If Wires Could Talk

I don’t see why all this fuss is necessary, the holes in the walls, the drilling. The drilling! Nobody thinks about the pain this is causing. All day long drill and pull, drill and pull, cutting plaster, putting holes in my home. The only benefit is the light coming through the plate glass, the beams of sun shining on me.

Copper can only be properly appreciated in sunlight. Gold—who cares about gold! It’s soft and ornamental, but of what use is it? Copper is beautiful and its uses are beyond count. That made me nervous when I was young. Thieves love to steal copper. But that is not my anxiety now.

I am watching the giant hands approaching my home, tearing out wires to the left and wires to the right. What is wrong with them? Don’t they appreciate our steadfast work, our hum day and night? The burn and tickle of electricity has been my life, our lives, what will happen to me if they tear me out? Sold, even melted and re-formed into who knows what.

There are two pairs of hands, one smaller, and the voice that accompanies those hands is higher, I can just about hear the words. The other voice, with the hairy big hands, is too deep for me to understand. But what they say won’t change what they do, and I can well anticipate the tearing from the roots, the cutting of the branch, that is likely to be my fate. There are people on the other side of my home, in the cavernous vacancy. I don’t know how they can bear the expanse of space. No pipes. No plaster. No snug companions intertwined and connecting, hearing the bubble of water so close.

They just pulled out Aluminum. The smaller handed one said he’s burned at the tip. Of course he’s burned, he has done his service, and this is his reward. Discarded. As if he is ugly. I admit he’s not as handsome as Copper, but even so he shines, he carries, he does his work. He can’t even cry out as they take him away. Without electricity, we can’t communicate at all. We are dry, we are flat, we are dark. They may as well take me now.

What’s this? Something else is being threaded through the wall. I can’t see what it is at all, shrouded in some kind of white stuff. The big hands are threading it through, the smaller hands reaching for me. I am pulled, I am yanked, I am cut from my home, and tossed, as if I am nothing, onto the pile. Aluminum and Copper, together as we die.

Exercise 8: POV of an object in your house

Filed under: Fun, Mini-Stories Tagged: postcard story