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Refrigerator by Mari Ness
As long as the refrigerator contented itself with political commentary I was okay with it. When it compared various political figures to the things moldering inside itself I chuckled slightly; when it started complaining that it needed to show the United States the true meaning of an open door policy and the importance of revealing the truth, I reminded it that saving energy and environmental causes were important, too. It retorted that it had no wish to conceal my flaws just because I wanted to get laid. If I brought home a woman, it would open itself, and force her to look, and I'd have to deal with the results.
Luckily it never did go through with this threat, but then again, I rarely brought women home. This was something else the refrigerator started to comment on, in a hurt fashion. "Are you ashamed of me? Don't you want me to meet your friends?" "I'm just not ready to date," I said. "Well, that's a lie, anyway," said the refrigerator in a self-satisfied tone. "Or a partial lie." I told it that when I needed dating advice, which I didn't, my refrigerator would not be the first place I'd go to. "I should be," retorted the refrigerator. "Who else are you going to talk to? Humans? All they're going to do is confuse the hell out of you and make things worse. Trust me. Take their advice and you're considerably worse off." "And what the hell makes you an expert?" "I hold your food," the refrigerator said, in tones that were no doubt meant to sound all knowing and wise and superior, but actually came out clanging, giving the fridge a rather whiny sound. I put my hands up over my ears in protest. "You'll still hear me," it sang out, and it was right. I did. I started avoiding appliances as a matter of form, without even thinking about it. My coworkers never seemed to notice the way I dodged away from our microwave and coffee maker, the way I suddenly ordered out for lunch and made sure to order caffeinated drinks. I got the girl two cubicles down from me to start bringing me coffee. Other women in the office started giving me hard looks, and I heard a couple of mutters about sexual harassment --you always hear those sorts of things in our office, but I ignored them. That, I could handle. Literary criticism from the coffee pot, not so much. "I wish I could read," sighed my refrigerator. "There's never anything good on TV." "You made me watch the season finale of Lost." "Case in point. Can we watch Veronica Mars this season?" The coffee pot sniffed. Luckily, it rarely spoke. Luckily for it, that is. It was much easier to move – and destroy – than the refrigerator. Not that I didn't think about destroying the refrigerator sometimes, taking a huge axe to it and hacking it until it died, or at least until it whimpered and promised to stop criticizing my life. Once, I started to move it so I could unplug it, at least, and it let out a huge shriek of agony, a wail that rang though my ears and body, causing me to collapse to the floor, holding my head and emitting my own screams. I didn't try to move it after that, but I did head to Best Buy to take a look at other refrigerators. The store would, I thought, remove my refrigerator while delivering the new one, and I could stand in another room, away from the shrieks, the cries, the throbbing sounds that filled my brain, making me cry out in pain. I wouldn't need to be involved at all.
I ran my fingertips along the shiny surfaces of the new refrigerators, which stood there silent, unplugged, waiting. Would they, too, talk to me? I didn't know. I knew that sometimes I thought I heard other whispers, other murmurs from other appliances. Surely Jack's refrigerator had said something when he'd rescued some beer from its interior the other night. I opened a new refrigerator door, stared into its shiny silent interior, its spaces carefully designed for a family of four and their soda. Behind me, a washing machine whispered. Or maybe it didn't. I jumped anyway, and fled.
We watched Veronica Mars that night, or rather, I watched and the refrigerator, the coffee pot and the microwave listened. I'd turned the TV screen away from them. That had caused the microwave to make its first statement. "Coffee." In context, I wasn't sure what that meant, and I didn't dare ask. The refrigerator sighed, its rumblings filling the apartment and almost drowning out the sound of the TV. During commercials, it talked about the state of my checkbook. I wondered how it had found that out.
"You left your checkbook open on the kitchen counter," the refrigerator said helpfully. I made a mental note to try to conceal my private life from the kitchen. A few days later, the refrigerator suggested that I start dating again. It did not leave unspoken its observation that I had not brought anybody home – dates or friends – for four – no, six – months now. It complained, not softly, that it felt lonely. "You're a refrigerator," I said. "She doesn't have to be hot, you know. She just has to be somebody I can listen to." "Guys who are ready to date don't talk to their refrigerators. Or if they do, they take better care of them." That hushed the refrigerator for an hour. I heard it rumbling a bit, but with no distinguishable words, until it muttered something about Tom DeLay. I breathed a sigh of relief. We were back to our old footing. For a while. Until I really did bring home a woman, and then things went really bad.
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