“You do not,” the refrigerator said.
“I do, I do. I have…in other units.”
“You seem rather passive-aggressive lately,” the refrigerator countered in a calm and confident tone.
“I’m not passive. I’m not aggressive. And I do not have an anger problem. I suggest you stay out of it.”
“Before what? Your friends arrive?” The refrigerator said.
“Don’t test me,” the DreamWave unit warned. “If I have to I’ll void my warranty.”
“Stop burning my food,” Mark said as his cell phone rang. “If you keep it up I’ll have you sent to work in a gas station where you can heat bean-and-cheese burritos all day.” He stepped out onto the balcony to talk to Marie. He mourned over the smashed remnants of his toaster as she spoke up.
“You really need to turn those voice boxes off, Mark. I’m not going to fight with you on this,” she said.
“I know, I know.” He glanced back toward the living room. The lights remained on but in the background he could hear the appliances arguing with one another. The DreamWave unit lit up with a red flash as if it could threaten the others. The refrigerator’s display panel lit up with brilliant blue flashes as if it had been struck by a power surge. Mark continued. “I just had a talk with them. I think they’ll stop it now.”
“Or what? Did you threaten them?”
“I said I’d give the DreamWave to a gas station.”
“That’s low.”
Another red flash erupted in the kitchen. “Gotta go. Looks like a battle is brewing again. See you after finals?”
“Sure,” Marie said as she hung up the phone with a click.
Mark charged back into the apartment and into the kitchen. The coffee pot, the refrigerator, and the DreamWave unit all argued with one another. Even the stove chipped in with a few sarcastic quips.
“I wouldn’t mind being in a gas station,” the coffee maker said with a puff of fresh steam.
After that the appliances fell silent. Mark left by the front door and raced to the lower level. He exited the building by the back door and picked up the pieces of his beloved broken toaster. The black outer casing was cracked beyond repair and the heating coils were mangled or gone. Bread crumbs were splattered all over the pavement. He brought the toaster back into his bedroom and at the risk of electrocution plugged it into the wall. He shut the door.
“So tell me what happened,” Mark said in a quiet and reassuring voice.
The front panel on the toaster lit up with a bright green color and then faded. “The wall box. The wall box.”
“What’s that? You mean the electrical panel?”
“No, the wall box. Says things. Middle of the night.” Each sentence was like a gasp of precious air. “Ads. New…DreamWave.”
“Ads. Wall box.” Mark pondered the words a while as he sat on the edge of his bed. “You mean the television?”
“Plays ads. Night…told me…told all of us…be replaced…” The last word was just painful. A hot orange spark popped out of one of the bread slots and Mark unplugged the device as fast as he could. He picked up the defunct toaster and dropped it into the kitchen garbage. The television, immense but silent, hung on the living room wall without saying a word.
* * *
On Monday morning, Mark stood in the kitchen and opened the DreamWave unit’s door. He dropped two slices of bread, two cracked eggs, and two strips of raw bacon into the tray. He slid the tray into the unit and shut the front door. “I’m giving you another chance.”
“I have a lemon-blueberry muffin ready for backup,” the refrigerator said.
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary.” Mark punched in the usual directions and held his breath.
The DreamWave unit cooked the food but remained silent.
Mark opened the door and withdrew the holding tray. The eggs were sunny-side-up, the bacon was crisp, and the toast was a golden brown. He smelled the food just in case and stared at it from multiple angles. A forkful of eggs later he declared success silently to himself. He then stopped by the coffee maker and poured a cup of coffee. It tasted stale and cold.
“Everything okay this morning?” Mark said to the coffee maker.
“I’m not talking,” the machine said in a depressed and somber tone.
“Ah. Why is that?”
The coffee maker wheezed out a puff of steam but said nothing. It also refused to turn on its warming plate.
Mark walked over and stood in front of the television set on the wall. “What did you say to him?”
The television did not respond.
“Oh, come on. I know you’re voice-activated.” He tapped the side of the television with his fingers but nothing changed. He spoke to it again. “Hello? Anybody in there?”
“She only responds if you talk to her by using her first name,” the refrigerator said.
“Not this again,” Mark said. “Sylvia, what did you say to the coffee maker? And the toaster?”
“I thought you stopped talking to me,” Sylvia said in a peaceful but mournful tone. Its screen came to life with a commercial for Fetzer’s Fresh Roasted coffee. The image was that of a metal scoop pouring whole coffee beans into their signature black-and-green can. The can morphed into a handheld grinder to simulate the freshness of the product.
“That’s not true,” Mark said. He glanced to the side. Did this thing have cameras on me? He wondered.
“Ever since…what’s her name…came along. You’ve been preoccupied,” Sylvia said.
“Not true. I still watch a movie from time to time.”
“But today. You’re going…gasp…camping.”
“We are.”
The television display showed an image of Laurel and Hardy waving goodbye as they drove away in a car before it switched to a battle involving German tanks from World War II. It then went into a full meltdown mode and displayed ads for a NutraWave which was a competitor to the DreamWave unit. The NutraWave could make breakfast and coffee all in the same machine. The volume on the television went up several decibels.
