fiction by Jason Edwards
Hey what’s up, my name’s Frank. I’m a battery. That’s not a metaphor; I’m an honest-to-god 9-volt battery. And I know how it is, you guys like to make fun of me. Double-A gets all the work, even triple-A comes in from time to time. And all those little watch batteries with their special ops. And me, old Frank, old has-been 9-volt, no good for anything except smoke alarms.
Well, you know what, mofo? It’s a quarter to four in the morning, and yeah, I could wait a few hours until you’re awake—hell, brah, I might even make it to the weekend. But no, screw that, I’m using up the last of my juice to let you know, loud and clear, in seventy-five second intervals, that I need to be changed.
Joke’s on you, jerk, because: am I in the smoke detector outside your bedroom, easy to get to? Nope. Am I down the hall in the office, close to where you keep the spare batteries? No sir. Maybe the kitchen, the smoke alarm that gets all the work whenever you fry bacon and forget to turn the fan on, ya terrible cook? No such luck for you.
Go ahead, try closing the bedroom doors to drown me out. Did it work? CHIRP! No it did not. Turn the fan on high, right next to your head, dry out your sinuses for all I care just for the white noise… CHIRP! There you go, pillow over your head, have to tweak your neck at a weird angle, your arm flopped over the top to-CHIRP! Better come find me, doofus.
Walk into the hallway. All is darkness and silence. Waiting, waiting for the sound. Where will it come from? Was it just a dream? Should you go back to CHIRP! Made ya jump!
I’m in the one above the front room, that lofty space, about 15 feet up. You know where I’m talking about. Yeah, you wanted “organic lines” and “free-flowing space” and “lots of natural light” when you bought the house. Time to pay the piper, dumb-butt. Time to get the ten-foot ladder.
The one in the garage. Punch in your house alarm code beforeyou go into the garage. Man that’s loud, how does your wife sleep through it? There’s the ladder, hanging on the wall, almost wedged in there where you parked your car too close. You idiot. So open the garage door. It’s louder at four in the morning, isn’t it? Now get in your car, to make room in the garage. Aw, you forgot your keys? CHIRP!
Get your keys. Get back in your car. Start it. TURN OFF THE DAMN RADIO! Jesus pleas us, who listens to NPR at THAT volume? Wow. Anyway, ease into your drive way. Turn off the car, set the parking brake, get out, step on a tiny pinecone with your bare feet. Are you loving this yet, suburbanite? My 9-volt ass is loving this.
At least it’s sort of calm out here, in the night air. Not too cold, not to warm. The sound of the highway, sort of like the ocean. CHIRP! Yeah, I can ruin anything.
Get the ladder, drag it inside by the light of baseboard night-lights because you don’t want to squint against regular lights. Carefully! You’ve already risked the wrath of wife with stumbling out of bed, closing bedroom door, turning fan way up, opening door, punching alarm code, opening garage door, starting car, shouting wonderful colorful curse words into the night air when stepping on pine cone! Don’t up the ante shattering vases with your Three-Stooges-ladder-carrying-technique, chirp!
There you go. You awake now? Well. A little foreshadowing—you will not fall off the ladder. That’s not part of my story. Your story. It’s our story now. Set up the ladder—Ah heck. Looks like the geniuses who built this house with its organic and its free-flowing and its natural decided to put the smoke detector on a part of the ceiling sort of but not quite above the staircase. So the ladder is sort of but not quite in the right place. Ha ha ha, chirp, etc.
Climb up anyway. Your halfway there. You forgot to get a fresh battery. You freeze. Your life now moves in 75-second intervals. Maybe you can just stop right there. You can stand halfway up this ladder, and maybe not move, and maybe time will stop too, and you can sort of just be, for all eternity, and that would be just fine. A tableau in frozen dimensions—you on the ladder, me silent forever, your wife all snug in her wee little bed… CHIRP! THIS AINT NO CHRISTMAS CAROL! GO GET THAT SPARE!
Sheesh, can I just lighten up for a second? NO. WAY. Off the ladder, up the stairs, quick little revelation- pinkie toes and ladder legs do not get along. Seriously, dude, WHERE did you learn to curse like that? There’s stevedores working the docks who’d blush to hear what you say. It’s just a toe, man, calm down. Go get the god-damned battery.
It’s in the laundry room. In the cabinet above the washing machine. No, not that cabinet. Yes that one. Not that shelf, that one. That little boxy drawer thing. Not that drawer, that’s spare keys. That’s one’s old keys that don’t open anything but you can’t throw away for some reason. That’s one extra rolls of Scotch tape. Nope, no clue why your wife keeps them here and not in the gift-wrap box. No, that drawer’s old mailing labels… don’t ask me, maybe people sometimes have to address packages of freshly washed clothes or something. This drawer DOES have batteries in it—but they’re all double A! Ha! A lot of good they’re doing you now!
Oh, way in the back, one 9-volt. Just the one. Not even in a package. And you, you have this tendency, don’t you, of not keeping track of your used batteries. You leave them lying around. And you can’t just throw them in the trash. You can’t recycle them, as it were. So what do you do? And later, your wife finds them, or you find the ones she’s left lying around, and sometimes they get put back in the battery drawer.
Which you only realize is the case when, for example, you swap out the batteries in the TV remote, and then it only works for a few hours before it dies again. As the kids say, WTF, man? You’re getting nervous, aren’t you. What if this is a used 9-volt? When was the last time you swapped out one of me in another alarm? A few years ago, or only months but enough months to feel like years? Are 9-volts sold individual or in multi-packs? Is this one fresh, was it bought with another, or has it been so long, even unused it’s still going to last only a few hours? Damn it damn it damn it.
