Now

“I think there’s something moving down there” 

You couldn’t tell there were three of them at first, not until they had almost cleared the courthouse and started towards the post office. The first one looks like a giant pitcher plant mixed with one of those funnels record players have. A heavy, plated cylinder curves up from it, then widens into the second machine, a rust-pitted box lined with slits that almost let you see what was inside. The third reminds me of a refrigerator whose handle has fallen off, and it’s connected to the second by a chute, just large enough to stick your arm through. They glide through the air like a skater on the pond, too quiet and too stable to quite believe. There’s a slight fwhooomp sound when they settle onto the sidewalk, and we all jump back a step, half thinking they’re about to explode. 

But they don’t explode. They sit there, long enough that curiosity gets the better of caution. Donnie (BBQ chips) raps on the outside, and Carrie (rice crackers, nail polish) tries to fit her fingers into the crack of the door, but finally, Lydia (eggs, milk, Werther caramels), who lives with Terence (pink lemonade) out of town, pulls herself up to the rim of the cone-shaped one, and says she sees something moving. 

Then, she falls into it. Some people say she slipped and others say the machine moved under her, but what’s sure is the thing’s powered on now, and it whirs like a mosquito as it sets to whatever its job is. 

The third door opens and Lydia’s there, which isn’t possible, and she says something no one can make out and then she falls over. When she’s on the ground, she pulls up her shirt and that’s when we see her stomach, pink and skinless.

Inside out. 

“They were all looking at me up there. I couldn’t just come down” 

Backwards, is what the doctor (too far out of town) says. Her stomach’s put together backwards now, but it’s okay because the food ends up backwards too, and no one knows quite what that means. It turns out backwards is what her voice is too, and when someone digs up a tape recorder, you can hear what she’s really saying. 

“I’m fine. Don’t worry.” 

Tom (chocolate mini doughnuts) tries to set up a guard, but when he calls into Asheville for support they shout at him, and ask if he really thinks he’s the only sheriff in the county with three machines in front of his post office. So there’s a guard in theory, but only if no one comes at night, or mealtimes or breaks or when he’s doing something else. 

If there’d been no guard at all, the teenagers might have steered clear of it, but as it is, it’s only three days before Dillon (Red Bull and sour strings) falls in while Luis (Funyuns) and Desirée (Takis) watch. 

When the door opens for him, he isn’t inside out, like Lydia. He’s transparent, all except for one lung, and he whispers, airily, when he talks. 

“I remember thinking I could do it if I wanted to. And then I was doing it.” 

Someone leaves an old stepladder nearby, and they ought to take it away, but no one does. Then, there’s three in one day and then, too many to count. Scales. Gaps. A kid who coughs up wriggling things that run away. A boy who floats just off the ground. Every day someone comes into the store talking about someone else who went in, and I start to see them come in themselves. That’s when I start writing it all down. Names. Changes. Dates. But most of all, why they did it. I scribble it all down on the back of receipts and I stuff them into the manila folders that have been sitting empty ever since I finished that online class on “Expansion Focused Budgeting”. 

“I don’t know. I guess I never thought about it that way.”

It’s after ten, and I’m in my house, and the TV is playing a Korean soap opera, because that’s the easiest thing to ignore. All the receipts with all my notes are splayed onto the kitchen table, in layers thick enough to peek over the edge of the plate with my tuna sandwich.

There’s one for everybody here. Every single one of them. 

For a moment, it’s almost clear to me. Not only what they went in for, but why none of them could explain, why none of them had words for it. It’s under their words, too large for them, like a river flowing below ice in winter. A hunger, but not quite a hunger. A need, or simply a vacuum. I see it large and amorphous, burning and sparking like fire, all around. Everywhere. 

The moment passes, and there’s nothing in front of me but a lot of receipts and scrawls. 

“I don’t want to be the last one.” 

So there I am, in front of the machine, putting my foot on the first rung of the abandoned step ladder. The horn of the trumpet is even darker than the sky, and I’m sure I hear the sound of a fan turning inside.

All I want is for it to tell me why, to explain what it was all about, but it doesn’t answer questions, so I step to the next rung. 

The fan grows louder, and I know that something’s moving before I know what it is. It’s the machines, of course, gliding upwards, just as softly as when they came.  

“No, don’t!” I cry, and I grab for the rim of the funnel, but I’m too slow. 

They keep rising, straight like an arrow, past the buildings and into the clouds. A perfectly straight line, almost stately. Their movement makes me think of an army, but not one in retreat. It’s more like a victory parade, a celebration of work completed.

__________

Lillie E. Franks is an author and educator who lives in Chicago, Illinois, but is normal about it. You can read her work at places like Flash Frog, Die Laughing, and HAD or follow her on Bluesky at @lilliekoi.bsky.social. She loves anything that is not the way it should be.