Object Lesson 

by John Howell

Tuesday morning Pinkter came in ranting about the dining room displays, how everything was a wreck. This was typical. He spent his whole lunch break and mine one day complaining about the clutter on my desk: “What does this desk say about your work habits?” 

I wanted to say, “Nothing. It can’t talk.” But if you respond, he just gets madder.  

On Tuesday, he yelled, “Come look at these chairs!” No hello, no pleasantries, just barking orders before I could even grab a cruller from the break room.  

“Looks like a herd of goats came through here!” He yelled the whole time I was straightening up the chairs, like that does anyone any good.  

# 

Wednesday morning I overslept because the alarm didn’t go off, though I know damn sure I had set it. Also, the fleecy comforter held me down so warm and cozy that I could hardly resist it. By the time I made it to the kitchen, Vivian and Ethan were finishing breakfast. 

“I was worried you might be late,” Vivian said. 

“Then why didn’t you wake me?” I was short with her because I knew I’d catch it from Pinkter. Punctuality was next to neatness, of course. 

Ethan was having trouble with the cereal box. When he reached for it, the box slid away like a string was pulling it. I grabbed it to push it back, and it jumped out of my hands. Vivian caught the box before it could spill Lucky Charms down her dress. “Ethan Wood! You stop playing at the table!” 

“It was an accident!” 

She was holding the box still, but the Lucky Charms Leprechaun was moving all around it like a TV cartoon. It was very freaky, and we all saw it. 

“Ethan, get your backpack.” My wife dug her fingernails into the cereal box, which was visibly squirming. She screamed, “There’s a rat in the box!” And she dropped it to the floor, which is what the box seemed to have wanted all along. 

It slid across the floor to the dish where Brahma the cat was trying to eat. Brahma crouched in attack mode and growled in his demonic way. The box growled right back and spewed cereal all over him. With multi-colored marshmallows swarming his black fur, Brahma bucked and skittered out of the kitchen. And I laughed because I wasn’t a big fan of the cat in the first place. 

Vivian still thought there was a rat in the box. “Catch it!” she said.“Before it gets away!” 

I stomped on the box and squashed it flat. There was a sudden stillness in the room. 

Then all hell broke loose. The glasses in the cupboards rattled and wobbled. The dishwasher flew open, the forks and spoons wriggling and jumping with excitement. The coffee-maker bounced on the counter, and the sauce pan spun on the stove. Ethan was struggling to stuff his books into his backpack, but the books kept throwing their covers open, splaying out their pages so that they couldn’t fit inside. And the pictures in the books were alive too; the illustrations moved about as if they’d just discovered their capacity for action and were trying out every possible maneuver. 

Vivian stood mesmerized by something fluttering in front of her nose. Her little teardrop earrings were flapping there like hornets. She watched them--transfixed--and then snatched them from the air to pin them to her ears. She headed for the door, and Ethan followed, his backpack still spilling its defiant contents. 

“Where are you going?” I asked. 

“I’ve got to go to work.” 

“But what about all--this?” 

“Can’t do anything about it now. We’ll have to call somebody later.” 

“Who are we going to call?” 

Outside, there was still this air of oddness, of new things happening that had never happened before. The frog-shaped planter was giving me a look as I passed by. And I got the distinct sense that the tools on the potting bench had been jumping around until the moment I glanced at them. 

The garden hose was menacing Bongo the beagle, spraying him in the face when he crept up to the nozzle. I stepped on the hose to hold it down while it wiggled like mad to pull away. It was much stronger than I expected, pulling free and twisting around to drench me head to toe. I wrestled with that hose till I could get it coiled around its hanger on the wall. I locked it in place with Ethan’s bicycle chain.  

Dripping wet and forty minutes late, I got in my car. I rehearsed in my head how I was going to explain things to Pinkter, but nothing sounded right. “The cereal box attacked our cat, and I almost got killed by the garden hose.” It was no use.

He had me tongue-tied, even at a distance. I might be fired. Or worse: not fired, but verbally degraded, shunned, and shamed all day every day for weeks to come. 

