Three Stories
Published by Reblogs - Credits in Posts,
By Addison Zeller.
Report of an Object
Report of an object, 28 October
The object, unidentified, is in a tree, an American elm. The observer is alerted to its presence by starlings; they flock and shriek and clatter in a nearby sugar maple. They’re offended by the object’s clumsiness as it lunges up and down, showering the yard with leaves and twigs. It flew low: this was the outcome. In pulling itself away, it damages the higher branches, even wrenching some free of the tree, though not of its motors, which rotate with silent effort as the branches revolve and crunch in the mechanism. It sinks close to the grass, then jerks up as if straining for air. Free at last, the object is somber as a snowy morning. The observer half-expects seal-like eyes to glare with hunted determination from a sleek monochrome head. The observer has collected a number of snapped-off twigs and leaves and slipped them into his album of evidence: eloquent testimony to the impatient shove and tug of the object, which finally ducks behind the eaves of the observer’s home and disappears into the alley. It makes no reappearance in the street. The observer conjectures that it underwent a shift in size as it flew through the alley, allowing it to slip unnoticed into the overcast sky, or—as he muses—condemning it to a new entanglement in the window meshes on that side of the house. The observer would be unsurprised to find it dried on the sill, lying on its white belly with a powdery moth, a brittle wasp, an upturned stinkbug.
Report of an object, 1 November
The object is noted at rest on the finial of the courthouse. It rises after thirty seconds, as per the testimonies of twelve witnesses. The observer, following it down Court Street, continues to look up and smile with admiration as it changes color in the light: from white to violet to metallic blue like the surface of an oil slick. The observer loses sight of the object when he collides with a woman, about forty years of age, who is setting tables outside the restaurant where she works. She refuses to answer any questions about the object, but seems nervous when asked, as if afraid that by acknowledging it she will make it reappear, hostile and close.
Report of an object, 6 November
The object is reflected in a mirror over the observer’s shoulder as it skates across the roof, nearly grazing the bathroom window with its finny corner. Amorphous, brown, of variable dimensions, it could be likened in texture to burlap, weighted possibly with sand or clay: some corners droop low and slide along the shingles as the object rotates over a section of roof. The observer reports a sensation of nausea as he watches the object’s movements, which seem irrational and for the most part aimless. Yet whenever it touches the roof it appears to feel about with its finny corner, stuffing it under loose shingles as though to test whether they may be stripped away. In a crack under the eaves, the observer has noticed, a starling has built a nest. From time to time, the starling pokes out its head and shrieks at perceived threats—often a squirrel, but in this case the object, which evidently probes too close to its hideaway. The observer smirks, expecting a confrontation, possibly an incursion by the object, which could so easily insert its finny corner into the hole: what could the starling do then? But as he watches, the object slides over the edge of the roof and passes into a section of yard invisible from the bathroom window. The observer moves to the window of his own room, but the object does not reappear.
Report of an object, 15 November
Bitter cold night. The observer is excited. Dramatic fluctuations in temperature are a harbinger of sightings. Sure enough, the object appears at 3:00 am, manifesting as a pure white light that passes over the street lamp in the parking lot opposite the house. Something taps at the window an hour later, but it may be unconnected to the object in the street. In the morning, despite the cold, the observer opens his window and extracts a small piece of downy white fluff from the screen: this he slips into his album of evidence. The observer questions his roommates about unusual sights or sounds in the night, but his roommates prove reticent, as if merely acknowledging the object will make it return. The observer bikes to work after a breakfast of cereal. He stacks egg crates and smokes American Spirits in the loading bay. During the lunch break, as he strolls in a circuit around the lot, the object announces itself with a low purr and snakes across the asphalt. When he steps forward to look, it darts up, nearly tripping him: he feels something cold and dense brush his chest. The surface of the object, which does not reappear, could be described as bright, gleaming, and spackled like terrazzo. It is approximately the size of a tiger. All the factory lights flicker as it passes.
Report of an object, 18 November
The object is too high to be seen.
Here Nor There
I had been walking so long I no longer felt like the same person and when I remembered that person I no longer remembered why I thought we were connected.
Opportunities existed in the city I have often felt since without reason.
Before I left home at the urging of my parents, who firmly believed a person was unentitled to self-respect without labor, my mother recollected a glass manufactory on the shore of a lake where her brother used to work and found it listed in an old directory.
She tore out the page and thrust it into a coat pocket of mine and sent me out the door with a basket of sandwiches and a few bottles of milk she also thrust into my pockets.
