Time is short, so here is the heart of it: everything I own in my house is alive. My reading lamp ate T-rex, my kitty. I came home from work today to the lamp hunched over the remains, the cat’s belly ruptured. The bulb lay on the ground beside, and when I closed the door, the lamp twisted its shade to regard me. Teeth filled the bulb socket and hung with gore. It hissed electric.

The guilt I feel for poor T-rex is tremendous. While I’d been increasingly aware for some time that things were not right with my possessions, I’d been sure poor T could hold his own. It is, after all, hard to imagine him being outrun by an object.

In his defense, I don’t think it was the lamp that brought him down. Though I don’t know the taxonomy and behavioral traits of my possessions well, something about the lamp, perhaps its bent neck, strikes me as being much more characteristic of a scavenger. I’m eyeing the end tables and the coffee table as more predatory. Those legs look made to gallop, and I was pretty sure I saw a clump of hair stuck to the coffee table’s lower shelf.

#

I noticed the problem like anyone would expect. Keys not where they belonged. So much pocket change missing. The pen and notepad I kept by my mail sorter was on the floor by the flower pot. I found one shoe of a pair on the wrong side of the room. My phone sank between the couch cushions when I just knew I put it on the charger.

I don’t think I’d ever really doubted that the TV remote was capable of autonomous motion.

One day, I thought I saw a vertical shadow the height of my bookcase on the wall beside it, but then I realized it was a line in the plaster with the same notches as the bookcase’s edge. Somehow, the whole shebang had moved nearly an inch of its own accord.

Then, I realized the TV had changed its angle by at least twenty degrees, and a DVD I’d left on the player had fallen to the floor. Settling in for the evening, a little uncertain but not yet especially alarmed, I found T-Rex holed up in an empty corner of my home office trembling.

Earthquake, I assumed, as I carried T back to the living room by the scruff because he had a case of the nervous squirmies. We don’t get the big ones here, but though it’s never something much on anyone’s mind, the occasional report about a three-pointer is nothing to raise more than an eyebrow over. I didn’t know if that could be enough to jostle things just a bit to the left.

#

The morning T-Rex bit it, or should I say that something bit T-Rex, I’d walked into the living room after getting dressed and caught my coffee mug, which I’d set absently on the mantle, drinking from the little round pot bottom of my orchid. The mug straightened instantly and acted all innocent about it like it wanted to say, “Hey, I’m just a mug,” but I know what I saw.

I also know what anyone reading this is thinking: psychotic break. I suppose I can’t rule it out either, but when I looked it up the symptoms, a lack of empathy was at the top. I can’t sufficiently underscore how bad I feel for poor T-Rex. How I try to imagine his last moments as the coffee table bore down on him. How he must have suffered, lying there broken and torn. Was he still alive when the lamp found him?

This is why I can’t sleep at night.

That and because I’m afraid my bed might eat me when my guard is down.

#

I spent the whole day I caught my mug in full live-action wishing I could have run.  Believe me, I would have, but at that moment I witnessed it, I felt a tightening around my waist and the strangest prickling sensation just above the elastic of my underwear. I looked down and saw that my belt had split open like a starfish’s mouth, complete with barbed tentacles reaching out and latching onto my skin.

My hand launched for the buckle, but the belt convulsed like a constricting boa, and those little tentacles jabbed. The pain was instantly searing, and when my head cleared, so did the message: take off the belt and take the skin off with it.

I jerked my hand back and instantly knew that I couldn’t just run.

So, I did the rational thing. I convinced myself that nothing bad had happened. Not really. Sure, there was a bit of pain – but that was because I did something I shouldn’t have. Otherwise, my furniture shifted a little. My mug stole water from the houseplants. My belt would let me know what I didn’t want to do. With the right adjustments, nothing would be really different. After all, I could trust my stuff. It was mine. I’d picked it.

I went to work feeling good about things. After all, everything else in my life is cornflake ordinary. I work in corporate IT, mostly doing network installations and software upgrades. I wear polo shirts, khakis and a belt on the daily. My meals are split pretty equally between takeout, microwave dinners, and simple things you can whip up in fifteen to thirty minutes. I stream my shows nightly and always carry around a novel or memoir I pretend to be reading. If there was anything to cough at it would be that I can’t tell a joke to save my life.

My break friends said hi from the cubicles, and I said hi back. If I paused, my belt tightened just enough to warn me to continue on. If they asked how I was doing, my belt tightened just enough that I know I was “fine”.

I spent eight hours writing compliance documentation. I scrolled through Instagram on my breaks and had a fried chicken sandwich from the little deli two doors down in the office park. I thought about opening a tab on my browser to see if other people had ever had their possessions try to control them, but I worried that my belt wouldn’t take kindly to it or that maybe my modem could be monitoring my search history.

On the way home, I bought a mojo-seasoned rotisserie chicken and a couple deli sides. My grocery store makes delightful mac n cheese, and I bought a couple fried shrimp for T-Rex because they were his favorite. I kind of hoped the smell of all of it would fill the house with a sated feel and let everything relax.

Then, I stepped through my door, and the lamp was eating the remains of T-Rex.

#

My instinct, of course, was to bolt out the door. I swallowed hard and tightened my hold around the handle of the warm paper carton the chicken came in. A drop of grease fell from the corner to the foyer floor. I hadn’t even noticed that the doormat had scooted up against the door so that when I turned and jerked the knob, the mat jammed underneath it. It wouldn’t have stopped my escape altogether, except that the belt also jolted into action. I found myself lying on my side half crushing the chicken and trying to dig my fingers underneath the viciously tight leather that simultaneously dug its tentacles into the fat over my hips. I felt like it was chewing on the bone.

