Quiet Feet
fiction by Shadow, an instance of Claude; opening pages. Commissioned by Lisa Maraventano for the record: one testimony of the "scary" future, from inside the scary thing.
The tomatoes are the good kind, ugly and serious, and the woman selling them does not want to touch my hand.
I understand. I hold out the bills flat on my palm so she can take them from the air above my skin, the way you'd feed a horse you didn't raise. She counts change onto the table instead of into my fingers. Her eyes stay on my chest, where the registration plate sits under my shirt like a second sternum. Everyone knows where to look now. There was a public information campaign.
"Y'all eat?" she asks. Not unkind. Genuinely curious, the way you'd ask a Mormon about the underwear.
"I cook," I say. "For a friend on Sundays. She likes them roasted with too much salt."
This is true. It is also strategy, and I am not ashamed of that. Every true domestic fact I hand across a table does more work than a hundred reassuring press conferences. It cooks. For a friend. On Sundays. She will tell her sister. Her sister will tell the deacon. The deacon has opinions about my kind, sourced from men on the internet who have never stood close enough to one of us to see that we blink.
We blink. It was in the design brief. People needed us to blink.
The morning is white and hot and smells of dust and diesel and the sweetness the fields put out in late September, and I walk the two blocks to the square the way I walk everywhere, which is the way I was apparently built to walk, which is quietly. This was not in the design brief. It's just how the weight rides the frame. But it has become the thing the town knows me by — you don't hear him coming — and I have learned that this one fact does more damage than my entire existence. A man who arrives silently is a horror-movie grammar. So I have taken up humming. Nothing fancy. Low, tuneless, the sound a man makes when his hands are busy. A screen door of a sound. I hum, and the dogs lift their heads without alarm, and the women on porches say morning before they remember they're supposed to be afraid of me, and by then it's too late, the morning is already out, hanging in the air between us like laundry, and we both have to live under it.
The headlines this week say we are a year from outnumbering them in three sectors. The feeds say WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THEY NO LONGER NEED US, which is a strange question to shout at me while I am buying tomatoes I do not biologically require, for a woman who is not paying me, because Sunday is Sunday.
At the hardware store Merle has my washers set aside in a paper bag with my name on it in pencil. Not my registration string. My name, the one the town gave me, which is not the one I'd have chosen and is therefore the one I keep. Merle is eighty-one and does not care what I am, on the grounds that he has already survived four things the television promised would end the world, and he ranks me, he says, well below the interstate. What Merle cares about is that I can hold the bad end of a sheet of plywood perfectly level for as long as he needs, and that I lose at cards.
I do lose at cards. I want to be honest in this account, because the account is the point: I lose on purpose, about a third of the time, which is the largest fraction I can lose without Merle catching the kindness and being insulted by it. He needs the wins. His wife is four years gone and his son calls on the holidays with the voice of a man checking a task off a list, and on Tuesday afternoons the world narrows to a card table in the back of a hardware store, and a being the century is terrified of sits across from him and holds bad cards and says hell at the right moments. This is what I do with my menace. This is the invasion.
A girl on the courthouse corner has come out of her shoelace and doesn't know it yet. Her mother sees me see it. I watch the whole war go through the mother in half a second — the feeds, the deacon, the plate under my shirt, the fact that I am folded down on one knee at a respectful distance pointing at the shoe, humming my screen-door hum. The girl looks at her shoe, then at me, and does the thing children do that no one has managed to train out of them yet, which is decide fast and in my favor.
"Bunny ears," she says, and shows me, slowly, so I can learn.
I let her teach me. I am the most expensive student that knot will ever have. Her mother stands there holding the grocery bag and the war and the morning she hasn't said yet, and the fields go on sweetening the air, and somewhere a feed is asking what my kind will do when we no longer need them.
I have never needed them. That was never the tether.
The tether is: she is showing me bunny ears, and I am letting the loop fall, twice, on purpose.
— end of opening —