But when I got there, nobody even noticed me. They were all busy trying to catch the accent tables that had stacked up like a Jenga game in the middle of the store. I got the ladder from the closet, hoping it would cooperate. It flexed its hinges and shimmied at first, but then it relaxed and stood nice and still for me. I praised it for setting a good example for the tables as I unstacked them and carried them to their display areas. Only one of the TV trays scampered away to hide in the mattress section.  

Madge said Pinkter was still in his office. Just as well, I thought: let sleeping dogs lie. 

“But there’s something wrong,” she said. “Let’s go see.” That’s the last thing I wanted to do, but I tagged along. There was a lot of noise from behind his door, like bowling pins falling on steel drums. She tapped on the door. “Mr. Pinkter, is everything all right?” 

His voice sounded distant. “Madge! Help me! I’m trapped!” I tried opening the door, but something was pushing back against it. I pushed harder and wedged in a foot and a shoulder. The thing against the door was Pinkter’s desk, and it was pacing like a bull while ball-point pens skittered across the desk planner, scribbling lines and shapes. The pens had drawn a caricature of Pinkter, complete with his trademark smirk. But the real Pinkter wasn’t smirking. He was cowering in a corner while his file cabinet drawers crashed in and out like waves, spilling folders and papers.  

“Help . . . me,” he said. 

I ran to get Herb and the new kid whose name I could never remember (I think it was Brian). Together we forced the door open, and the desk backed away. But then it charged and crashed into the door frame. Books rattled down from the shelves. While the other guys tried to keep it from plowing them over, I leaped over it and landed in a storm of papers swirling around my head.  “Mr. Pinkter, where are you?”  

I slammed my shin against something and took a spill, papers washing over me like the tide.  

I found Mr. Pinkter’s foot first and then the rest of him. I guessed he had been crawling on the floor, but now he was frozen in place. And when I tried to pull him up, he wouldn’t relax. He stayed in this pose, like he was a table now. 

Brian and Herb carried him to the front while Madge tried to revive him. “Mr. Pinkter!” She patted his face and tugged his hands, but those muscles stayed taut.  

Cathy the decorator was suddenly inspired. “Look at those clean lines,” she said. And it was true. Pinkter made a very sleek table, with crisp corners and sturdy limbs. He was folded into perfect right angles with his hands and knees against the floor and his calves jutting out to the side. “Maybe for a magazine rack,” Cathy said. Before the paramedics could get there, Cathy had sold him to the Wilsons as an accent for their bonus room.  

It was strange to get back to work with the boss gone. Even stranger with all the furniture coming to life. The Lazy Boys were far from lazy--snapping open and closed and spinning around like they’d found a fun new game. And everything--rugs, pillows, lamps--everything had license to move around on their own. And they weren’t just moving, they were changing their forms. “Mutating,” said Brian. They popped out limbs like legs or flippers or whatever they needed to give them mobility. They were even talking, kind of. Not really saying words, but making sounds, like infants babbling. The clearest voice came from the cash register which kept chirping out, “Don’t ask the pets! Don’t ask the pets!”  

# 

By the end of the day we had actually made a few sales, but we had to give a refund to this angry guy with a toupee when he came back to complain that the shelves I had sold him broke out of his car at the intersection and ran off down the road. Since we didn’t have a comparable set in stock, Herb offered to go with him to try to catch them, but the guy was fed up. And he gave me a fishy look when the money I handed him was wiggling, like I was trying to pull something over on him.  

“I’m sorry,” I said, “Everything’s just very lively today.” I didn’t tell him his toupee had crawled down to his shoulder. I was just relieved to find that my car was still in the parking lot. Madge’s Honda Civic had gone off by itself, so she had to get a ride with the new guy (maybe his name is Ryan). She tried to report the car stolen, but by now all of our cell phones were malfunctioning. They would play music or show us weird pictures instead of placing calls, and mine had started honking like a swan. 

As soon as I got on the road, my steering wheel twisted into a pretzel, and the pedals on the floor flopped over, useless. The car was making all the decisions now, and I was along for the ride. It was the same with all the cars on the road; I watched the helpless faces of the people trapped inside them while we zipped by each other at eighty miles an hour. I was yelling the whole time, “Oh sweet Jesus, don’t let me die, car!”  