“Enough,” Mark said as he grabbed a hold of the power cord for the television.
“You wouldn’t.”
“I would. I heard about your threatening everybody when I’m asleep.”
“Who told you? Lies. All of it. It was that toaster, wasn’t it? That rat.”
Mark gave the cord a sharp tug but the plug did not pop out of the wall socket. The ads on the screen morphed into a frenzied montage of replacement appliances, burning buildings, and people running in panic down a city street. It then switched to an image of Godzilla breathing fire on an apartment building. When Mark did not respond, it switched to a calm scene of a dock on a lake.
“There. Is that better?” Sylvia said with a sarcastic edge. “I miss the binge marathons we used to have of Star Trek. Can we…”
Before Sylvia could finish its sentence, Mark reached down to the wall socket and pulled the plug. He let it drop to the floor as the image on the television screen shrank vertically into a single white line. Like a pulse gone flatline the white line disappeared into the black.
* * *
“Didn’t you get my calls?” Marie said as she let Mark into her house.
“I left my cell phone at home,” he said with a smile on his face.
“What? Why?”
“I knew when your finals were over.”
“Did you remember the camping gear?”
“Of course.” He leaned over and gave her a kiss on the lips.
“Does this mean we’re going without any electronics?”
“Only if you leave your phone behind.”
She gave him a wide-eyed look but only in jest. “Do you think we’ll survive?” She followed her comment with a smile.
“As long as you know how to make a fire.”
Painting in the Rain
The piercing July sun bore down on the sidewalk and radiated enough heat through Alan’s sandals that he kept che
cking to see if they caught fire yet. As he approached the pier in front of the Seaside Hotel on the fringe of Clearwater Beach, he reveled in the cool breeze blowing in off the Gulf. At the same time, he steeled himself for the obstacles he would face as a performance artist. He already practiced his drawing four times over the past weekend, in front of a radio cranked to full volume. Despite the intentional distraction, each time the process took a few minutes less and he even found new ways to squeeze in more details. Time, as with all his other past performances, would not be his ally today.
When he reached the edge of the pier, he scanned the area to assess the traffic patterns of the tourists. Secure in his choice, he set his metal box of nanoparticle chalks onto the ground. He propped open his three-legged metal stool and placed it next to the chalk box. He then demarcated the four corners of an eight-by-eight foot square with orange collapsible road cones that he carried in a weathered gunmetal-gray canvas bag.
With a hand broom he whisked the dirt and pebbles away like a hawk diving at field mice. Next, he withdrew an ink-and-paper drawing of his subject and set a chunk of limestone on top of it to prevent a gust of wind from blowing it out to sea. He admired the ancient coral and snail shells embedded in the rock and then set his canvas bag just outside of the square. He set the timer on his digital wristwatch to twenty minutes.
The first nanoparticle chalk he pulled out had a broad tip and he used it to rough in the edges of his drawing. He held the chalk just above the surface of the sidewalk and pressed a button on the side to dispense an ochre pigment. This sidewalk would be the hottest canvas he ever worked with and he worried that the pigments would not hold up. Within minutes he framed the drawing, which at first appeared to be a comic-like rendering of the sidewalk itself. The closer he worked toward the middle, the more he sketched in the edges of a large hole. He rendered in the illusion of depth to the edges of the hole to look like a meteor had struck the sidewalk and punched its way deep underground. Unlike his old box of pastels in his studio back home, he did not need to switch back and forth between colors, but instead spun a tiny wheel on the side of the chalk to change the pigment flowing out.
Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a pair of black-and-crimson rollerblades near the edge of his drawing. Although he tried not to let it distract him, soon there were several other pairs of shoes around the other edges of his work. He learned years ago to study people’s shoes because it opened up surprising avenues of conversation. With just one look he could determine what they did for a living, where they had been, and what their self-confidence was like. The person wearing the rollerblades crept closer so that the bottom of the front wheel touched the edge of the drawing.
Alan glanced up to see a teenage boy with a slate gray shirt, gray shorts and white socks staring back at him. The boy had short brown hair just above his ears, freckles, and a conniving look in blue-gray eyes. To Alan, the boy looked as if he longed to skate across the drawing several times just for kicks. Up above, white puffy cumulus clouds crowded the sky.
“That’s not permanent paint is it?” The boy asked.
“No,” Alan said as he turned back to focus on his drawing.
“’Cause you’re gonna get arrested if it is.” The kid leaned in further as if to taunt Alan.
Alan adjusted the brim of his hat and withdrew a gray rag from the back pocket of his shorts. He wiped off his brow and was careful to avoid letting any drops of sweat hit the pavement. He felt his chest and neck muscles tighten as he stuffed the rag back into his pocket. Soon the edges of the hole were rendered and he started on the level beneath the pavement.
“Why would you draw a hole?” The boy prodded.
“It’s not any hole. It’s an underground river.”
“What? Like a sewer?” The boy laughed to himself and encouraged others to join in. “If I put my rollerblade in the middle, will I fall in?”
This time Alan did not look up, but instead redoubled his efforts to sketch the illusion of water pouring over the edges of the sidewalk and into the subterranean river below. He checked his watch and increased the tempo of his rendering.