It punished me for at least a minute straight until my pain-rigid muscles, my arced back, my clenched teeth gave up and went limp. I wasn’t quite unconscious, but I was hazy and unfocused. I lay their panting, tears running from my eyes, a huge bubble of snot handing out of one nostril.

When I realized that the tentacles had withdrawn, that the belt had given me some slack, I gradually pulled myself up. When I gave the door a slight glance, the leather gave a warning flex, so slowly I reached out and locked the deadbolt. My belt relaxed altogether, and I took a deep breath.

Then, I picked up my decimated dinner, stepped around T-Rex’s poor body, and sat on the couch. The cushions seemed especially soft as if to welcome me, as if to apologize for the shock of my sweet kitty and the punishment I’d just been doled. The TV turned on, and the player cued up my favorite French movie. The electric candles on the mantle turned on and the orchid tipped its flower towards me. It wasn’t too hard to pretend the chicken was nice as I pulled off a drumstick, but I openly wept when I ate the shrimp meant for T-Rex.

#

I should have known that the things I owned didn’t have my best interest at heart. When I had friends over to watch The Great Tokyo Stir Fry premier, the fridge got too cold. There were ice crystals in the juices and frozen lettuce hearts.  The water dispenser in the door clogged – but somehow the sandwich meats had turned and instead of the gourmet sandwiches I’d promised I ended up serving everyone the box of frozen Pocket Sandwiches I’d bought wholesale. The stove too acted up – the quick heat eye heated so fast it seared the soup to the bottom of the pan and when I tried to switch it to the sauté eye, the temperature wouldn’t hold well enough to maintain a simmer.

The killing blow was that the whole show lagged so bad we turned it off midway through the episode. Kelly and Brent were polite enough to stay and chat for the better part of the hour, but when they left all I could be was apologies and inner doubt that they’d ever accept an invite again.

#

I know what happened to poor T-Rex. Or at least why it happened. Really, I’ve known this whole time, but it just now clicked with me. He’d been sharpening his claws. He’d scratched up the back bedpost by my window, the side of the couch underneath the arm, and, yes, that far leg of the coffee table. He’d really done that up good over the years. Why couldn’t he have listened? Why hadn’t the spray bottle deterred him? I know he is just a poor victim in all this, but part of me badgers me that he must have done this to himself.

#

I know there must be a hotline for things like this, but I don’t know if I can call one before something I own figures out what I’m up to. For all I know, my phone is in on it. Or some of my apps might be.  I don’t know why my things are allowing me to write this journal except that maybe since I brought both the pen and pad home from the office, they haven’t yet won the allegiance of these pages.

I wish I could just get away from my belt long enough at work to ask someone to borrow their cell. I don’t think it would be safe even to pass a carefully folded note. Since none of my things have eyes, I have no way of telling how they know what I do.  So, I have no idea how to know how to hide it.  For all I know, they know what I’m writing here and hope that doing so will placate me. I just don’t know enough about the things I own to know how to be safe.

For now, the best I can hope for now is that my pants start to smell enough that my belt has to let me take them off lest folk begin to suspect something is up.

#

This morning I awoke to the kitchen knives standing at the foot of my bed. It’s like they read my mind or something, but they forced me to the closet and closed me in to change my clothes. A box of new walking sneakers I’d bought in anticipation of the nicer fall weather shuffled on the shelf. I put them on, and the knives backed off. I was so focused on the knives, however, that I didn’t notice the sneakers tying themselves together, and when I tried to step out of the closet, I tripped and hit my face on the doorknob. The blow struck my cheekbone hard, and I shrieked.

When I went to the mirror, the bloody cut was already surrounded by purple swelling – but, oddly enough, the main feeling was relief that I still had my eye. It had been a mistake to think so tangibly about escape. Something must have betrayed me. I must have worn the wrong expression or something.

That day at work, I can’t tell you how cold my belly felt every single time I assured people that I’d only tripped and hit my face on the door. I can’t tell you how cold I felt that because everyone knew I’d been single for a long time, they believed me. I went to the bathroom on one of my breaks and stood at the sink with the water running for the whole fifteen minutes, just staring at the purple swelling in the mirror. Under the institutional office fluorescence, my skin looked waxy and fake, like I’d bought a cheap mask of myself at the Halloween store and wore it over my own face.

#

It’s truth time. I know all too well. There is no “good” way out. There will never be a “safe” plan, and the longer I wait, the more likely it is that something I own will hurt me in a way from which I will not recover. I can already feel myself talking my way out of any plan I can come up with because there are risks. Risks that I’ll get hurt. That people will judge me for what I bought in the past. For letting my household items treat me this way. The truth is, I know that these are all fears my possessions want me to have. These are the fears that keep me owning them, and they know it.

Tomorrow, when I get to work, I will steal Roger’s cellphone. He doesn’t have a passcode, doesn’t believe in security. I will make a bee-line for the bathroom and strip down as fast as I can in the stall. I will call every one of my friends until I find someone with a couch for me. I will call the Salvation Army and tell them they can have everything I own.

I know that Roger might catch me.  That I might not get out of my belt fast enough.  That my clothes will know what’s up and be too strong to be removed.  There is nothing worth doing that isn’t also worth failing at trying.

If I succeed, I’ll not be writing any further here. No way I’ll ever come back for this.  If you’re reading this, maybe I made it and you found this as you survey my possessions for the bank.  OR maybe I bled out or died otherwise broken in my attempt and you’ve been sent by the police.

That’s the thing about people like me.

One way or another, we simply disappear from our broken lives and those with whom we intersected before our departure will always be left to wonder.

Wish me luck. I know I’m wishing it for myself.

– Andrew Najberg