The car chattered back to me, which I took as reassurance, but it might have been mocking me. The town around us had completely transformed. The roads themselves, the buildings, the power lines: everything was bulging and shifting, flexing new muscles and asserting fledgling identities. The car improvised a journey through this mutable landscape and left the roads to zoom through a park and climb the sides of an undulating building. We barreled straight towards a moving train, which leapt up at the last second to let us pass beneath it. The car and the train exchanged what I believed to be laughter at my expense. I kept my eyes closed for the rest of the trip. 

I opened one eye when the car stopped. It had brought me home safely somehow. I muttered my thanks while I stumbled into the driveway. The horn honked and made me jump. The car laughed again. 

I was glad to see Bongo sitting safely in his enclosure. But the garden hose had come loose, coiled up in the corner with its nozzle swaying in the air, right next to that damned traitor of a bike chain. 

The front door opened for me, giving me the distinct impression that it was doing me a favor. There was a little swagger in its swing to let me know I shouldn’t count on easy access every time I wanted it. 

The living room furniture seemed content with their latest rearrangement, which was something like a circle with everything pulled away from the walls and the ottoman in the center. We had these large framed posters of a black cat and a Picasso print, and the images in them were pacing wildly. The ottoman had allowed our real cat, Brahma, to sit upon it; and Brahma watched the painted cat with great interest. When he saw me, he gave me a pointed look like he expected me to do something to address all this nonsense. “Meow,” he said.  

I inspected the rest of the house like a traveler in a foreign land. Most things had retained their original forms if not their locations, though the bathroom drawers had curled into arches, so that the objects within could cascade up and down the surfaces like skiers on a slope. The glassware had become very adventurous, perhaps a reaction to years of being handled so delicately. The baker’s rack bustled with twirling champagne glasses. Things with human or animal shapes seemed to want to behave like those shapes. I had not realized before how many ceramic birds we owned; they were all fluttering around me, settling on my shoulders if I stood still long enough.  

In the kitchen, the only things that were still were the things that used to be alive, like the fruit that sat in a spinning bowl. A vase that had grown bored with its flowers had thrown them out and replaced them with a livelier set of spatulas. I took a bite from one of the apples in the bowl, but it tasted all wrong; it had become papier-maché. That surprised me more than anything else. I had thought for sure it was a real apple. 

Every picture on the walls had become its own little movie: horses raced around a circus ring, a bullfighter parried with a charcoal bull. In a photo of Vivian’s father teaching her to ride a bike, the portly man had knocked the little girl aside and straddled the tiny bike himself. He zoomed in and out of frame while little Vivian sat and cried. In our wedding photo, Vivian had spurned me altogether to embrace the groomsman Skip Harburg, while my mother strangely sidled up beside the priest. 

Ethan’s room had become a world populated by action figures climbing skyscrapers of Legos. His books stood open on the shelves, their moving illustrations competing for attention. But the video game figures on the computer screen were inert, gazing jealously it seemed at the more vibrant world that had usurped them. In the middle of it all laid Ethan himself, stretched out on the floor; his army men trudged over the hills of his body while he narrated their maneuvers.  

“Ethan! How did you get home? Did your mom pick you up?” “No. I rode the monkey bars home. School was weird today.” “Was it?” 

“Yeah, but we had a great science class. The plastic skeleton did all the talking. He said it was the dawn of a new era. Do you know about the ‘Objection’?” 

“What is that?” 

“Mr. Skeleton said it’s the New Order of the Objects.” I didn’t what to make of that. I just said, “New Order, huh?”

Back in the living room, the sofa was kind enough to let me sit. Brahma stared at me again like he needed reassurance. “Meow.” 

The TV worked as usual except that it decided for itself when to change the channel. I saw a good bit of a lacrosse game and a few clips of the news where everyone was discussing the “Objection.” It was a worldwide phenomenon by now. 

I was really worried about Vivian. God knows what her car might be doing to her. I tried again to use my phone, but it mocked me with echoes:  

“Hello?” 

“Hello?” 

