maybe your Mom cursed the closet. She said she was a witch.”
“My mother is not a witch, she’s mentally ill. Remember when we caught her with that mouse?”
“Relax … your blood pressure! Now, please let me work.”
Laura stood for a moment in stupefaction, then shoved the kitchen chair back into place and shut the closet door with unnecessary force. She left the kitchen with her arms crossed over her chest.
“Blood pressure!” Angie sang out.
Behind the closet door, past the top shelf, through a gap in the ceiling that led to a crawlspace, in a long gallery only a foot high, a mouse sighed in relief. She nosed her two new prizes into place, wrapped bare wire around each of their bases, then connected the terminals. Finally she went back and reconnected a bit of insulated wire. The crawlspace lit up with dozens of light bulbs: Christmas tree bulbs, floods, standard lamp bulbs, frosted globes, and more. Many were masked with bits of colored paper and fabric over toothpick frames, so the mouse was surrounded with glowing colors, varied and warm and mixing subtly where they overlapped. The mouse sighed and lay down to sleep in her fairyland, soothed by the faint tapping of the human woman’s fingers on her computer keyboard below.
The Automatonist’s Assistant
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
“Darling!” squealed Eleanor, pulling the covers over her body as she scrambled out of the bed. “What are you doing home at this hour?” Her husband’s new assistant, Mr. Twall, was left completely naked on the mattress.
“I was looking for Mr. Twall,” said Horace, the husband. “I hadn’t realized there was a queue.”
“I don’t know what to say,” said Mr. Twall. “I’m profoundly sorry.”
“It isn’t your fault, Twall. Eleanor, I’ll have you know that Mr. Twall is one of my biomechanical automatons. I purposely created him to see if you would be unfaithful to me.”
“I am not!” protested Mr. Twall.
“Of course, I programmed him not to know this. Mr. Twall, would you be so kind as to recognize shutdown code five-ought-R-R-four?”
“Certainly,” said Mr. Twall, apparently to his own surprise. Then he went utterly limp.
“You bastard! You pustule!” said Eleanor.
“Call me whatever names you like, but I had to test you. I suspected you had fallen out of love with me, but hadn’t cared to bring it up.”
“You suspected right, and is it any wonder? And it isn’t easy, you know, to find out over time that one’s husband will not become less emotionally frozen, that the clumsiness of his intimacy is not something one can correct. I was wrong to think you could be better!”
Eleanor dropped the covers with a warning glare, swept up her clothes from the floor, and strode out of the room. Horace stood frozen for a few moments, then slowly walked over to Mr. Twall and popped open his neck panel to erase both the unpleasant incident and the inclinations that led to it from the automaton’s brain. He found, though, that his hands were shaking, and he had to sit down on the floor as he began to cry. It was just gasping and tears at the corners of his eyes at first, but it quickly degraded into hoarse, barking sobs that he couldn’t stop or even quiet down without clamping his hands tightly over his mouth.
The naked automaton looked on blankly, still inert, as the sound of Eleanor slamming the front door reverberated through the house.