Well, nothing to do about it now but try it and see. Chirp, by the way, as a reminder. Gurgle, your stomach says. Your bladder has finally decided this is not a quick wake and flip the pillow and go back to sleep situation. You are up, probably for good, and there are certain morning rituals your body has gotten used to. Chirp. Burp. We’re a regular rock n roll band, your body and me.
So there you are, sitting in the dark, in the bathroom. The guest bathroom, just in case wife finally wakes up, decides to use the bathroom herself, opens the door, startles you, making you yelp, making her absolutely scream, and hilarity and 911 calls ensue. Chirp. Your sitting because you have nothing manly to prove to anyone, and besides, it’s difficult to aim in the dark. Chirp. Did you leave the door to the garage open, the garage door itself open, your car door open? Aw who cares. Chirp. Once you’re done here, you can change the battery, put away the ladder, park the car, close up the house, go back to bed, wait for your wife to nudge you and tell you to stop snoring. Chirp. Where’s that spare battery? In the pocket of your pajamas, which are pooled around your ankles. Why do pajamas have pockets? For chirp like this, I guess.
All done? Good. Brief wiggle, stand up, pull up your pajamas, ignore that plopping sound, flush, wash, all in the dark. You’ve lived here a long time, you know every square inch of this house, working in darkness is no problem. Hands washed, out the bathroom door, square-inch my ass, there goes your pinkie toe against the side of the door jamb. You can’t even curse this time, can you, just bite your bottom lip and makea sort of “FFFGGGFFF” sound. Hand in your pocket despite the pain to get the spare.
Hand finds nothing. Other hand in other pocket. Also nothing. Pause, in pain, and wonder why Satan would choose this exact time to drive you insane. And then a revelation, and you can feel your soul sinking out of your stomach and through the floorboards. That plopping sound.
This is where I decide I’ve won. Frank the 9-volt has won. You don’t even curse anymore. You don’t even care, do you. Turn around, back into the bathroom, flip the lights on, blazing steely-hot javelins of light stabbing your eyes. There in the still trembling water of the commode, the 9-volt, at the bottom. You’re reaching in before you have time to think about it. Hauling it out. Back at the sink and casually soap and lather and rinse and repeat four or five times in water so hot that if you cared you’d be in pain. But you don’t care. Nothing matters.
Your bed and your wife and your house and your car. All of it, pointless. All of it meaningless because you had to make fun of me, Frank, me, a 9-volt battery, make fun of ME even though I AM THE ONE who alerts you if your house catches on fire. ME. FRANK the FUCKING 9-VOLT BATTERY helping to make sure YOU and your BED and WIFE and your HOUSE and your shitty little CAR in your GARAGE don’t burn down because SOMEBODY forgot to blow out the candle or turn off the stove or some other DUMBSHIT move that only YOU and not BATTERIES LIKE ME could ever do.
Get back downstairs. Get up that ladder. Open up the smoke detector. Pull me out. Put another me in. Did you remember to check which way I go? Is it positive left, negative right, or the other way around? Well, it’s too dark to tell, so you’ll just have to wait. Up there, 15 feet above the floor, perched precariously.
All those times you cooked bacon, forgot to turn on the fan, and the smoke detector goes off, and you got MAD. Idiot. MAD that the thing that keeps you from dying actually still works. Oh, the things you said. The number of times you pulled me out and let me dangle there by wires so you could unplug and replug me. Just dangling like a, like a… like a I don’t know what. But it sucked, man. It really sucked. You shouldn’t have treated me like that, man, you just shouldn’t.
But look. I mean listen. Hear that? Nothing so far. Maybe you got it right your first try. Count to something. I don’t know, count to one hundred. Slowly! There you go. Yes, sixty… seventy… man you’re on edge now, hey, better grip the top of the ladder tighter, in case the detector makes that sound and startles you off into a 15-foot fall. Break your ankle, if you’re lucky, your hip, old man, your spine, your neck, wife widowed, who’s going to change 9-volts for her when you’re gone? Ninety… one hundred.
You’re still not moving. Maybe you counted too fast. No, you didn’t count too fast. I think it’s okay. Descend, human. Fold up the ladder. Yeah, it’s probably okay. And you know what, if you’re wrong, if you did put in the battery backwards, or it’s an old one, so what, right? You’ve learned your lesson. You can set up the ladder again. Hop in your car and go to the 24-7 convenience store, whatever. Life’s too short to hate chores and make fun of 9-volt batteries.
Ladder folded, back in the garage. Yeah, yeah, you knocked over that broken lamp on the shelf next to where the ladder hangs, so what. Car back into the garage. Garage door closed. Door to the garage closed. House alarm set. Back up the stairs. Back into bed. Aaahhh. You thought you were wide away. But this feels sooo good.
Almost worth it, am I right? All that petty agony, that minimal suffering, all that suburbanite angst. Almost worth it to get back into this cozy bed. Wife snuggling up to you. A few hours left before the clock radio alarm will go off. So nice. No chirps for several minutes now. The torpor of drowsiness settling in. Wife murmurs “big spoon” as she rolls over. So with the last of your energy, roll over to hold her.
That used 9-volt battery, me, Frank, still in your pocket, and now pressing against your hip, smashed into the bed, very hard. But it’s okay. “Motherfucker,” you kind of chuckle. You’ll have a bruise when you wake up. So what. Small price. We’re friends now.
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