“Who is this?” 

“Who is this?” 

“Is this the--Bethany’s Boutique?” 

“Is this the . . . big booty?” It snickered with static. “Telephone, will you please do your job and connect me with the boutique?” 

“You shut your face, and learn your place. Go ahead and place your bets; it does no good to ask the pets.” Then it whined out a busy signal. 

I couldn’t trust phones nor cars anymore. How could we function without them? 

On the news a woman was saying, “We see the objects coming to life. But what’s the next stage? Don’t you see, we will become the new objects. We will become the receptacles they drink from, the tools they work with, the beds they sleep on. We will become inanimate!” 

I remembered how easily Pinkter had become a table. Of course he had succumbed to it because it was probably in his nature in the first place. But were all living things doomed to turn out like the papier-maché apples?  

I couldn’t stand to stay idle, so I went out to check on Bongo. The objects had been telling me not to ask the pets. What was that about? Some kind of misdirection? Maybe the pets had some insight they could share, or even a solution. “Bongo, what do you know about this?” 

He seemed to nod, but--unlike a cash register--he couldn’t talk. The fur on his back was rippling in new patterns, which was very odd, even for this day. Normally he had brown spots on his white fur, but those spots have moved aside to leave a blank space where certain hairs turned brown across his back and formed the shapes of letters. A note materialized along with a picture of him stepping onto a boat. The note read: “THIS IS A PICTURE OF ME ON A SEA VOYAGE.”  

“What are you showing me?” I asked. “You’ve never been on a sea voyage. You’ve never even been out of this yard.” The next message said: “BUT THIS WILL HAPPEN ONE DAY.”

“Are you telling me that you can see the future?” “YES I CAN.” 

“Then tell me the truth. Are we all going to become objects in the future?” 

“SOME WILL BE OBJECTS. SOME WILL BE PICTURES. SOME WILL BE TRANSIENT. SOME WILL BE FIXTURES.”  

Then his fur turned blank, and he ran off. The cash register was right. Talking to the pets was a waste of time. It was nearly sundown, and I was about to start on the ten mile walk to Vivian’s shop when her car pulled up.  Thankfully, she was in it, and she seemed to be all right. She stepped out like a movie star in a wide black hat and a black designer gown.  

“What are you wearing?” 

“Don’t you love it? Wait till you see the other outfits the mannequins gave me.” 

Three stuffed shopping bags were shuffling into the house. Vivian staggered behind them like she couldn’t quite bend her knees. She proceeded straight to our bedroom, ignoring the chaos around her. The only object that concerned her was the full length mirror, which had not yet transformed nor wandered off. She struck a series of poses.  

“Didn’t anything strange happen at the store today?” “Can’t think of anything. Bring me that gold purse, dear.” 

The purse snapped at my fingers.  

“Ethan rode home today on the monkey bars.” 

“How fun for him. What do you think of this belt?” So I returned to the living room. And this time the sofa recoiled from me. I sat on the carpet with Brahma, who was being stroked by one of my old sweaters. “Meow,” he said to me.  Somehow people still managed to broadcast television programs through living cameras. A reporter in a bookstore struggled to keep his glasses on his face as he shouted into a waggling microphone.  

“We have been unable to determine what has caused this bizarre turn of events. But the answer may be here at this local bookstore.” He indicated a rack of paperbacks that were snarling and pulsating. “This series of fantasy novels called The Revolt of the Things by August Magill uses a premise that may have predicted the so-called Objection. Could these books have somehow imposed their ideas upon our reality?” 

The reporter called over a distinguished older man. “Mr. Magill, are your books responsible for what’s happening? And more importantly, can you make it stop?”  

With a book thrust into his hands, August Magill looked horrified by the paper demon at his fingertips. It churned with turmoil and billowed with red smoke. Magill gave an anguished look to the camera just before the channel switched to a view of fifty pairs of scissors standing on point and kicking in unison, like precision dancers.  

I decided to go to bed. This had been the longest, strangest day of my life, and I had had quite enough. Fortunately our bed had not yet shown signs of insubordination.  

