Someone is trying really hard to give away a cardboard box in front of Sound Foods. They’re advertising it as a castle, or, alternatively, as toddler storage. Maybe they could hold on to their box and hitchhike to the transfer station. I once tried to pick up someone who was hitchhiking with a truck tire, but the tire was too big to fit in my trunk. But I could cram a box in beside all the things I’ve been meaning to take to Granny’s for a year.
We’ve been getting loads of spam calls. I get calls about a warranty on a car I don’t have, and that my account at a bank that doesn’t exist is overdrawn. The frequency of these calls must mean that the thin veil of reality that separates dimensions is breaking, and we’re receiving messages from an alternate timeline in which we all owe money.
And speaking of money troubles, someone’s dropped their brown wallet in the mud. If you find it, return it. Losing your wallet is so unmooring. Sometimes I have nightmares that my wallet’s been stolen and I have to cancel all my credit cards. I’m more relieved to wake up from those dreams than dreams about getting murdered.
To get even more grim, we’ve been talking about how many animals we’ve killed. So many people mourn the animals they’ve run over. And there are the animals we’ve harvested and hunted for food, such as the frogs people forked at the pond so they could eat their legs.
Then there are the pests we’ve killed because we are done with rats living in our car engine, and, no matter what everyone says, spraying the engine with lavender oil doesn’t keep them away. It just makes our car smell like someone opened a spa in a parking garage.
The power went out early Wednesday morning. People reported a loud boom followed by flashes in the sky before everything went dark. It’s aliens, obviously. They’re punishing us for not answering their robocalls.
When the power went out, our robot vacuums, unmoored from their chargers, rampaged around the house, and our fire alarms screamed. My toxic gas detector detected that its battery was low. I hunted it down behind the dryer and put it out of its misery.
I find it a little distressing that our appliances protest and rebel whenever the power goes out.
We discussed the best places to go to feed a donkey a carrot. If you get the chance, swing by the westside to feed Carlo, Shadow, and Taz.
Every week, another new escaped animal becomes a local celebrity. This week, it’s a loose dog. He’s been visiting a middle school teacher, riling up her dogs and disrupting her online classes. He’s also been spotted around the neighborhood, conspicuously pooping. If you catch him, get his autograph for me.
Sometimes the Beachcomber borrows our comments from social media in its articles about local issues. Whether we feel that’s journalistic malpractice or a valid way of gauging public sentiment, we can all agree that we miss the sheriff’s report. How else would we find out who’s been loitering at the gas station and whose bagpipes were stolen?
I for one would like the Beachcomber to stop harvesting our comments because they’re stealing my thunder.
Author: Anna Shomsky
I'm a former teacher and a data engineer living on Vashon Island. My writing has appeared in Five on the Fifth, Women on Writing and on the Post-Culture Podcast. I wrote and produced the radio show Whispers of Vashon for 101.9 KVSH. I’ve had short stories published in the anthologies Island Stories and Chicken Scratchings, as well as through the Open Space Literary Project.