When I reached the address I found the building still standing but locked, the street-level windows shattered, the intact ones too high to peer into to see if manufacturing was in progress on the upper floors.
I wandered the lakeside from business to business, inquiring of any eatery in need of a bartender, busboy, coffeemaker, or dishwasher, or someone to dust up, then I moved farther out to the bank of industries north of the river, finding them boarded as the manufactory had been.
It was snowing; winter was coming in on the lake in wind tunnels that swooped between the empty warehouses and when I passed through one I broke out running from the wind pressing into my back like an umbrella unexpectedly opening.
I crept into a manufactory of auto parts and slept in what had been the foreman’s shop, but the cold sang in the valve of a fluting mechanical tube suspended from the ceiling sixty or seventy feet over my body and deeply obscured by many corroding ladders, gantries, and crane heads that leaned forward under the filmy skylights like gray parrots stooping to avoid the bars of a too-small cage.
In the morning, unrested, I extended my search farther into the city, hoping for a customer service job, but nobody was willing to allow me more than a passing look, disturbed by my exhaustion and detecting on my person all the oily smells of the factory I slept in and noting disgustedly no doubt the metal shavings on my coat and trouser legs from having spent the night tossing and turning on the shop floor whenever I witnessed a crane head drift into the space between me and the light in all the solemn windows.
As I trudged through conversations that never faded into interviews, my eyeballs felt as if they had been scooped out and replaced only after the sockets had been layered with a bed of sand and wood shavings.
I made sure, remembering my mother’s advice, to ask if I could use the bathroom before I moved on from each establishment, and most of the people I spoke to granted my request, waving towards the doors in question and eyeing me as I slunk past tables of lunching guests.
The bathrooms generally provided liquid soap, which I slid across my shirt and pants to obscure my sour patches, and all of them included toilet paper, which I stole at a count of six or seven sheets a pop, too few to be easily missed, and concealed under the sandwiches in my basket.
In the more lavishly multi-toileted bathrooms my basket was sometimes exposed to the contemplation of restaurant patrons, but not once was I ever cornered or accused of theft.
Occasionally I discovered bar soap in these bathrooms, which I chipped with my fingernails, shaving the bars unobtrusively into those pockets of my coat unoccupied by milk or paper.
In the mornings I would empty my pockets, dissolve the soap curls in hot water, and slick the liquid over my scalp, legs, and extremities, then proceed on my rounds, tapping the windows as I passed them to disperse the gulls that liked to stare in at my sandwiches.
Which is how it went while the milk held.
Animals Inside
They lived in terror of living animals. Animal blood and animal flesh alarmed and excited them. It didn’t help to install glass partitions in the rooms or fill empty corners with taxidermied specimens. Silence, stillness, the occasional snow of sawdust from tiny holes in old hide, these were good things, but not enough. Not reliable. More than once, in the black surface of a glass eye, they glimpsed reflected movement, a declining sun or a bending leaf. They dined in silent tension, in an atmosphere of seance, waiting to detect alternations of light and shade among the cutlery. Breeze shifted trees behind the partitions. In moments of doubt they resorted to tactics of absolute stillness, posture bolt upright and motionless, suspension of hand and eye until the period had ended. Walking in corridors was the safest activity, pacing and making noise, coming down hard on the floorboards. That was the daytime theory. Up and down with a good hard tread. At night it was better to pass unnoticed, so that any movement then was undertaken lightly, without candle, and sometimes they startled one another in the dark galleries, crying out and falling silent, recollecting themselves and buttoning their nightclothes, pretending the whole thing hadn’t happened, even backing up and reversing their footsteps slowly, without candle, until the galleries were again empty and the floors again silent. They had learned by trial and error not to light their way in any of the partitioned rooms—not to risk the glow of candlelight on the glass. How could they ignore the leaves pressed against it, or the eyes among them? It was bad enough when light twinkled in the eyes of the taxidermied specimens, which were therefore allowed to gather dust, so that in the mornings, when they sat among them eating breakfast, it was as if the animals had all gone blind and they could comfort themselves in the thought of invisibility. They could eat with vigor, at least for a time, if the conversation held out. A more elegant solution might have been to sit still long enough for the dust to cover their own eyes, but it never occurred to them to try. If anyone had suggested it, they would simply have pictured ways the experiment might fail, what might happen for instance if they shook their heads one day and the dust fell out, only for them to see animals walking inside.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Addison Zeller lives in Wooster, Ohio. His fiction appears in minor literature[s], Epiphany, Sleepingfish, Olney, and elsewhere.