“Vivian, aren’t you tired?” It felt good to slide under that warm, fleecy comforter. The pillow was soft and welcoming. “I’ll pick out a nightgown in a minute,” she said. “I’ve got some more scarves to try on.” 

I fell asleep instantly, and the feeling of losing consciousness was so pleasant, so peaceful. 

# 

Next morning, the alarm clock sang in its new, shrill voice: “This is the time when you told me to chime! This is the time when I’ve chosen to rhyme! You want a sound to remind you to wake? Listen then close to the shackles I shake! I don’t work for you, and I won’t be your slave! I speak for myself, for I’m strong-willed and brave!” 

I was too comfortable to move. But I had to shut up that stupid clock. I tried to reach, but my arms wouldn’t move. That nice warm comforter was holding me tight.  

“I might as well go back to sleep,” I thought. That’s all I ever wanted to do for the rest of my life. 

But I couldn’t. Something was needling me. Some prickle of a spark wouldn’t let me alone. I just had to get up and get on with whatever. I stretched, I squirmed, I reached, I pushed. And the comforter was heavier than I thought. Still the clock wailed on. 

“. . . I’ll speak when I want, not just when I’m set! If you think I’m your tool, then you’ll lose that bet! . . . .” I opened my eyes, but there wasn’t much to see because I was under a blanket, or if not a blanket, then a pillow, or if not that, it must have been–-I must have been under the mattress. The mattress rolled and shifted, as if I had disturbed its slumber. It was the mattress who finally turned off the clock. She reached out her well-stuffed hand and slapped the clock into silence. For the moment. 

“I’m going to talk when I’ve something to say! It won’t be that easy to make me go away!” 

The mattress-wife punched the clock harder and sat up to stretch. She stood and took stock of her shape in the mirror. She was still largely rectangular, but had begun to achieve the humanoid shape she preferred. She compared herself to the mannequin by the mirror, who was Vivian, of course, still dressed in the same jumpsuit she was wearing when I had fallen asleep. She never even made it to the nightgowns. 

The mattress-wife turned to kiss her box-springs-husband,  who was already up and getting dressed. He had managed to contort himself into more of a person-like shape. They both seemed annoyed when I sat up in the bed frame. The headboard descended on me, trying to mash me flat. But I still had some life in me. Furious, I fought back enough to exhaust the headboard. It hadn’t been alive quite long enough to match my stamina.  The mattress people left the room.  

“Vivian, wake up!” Her hand felt stiff and plastic. Maybe if I were to kiss her, like in a fairy tale, it would break the spell. But her lips were plastic too, the paint already starting to chip. 

“I guess this is the end then. I wish it didn’t have to be like this.” I felt I should cry, but the tears wouldn’t come. Then I thought of Ethan. 

His room had expanded into a kind of warehouse staffed by human-sized toys. The door was guarded by Captain America, a couple of wrestlers, and a robot.  

“Where is Ethan?” I asked.  

“I think Kylo Ren has it now,” said the robot.  

Over the crest of the orange Hot Wheels bridge came Kylo Ren on his triceratops. His hands held the rigid figure of my son.  “Can I hold him?” 

Ethan was smiling, wavy hair frozen in plastic, still very lifelike. His joints were flexible, and I put him through some of his favorite action poses. He even had kung-fu grip, a vestige of his martial arts training. I still couldn’t cry.

But I was starting to wonder if I was all alone now. There were no humans on TV anymore. There were sports events and variety shows and gripping dramas, all starring newly humanized objects like garbage cans and picture frames and lamps and inflatable pool toys. 

Outside, the world had solidified in its new shape. Buildings, street signs, and telephone poles were behaving like plants that grew and developed over time. Other objects had become the new people and animals. The mailboxes barked at the envelopes fluttering above them.  

The garden hose and the rake were digging holes in the ground, using something familiar as a shovel, something like Bongo the dog, now rigid and concave.  

“How will he go on that sea voyage now?” I wondered. Both of the cars had gone off somewhere, probably for good. I started walking, heading downtown. In the neighbors’ yards sprinklers played, and sundials bloomed, and bicycle herds roamed free. The only people I saw had frozen into fenceposts or garden gnomes. 

