Just a few minutes ago I was eating a late lunch.
I set my spoon down and reached for my coffee when my hand hit something that
was not my coffee cup.
I looked up, and in front of me was a ceramic
penguin. I puzzled over why it was on my kitchen table, and why I did not see
it three inches away from my bowl and coffee cup. I certainly had never seen it
before. I called my kids over, and none of them had ever seen it either. My
wife denied ever setting eyes on it, and when I showed it to my two dogs, they
seemed to think “FOOD!”, then “NOT FOOD” after subjecting it to the sniffy
test.
So there I sat, holding an ugly penguin statue.
I’m a Linux fan, but it wasn’t cute like Tux. It looked like it was painted by
a blind person during a seizure. Not so bad that I could blame it on my younger
kids, but not so artsy that I could blame the older one.
How it arrived I have no clue.
Inter-temporal-space-shifting, most likely. I looked around and spotted things
I had never noticed before, and they had a light layer of dust to lie about how
long they were in my abode. Perhaps aliens are using streaming-video spy
cameras disguised as junk. Take a look around your space right now. Was that
book there before? Have you read it, or even knew it existed?
Hopefully, my house is not a stopping point for
supposedly inanimate objects to migrate through on their way to their natural
habitat (to breed more junk, I suspect, in random roadside stands and flea markets.) Perhaps
things are passing through your life, just looking like background clutter.
Nothing you’d notice, unless you happened to look up as one materialized.
I politely placed the penguin back on my kitchen
table. I left the kitchen to write this, and then remembered my coffee cup.
When I returned, there was another coffee cup next to the penguin and my
original cup.
“Just passin’ through, I hope. Enjoy your stay,” I
told it as I retrieved my coffee. You can never be too careful these days.
Appeared in Pill Hill Press
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Appears in Odd Places