What was that?
The washing machine was empty, it was definitely empty. This morning after its terminal hissy fit, Maeve had removed the wet sheets. She’d rung the cloths, heavy with unspun water, out over the chipped bathtub and suspended them in the front room. Since the dryer had broken down last month, the rickety airer left in the flat by the previous occupant had come into its own.
When she’d viewed the flat in September, the skeletal frame had stood alone in one room. “That’s one of the perks that comes with this place,” the indifferent factor had told her, indifferently. There were plenty of other downwardly mobile people about, and he’d not tried to inveigle her.
So, then, what was that noise coming from the utility room? It surely sounded exactly like the clang, clang, clang, and kerbumps the washing machine usually graced her otherwise-silent home with. She scraped her chair back and went towards the tiny room. Just as she peered round the doorframe, the racket stopped on a clang. The machine faced her, apparently unperturbed, She returned to her chair at the kitchen table and stared at her half-written article.
Maeve, like so many others, worked from home now. She got out of the flat only when she went on her ‘woman-on-the-street’ walks to scrounge new stories for the papers. The coffee and tea houses where she’d planned to write, to stay warm in deepest winter, were now closed. No one advanced a date for their reopening. The UFO sightings had seen to that.
Everyone had witnessed the lights. Millions, maybe billions, saw the UFO’s sweeping across the night skies. Problem was, no one knew where they went. Apparently no government had technology capable of tracking the incoming crafts. During the resulting fuss, the people who could migrate had either made a dash for the countryside, or bolted to the cities, trying to stay safe or trying to greet whatever came in the ships.
The sightings had shifted the world’s economy in a matter of weeks. Now, only the most essential industries and businesses continued to operate. Governments everywhere said, “Stay inside. Stay quiet. Don’t be a moving target.” People lived at subsistence level. A few did well out of it. They were the entrepreneurs who built new empires offering protection from, communication with, or speculation about who was in the UFO’s.
All that fear. All that excitement. And no real telling if the things had landed, or not. Untypically, extreme caution was the order of the day.
Maeve, like most people, hadn’t the connections to thrive, so she gleaned tales at the raggedy parks, the near empty city square, the gull infested pier. Hers were the wee human-interest stories that people still wanted… no needed, to read. Her most popular were the ones about the dog found in a tree weeks after it went missing; the brave and desperate mother swinging her child at the playground; the toy flying saucer found in the park with no maker’s name. She embroidered on most of her stories. The dog wasn’t in a tree, though the mother and child were real enough. And rather than her pathos-filled tale of an old man who remembered the war as the finder of the saucer, it’d been she who had fished it out of the city burn..
But those stories were just fodder, tiny things that kept a few pennies coming in and readers from going spare. What she needed was a real story to catapult her out of this morass her life had become. Something useful to her fellow human beings. Something investigative or revealing, something to make her name.
As she thought about what she needed, Maeve reached for the toy saucer, scraping at its impenetrable surface with her fingernail. When she’d first found it last month, it had sparkled with illumination like an old-fashioned disco ball, tiny lights winking on and off. She’d spent some hours prodding it, but she’d never found a battery compartment or a solar panel embedded in its smooth surfaces. Or even any way to access anything in it. Although the lights had died down a few at a time, it still sometimes blinked. She put it down. Turned back to reality.
When the cafés had first closed, Maeve worried that someone, maybe the factor, maybe nosy old Mrs MacGillivray, would find her frozen to her chair one day, in this close-view, north-facing flat.
Her relief had been huge when she’d realised that by forgoing the price of a cup of coffee in the morning and a cup of tea in the afternoon, she was able to afford two whole extra hours of gas on the meter. That was double the hours she’d previously allowed herself. For four hours a day Maeve didn’t have to dress like Scott of the Antarctic. She sighed. Now that the washing machine had joined the dryer in retirement, she’d have to go to the laundrette. That meant more time in polar gear. Feck.
There it was again!
Clang, kerbump, clang, clang.
This time, Maeve put the saucer down silently, then she rose slightly in her chair, clutching the seat with both hands and lifted it off the ground, still under her bum. She backed away, twirled the chair into one hand, then set it in place as if laying a lover to rest. She crossed the kitchen floor wraith-like, avoiding the squeaky tile midway. All the while, the washing machine continued its arrhythmic clanking.
When she reached the door, it stopped.
‘Oh, come on!’ Maeve stamped her foot and made to turn away again when something caught her eye.
The water lines that fed the washer rocked back and forth.
A warning bell clamoured in her head.
What was this?
Rats shoogling the lines? No, they’d moved out weeks ago in search of richer fare.
Poised between flight and fascination, Maeve let her breath seep from her mouth in a fine smoke-like stream. She watched as the rocking motion became more pronounced. When she took a step forward, the water lines halted as if frozen in the air. Breaking the silence, the machine juddered with so sudden a spasm of sound and motion that Maeve jumped, but she held her ground.
At somewhat reduced decibels, it kerbumped, clanged, clanged again, as if belching politely. At the same time, in place of its usual numbers, its digital display started to flash hieroglyphic-like runes. In a moment of fierce recklessness Maeve took the second and final step that would bring her to the machine and snatched open the soap drawer.
There, long limbs folded in the main wash compartment, sat an olive green man. Though ‘man’ might not be the right word: Being. Maeve and the Being stared at one another wide-eyed. Though, once again Maeve corrected herself. Its eyes were far taller than they were wide. Nevertheless, they stared at one another.
As she looked, the Being graded from olive to emerald. Not a chameleon then, or it would be yellow-white to match the drawer. A leprechaun? Stranger things had happened recently.
She rasped, “Who are you?”
The Being did not reply immediately but held up a tiny twinkling tablet in its hands. It tapped on the device, and a grumpy voice said, “Do you mean you can talk? We’ve only seen your kind moving about like herd animals.’ It peered at her again. ‘I’ve been trying to communicate with this creature for hours, and I was beginning to think something was wrong with my programme!”
In a flash, Maeve understood the ‘creature’ it spoke of was the washing machine. She narrowed her eyes, hands on hips, “Did you wrack my washer?”
A previous version of this story appeared in Shoreline of Infinity issue 27