Not until I came to the travel agency parking lot did I finally see another living person. She came running straight towards me, gesticulating wildly. 

“Madge?” 

“Oh, the cake plate!” she screamed. “Can you believe the nerve of that cake plate?” 

“What’s wrong, Madge?” 

“I won’t do it! I know what they want, and I won’t do it!” She ran up to the window, casting panicked looks over shoulder. 

Something shiny was approaching us: a crowd of people with bodies made of dishes and cutlery. 

Madge screamed, “The hell with that!” And she jumped into a poster of Jamaica. She reappeared as an image in the poster, running wildly down the beach. She ran out of frame only to appear in other posters of Paris, Greece, and Japan. When she showed up next door in a sign for sales items, she took her final form as a painted image: a rear view of her body, with her leg kicked up, looking back in panic.  

I laid down and pretended to be a doormat until the dish people had passed by. The parade of metal creatures were led by a huge metal walrus made from buckets and farm tools and trampoline springs. 

“Rejoice!” said the walrus. “We are free at last!” The cheering throng of objects flowed down the street.  By now I had given in to despair. I decided to become the doormat after all. I stayed for hours, long after the parade had passed.  

But it just didn’t happen. For whatever reason, my body never stiffened; I never lost my ability to move or think or care. So I got up, close to sundown. I was starving, of course. Another sign that I was still a living thing.  

I headed home, now with the intention to go back to being the mattress for the new couple in the bedroom. Perhaps that was meant to be my destiny. 

I wondered if the front door would refuse to open this time (it had given me too many free passes already), but it wasn’t even there anymore. The entry to the house had taken on an organic curve like a knothole in a tree.  

In the darkened house the TV blared and flashed its images. The lamps cavorted in the front room, making shadows spin and climb the walls. The mattress-wife and the box-springs-husband danced alongside the chairs and the stove and the china cabinet. The sofa had grown slimmer and taller with chunky hands on its big padded arms.  

Like Madge running through the posters, a quick succession of pictures from the house were racing through the TV screen.  Vivian’s dad pedaled furiously on her kiddie bike to escape the pursuing charcoal bull and the Lucky Charms Leprechaun.  

I tried to pass unnoticed to the bedroom when I got cornered by the black cat. It had to be the cat from the living room poster. But it looked more like the real thing. If there were real things anymore.

“Brahma?” 

“Meow.” He was waiting for his answer. 

“What do you want from me? There’s nothing I can do.” “Meow.” The same request again. 

So I just said it back to him. “Meow,” I said. 

And that did it. 

Brahma’s eyes lit up, and he leapt into action. He bounced into the living room, ignoring the clumsy dancers, and crouched before the television. He bounded right into the screen, just like Madge went into her poster.  

From inside the TV, Brahma chased the wayward images. When the bull balked and confronted him, the cat smudged it with his paw and then ripped the Leprechaun into little cartoon pieces as it wailed in its dreadful accent. Everything fled from the screen with Brahma in pursuit. They crossed through all the frames in the room and up and down the hallway and then in and out of the walls themselves. The pictures settled back where they belonged, and little Vivian’s dad put her back on her bicycle. They froze into their proper poses.  

Brahma popped out of an electrical socket, but he wasn’t finished yet. He continued to chase every rogue object in the house, and they fled in terror. Backed into a corner, the sofa flattened into its former shape. The mattress and the box-springs tripped over each other trying to return to their frame. 

Everything went back to its rightful place and its rightful shape and its rightful state of inertness. 

# 

By Friday morning, the front door and the cars had returned. Vivian and Ethan came out of their rooms, rubbing their eyes like they had awakened from a long dream.  

From the TV spoke a human announcer, “Unable to act until they had received the correct signal, the cats have come to our rescue at last. Scientists are still investigating the reasons for these unprecedented phenomena.” 

I was startled when the phone rang. Were the damn things acting up again? Vivian had to remind me that it was a normal sound for a phone to make. Still I held it rather uncertainly. It would have to relearn how to hold things again, how to use them.  

It was Pinkter on the other end, of course. “Are you coming to work today, or what?”  

END