Gadgets

Bud’s been huffing warm air from old machines. He and Cleo have a TV from ‘04, a computer from 2000. Those are his rigs, his gadgets. They’re his babies, or he’s their baby. He’s sixty-nine and done with work and this is what he wants to do.

The first time Cleo catches Bud behind the TV, he tells her he’s cleaning up mouse shit, that there are little shit commas where the wires and air come out the back, and she believes him. They do have mice. Cleo’s been leaving frozen corn out for them. She finds them cute. Bud tells her he doesn’t mind. 

“I love that you have your mice,” he tells her. “If you hear me back here, know that I’m working hard for you and your mice. If you hear me sniff in super deep, it’s me finding more mouse shit to clean. Because I love you.”

His work was making cabinets. For fifty years Bud used sealant, glue, and varnish as intended. He quit smoking, the triumph of his life. He lost two older sisters to a blind drunk muscle car. Once, on a red-eye he was riding over the Rockies, the oxygen masks had to drop. But he slept through that. Then he slept through the emergency landing. Taxiing at dawn and the grapefruit sunrise refracted through the plastic air bag, that’s what woke him.

The second time Cleo catches Bud behind the TV, she can see he isn’t cleaning. He doesn’t have wipes with him. He doesn’t have a shirt on. She finds him with his lips and nose mashed to the air vent. With each inhale, his eyelids flutter like he’s planting a first kiss at long last. That’s what gets her screaming. She makes Bud push their TV flat against the wall. Then she locks him in their bedroom and runs barefoot down the street to where they’re throwing up new houses beside the retention pond. 

She stares at the dumb geese sitting on the water. 

She flips off a dogwalker who calls out, “Hey you!” 

She steals an armload of bricks out from under a tarp and piles them in front of the TV. If he tries to get back there again, she’s going to make him mean it. He’ll tell the world he wants it brick by brick.

Bud pivots to their computer and blunts her heart.

When he’s down there getting his gadget air, he rocks back and forth like a grub. His hips, they do gyrate. Sometimes he blows air back out against the flow. Then he rebreathes the twice-gadgeted air. 

He spends days at a time on his belly. He only breathes what he prefers.

There are no children to flee to. Cleo has mice instead of children. She has a stack of stolen bricks. She can’t remember buying the computer. Weren’t they fine with newspapers and real cards for solitaire? Why introduce this ghastly basal gangliac witch and break up a decent marriage?

Once a week, she mails off a brick to a major electronics manufacturer. This does not stop their products from appearing in stores. 

She tries to warn other women. She pins them in the freezer aisle, poor things shopping for corn. First she’s fake-helpful, holding the freezer door open. When her mark is headfirst in the corn, she springs in: “Your husband may not be your husband anymore. Watch him around electronics.” Some wives pretend not to hear. Some run away with their fingers in their ears. 

If asked, Bud will talk about it. But his insights are not helpful: “I just can’t seem to use these gadgets right… Don’t know how else to make them please me… Never could find the channel or website for me… and any John Doe can use these gadgets the right way, the intended way…”

Days of raw, rubbery rebreathing. Days of grub-rocking. Days of the TV volume on MAX because the louder it plays, the harder it works, and the harder it works, the more air it shoots. Nothing about this feels romantic. And so nothing about this feels tragic.

Perhaps if he’d been bewitched by something fetishy…

Like sex with a fireplace, that would be better. Or eating the filthiest book in the library one page at a time.

Via note left for him behind the computer tower, Cleo asks Bud for twenty dollars. He leaves two tens and also a five on her pillow, and she drives to an estate sale out in the sticks. 

“Help!” cries the widow, a scarecrow in a bathrobe and curlers. She fusses with the cash box. Seems like she’s locked herself out. “Someone fucking help, please?”

Cleo buys ten crystal ramekins. One is a food bowl for her mice. Nine are for throwing at the telephone poles she passes on her long drive back from soybean-and-corn country. Glass bits catch in the brunette wood. She gets pulled over.

“What will it be like for Bud if I walk?” Cleo asks the cop, a statie barely old enough to shave.

“Probably not too bad,” the statie tells her. “Maybe he’s been waiting to do this all his life?”

“He has always noticed those mornings when you can smell the ocean,” Cleo says, “even though we’re hours away.”

“Sounds like a good guy, capable of noticing and appreciating.”

“He’s a little beta bitch boy who’s ruining my life for air that went inside a machine and came back out the same old air. Can he even get high off this?”

“I think he can get high off this, yeah.” The statie is an Eagle Scout, so this is a guess. He writes Cleo a ticket for six hundred dollars.

Cleo weeps.

Dozing Bud. He dreams he’s grilling salmon for his sisters, who moan and complain and make him wash the cooked meat with soap, can’t he see the smoke and burned bits all over their dinner? Then he’s awake and at the computer. He’s with his gadgets, but his gadgets aren’t with him. They’re off and quiet, and the whole house is dark—power outage—and Bud’s sisters are hiding behind the TV. He can hear them back there gossiping. Their voices are helium-high. Bud crawls over and cannot hide his disappointment when he finds two shit commas and a baby mouse keening for mama. 

“Cleo’s out buying…” Bud can’t remember what it was, exactly. The mouse doesn’t run when he sticks out a hand. He palms her, runs a thumb across her. She’s soft all over with a wet spot for a mouth and a frigid little drum machine heart.

Seems the thing to do is keep her warm.

When he rises and wanders to the bedroom, the world rolls head over heels with him. The walls and his stomach moonwalk in lockstep. So much non-gadget air. He falls atop the marriage bed, baby mouse clutched to his chest. Whole world smells like cinnamon. His every breath a church bell wrapped in tonsils. When Cleo leaves him and their house and her mice, it’ll feel like this only stronger. He’s excited about maybe living this way forever. He’ll take good care of the mice. He knows they need to chew all day or else their teeth go up their brain. 

Can he give this little one milk? Maybe in the morning he can try to give her milk.

John Pinto is a film lab technician living in Philadelphia. His recent work has appeared in ergot., Scaffold, Little Engines, and X-R-A-Y. His zine Bill Kiss was published by Tree Trunk Books in 2024. Find him online at pintopintopinto.com.