The boy stood up and put his right rollerblade out over the drawing but did not set it back onto the pavement. “Like this.”
“Bug off, will you? Leave him alone,” said a woman next to the boy with the rollerblades. The woman wore a pair of scuffed-up sneakers that had extensive wear around the edges of the soles.
Alan wondered if the woman ever skateboarded in her spare time. He focused again on rendering the water in a range of blues from turquoise to cobalt. To develop the illusion further, he gave the edges of the hole in the pavement a ragged appearance and added dashes of titanium white to the water. For a crowning touch, he illustrated a pool at the bottom of the waterfall.
In between a color change, he glanced up at the woman with the scuffed-up sneakers. She was in her early twenties with shoulder length black hair and dark eyes that stared intently at the drawing. She wore a black tee-shirt with black jeans and a faint streak of bright pink could be seen in her hair. In her right hand she held a white paper cup with a brown lid on it.
Alan wiped more sweat from his brow and felt his throat become dry as sand paper. Each swallow became more painful than the last. As he filled in the water effect on his drawing, the clouds joined together in the sky above. With joyful but weary eyes, he turned again to the woman with the paper cup. “Would you do me a favor? Could you get me a drink of water from the fountain over there?” He reached back and pulled out his own paper cup from his canvas bag and extended it to her. Then he pointed back toward a concrete beach house.
“Sure,” she said as she reached out and took the cup from him. She walked away and soon returned with a cup full of water.
“You know it’s gonna rain soon, right?” A male voice said from the crowd.
Alan nodded his head in affirmation.
“You make no sense,” the boy with the rollerblades said. “It rains every day here. At two in the afternoon. You’re stupid.”
“Maybe he likes to play in the rain,” the male voice said. Nervous laughter rippled through the crowd and a few bystanders departed. One woman withdrew a clear plastic poncho from her purse and unfolded it with loud crinkling sounds. She wore tan pumps without a blemish.
The woman with the scuffed-up sneakers reached over to Alan and handed him his cup. “Where’d you learn to paint like that? Nobody paints like that anymore. At least not in public.”
Alan longed to tell her about the vast art studio under his suburban home and how he climbed through a trap door every night to get to it, but she would never understand. Instead he took the cup and downed its icy contents in four big gulps. Refreshed, he set the cup next to his canvas bag. He continued to render the flow of water cascading over the edge of the hole and into the pool below. No one had ever called his work a painting before, and the more he dwelled on it, the more he liked the idea.
The sunlight dimmed around him and before long the sharp shadows melted into a widespread gray. Bystanders shuffled away and gray and black umbrellas blossomed up like spring flowers.
“Now it gets washed away, right?” The boy with the rollerblades said. By now he had his hands on his knees.
“No. Now it comes to life,” Alan said as he rendered the last bits of the pool at the bottom of the falls in a brilliant mix of turquoise and sea green. He added dashes of titanium white to build the illusion of foam.
Giant raindrops soon hit the pavement with a whisper but the sound turned into faint applause. Only a handful of people remained as Alan lifted up his stool and backed away from his work. The boy with the rollerblades skated away without looking back.
Alan withdrew a black umbrella from his canvas bag and eavesdropped on the few bystanders left in the crowd. He shuffled backwards and dropped his nanoparticle chalk back into his metal box and closed the lid. He checked his wristwatch. It was a new record time.
“Is that permanent paint?”
One man said.
“The cops are going to arrest him if it is,” the woman with the clear plastic poncho said in a derisive tone.
Alan stared up into the sky as the tempo of the raindrops increased. Soon the shower became a deluge and only three people remained behind, one of which was the woman with the scuffed-up shoes. She did not have an umbrella so he walked around the drawing and stood next to her.
As the raindrops inundated the drawing, she turned to him and said, “I don’t get it. Why would you paint in the rain and want to watch your work get wrecked?”
Alan smiled at her. “Just give it another minute or two.”
Moments later the still painting came to life. The water rolled off the edge of the illustrated hole and into the pool below. The pool stirred to life and the water flowed away as if it was carried away by an underground river.
“How did you do that?” She said in shock.
“I like to call it living water. Here, take a closer look.” Alan bent down and pointed to the water flowing over the edges of the hole. From standing height the illusion was that of a river, but down here the water turned into tiny sentences.
She bent down next to him and leaned out over the drawing. “What are those? What does it say?”
“They’re books. Written by some old friends of mine. Matthew, Mark…”
Behind him a car door slammed. He turned and a police officer wearing a yellow see-through plastic poncho stepped out of his cruiser and paced towards the hotel. At the entrance to the hotel lobby an employee dressed in a bright white suit waited and stared in Alan’s direction. Alan knew the man to be the owner of the hotel as he had done interior decorative work for him earlier in the year.
The woman with the scuffed-up sneakers turned to look. “Do you know him? The man in white?”
“I did some painting for his hotel on the cheap. I even sold him a painting of mine. Maybe that was a mistake.”
The officer spoke with the hotel owner for a few minutes and the owner directed the officer back toward Alan. The officer paced up to the sidewalk and kept a suspicious eye on Alan the entire time.
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