[On Sunday, my advisor at the residency for my M.F.A in Creative Writing program gave us a writing exercise to be turned it this morning. We had to write a story where three characters (one has to be a child, another an alien in the E.T. sense, and the last a person suffering from severe memory loss) come upon an object and try to figure out what it is and how it's suppose to be used. I wrote the first draft Sunday night, and then rewrote the whole thing last night. I hope you enjoy it.]

—

The boy reached down and picked it up out of the leaf pile. Though he was perhaps no more than seven or eight, there was a big, red, painful zit sitting smack dab in the middle of his chin. He wore a white and blue striped, collared, button-down shirt, the kind little boys only wear for things like Church or their big sister’s high-school graduation. His arms were thin and his hands dainty, as if he’d never played in mud or helped his dad collect sticks for a campfire. He wore glasses almost as thick as the bottom of a wine bottle, and his hair, like a British prince’s, was prim and proper.

The old woman snatched it out of his hand. He was about to protest, but she saw it coming, and before he could really get going, she kneeled down and brought her face up real close. He saw emptiness at the center of her gray eyes. Her dark, bushy eyebrows felt like sandpaper against his forehead. Her breath smelled like a burning battery. He could feel tears starting way down in his chest, like his soul was about to break out in a fearful sweat.

She spoke each word as if it were its own sentence.

“Don’t. Even. Think. About. It.”

Something slimy dragged across his lip, and as her face pulled slowly away from the boy, he saw something fleshy and purple-veined squirm its way back into her mouth. He recoiled in horror, and with just a little shove, she sent him sprawling into the pile of leaves.

Behind her, the lamp brightened and dimmed in a code that had taken the old woman a quarter of her life to learn.

“What’s that?” she asked, turning around.

“The kid’s a fucking pussy,” the lamp signaled again.

“All kids are nowadays,” she said, turning back to glare at the kid, “It’s their parents fault. They follow ‘em around, wiping their asses until they’re twenty-three, but you’re right, the kid is a fucking pussy.”

“So,” the lamp asked, “What is it?”

She looked at the thing she had snatched from the kid, but the night was too dark for her to really make it out. She turned back to the lamp.

“Brighten it up a bit, would ya?” she said, and it did.

She moved the lamp’s little danglies out of the way ⎯ she hated those fucking danglies, and she knew for damn sure that she didn’t like the tiny glass balls on the end of them. She didn’t like the way they clinked together when the lamp hopped on its way from one place to another. They reminded her of the old, dull wind chimes that her neighbor absolutely refused to take down, despite the old woman’s rather blunt and aggressive letters. She hated those fucking wind chimes and she hated these fucking dangly balls. She hadn’t known the lamp for very long, but already it pissed her off.

“Oh, I know what this is,” she said, “It’s one of those…you know…one of those…what do you call them?…oh you know what I mean, one of those…”

She trailed off. The lamp was getting used to this. Ever since they’d crashed on this fucking planet, the old woman had been barely able to remember the names or uses of anything. It took her thirty-five minutes just to remember that the name of the thing they had crashed into was a clock tower. The lamp’s own immense knowledge was useless here. It had picked up enough English words from the old woman to be able to talk meaningfully about things, but it had absolutely no experiences with the things themselves, like when it accused the boy of being “a pussy” ⎯ the lamp knew what being a pussy meant, knew the word’s function as an insult, but put one in front of it, and the lamp wouldn’t know a pussy from a car antennae.

“A car antennae?” the lamp suggested.

“Stop talking,” the old woman said, “I can’t see it when you’re talking.”

The thing was square, smaller than the palm of her hand, glossy silver, and pliable. She pushed her thumb into it, and with a soft crinkling sound, it gave, but as soon she removed her thumb, it crinkled back to its original shape.

“It feels like pushing on tough skin,” she said to the lamp, “Not that you know what that feels like, but it does.”

The lamp didn’t say anything.

“Hey!” the old woman said, “You there?”

Still nothing. She harrumphed in the way that old people do, and turned her attention back to the object.

“I think it’s mad at the you,” the boy said from the ground.

“It’s not mad,” she said, “They all do this.”

She didn’t know why lamps sometimes stopped communicating, but she didn’t take it personally. When she had first arrived on their planet, dropped off in the Great Specimen Swap of Aught-Six or Aught-Seven (the old woman no longer remembered which), she thought she’d been abandoned in the lighting section of a planet-wide department store. The lights on the lamps were all fading in and out ⎯trying to talk to her, as she later found out⎯but she just chalked it up to something fishy in the wiring. She’d walked almost a third of the way around their tiny planet searching for the furniture department before it dawned on her that the lamps were living things, and what’s more, the planet’s dominant species. Over the years, she resigned herself to their moody nature, the way they could go from talkative to incommunicado with just the flick of a switch.

She held the object out to the boy, “Do you know what it is?”

The boy stood up and took it from her. He pushed his glasses up on top of his forehead and brought the object up real close to his eyes.

“I don’t recognize it,” he said, “But it’s got words on it.”

“Well,” she said, “What’s it say?”

The boy looked down at his shoes.

The old woman hesitated for a moment, confused, but then she laughed at him.

“You’re an idiot,” she said.

Tears came to the boy’s eyes.

“How the fuck can a kid your age not know how to read?” she continued, “I swear, your parents should be smacked right in the face.”

She tried to snatch the thing back from him, but the little kid expected it this time, and he held onto it.

“Give me it!” the old woman screamed.

“Fa, fa, fa….,” the kid stammered.

The lamp came back to life. Its bulb brightened and dimmed rapidly, and the little boy felt like it was cheering him on, saying “Go on, kid! Say it! Say it to the hag!”

“Fa, Fa, Fa…!”

The old woman tried to twist the thing out the kid’s fingers, but she could feel her arthritis starting to flare up. If she didn’t get it soon, she wouldn’t be able to at all.

“Fa, fa…”

“You goddamn little brat, give me the…”

“Tell the bitch!,” the lamp signaled, “Do it! Say it! Just say it!”

“FA, FA, FA….FUCK YOU!” the boy screamed.

He kicked the old bitch in the shin and she fell back, but she didn’t let go. The object ripped in half and something small and whitish fell onto the ground between them.

“You dirty little punk,” she howled, “You broke it!”

The lamp hopped over to the new object lying on the ground and turned its bulb brighter.

The boy picked it up. This new object was disc shaped. It felt a little slimy and there was a bubbly tip in its center. He pushed down on it and when he removed his finger, the bubble popped back up.

“Try pulling on the bubble,” the lamp signaled.

The little boy did, and the whole thing stretched with it as he pulled, turning the small whitish disk into a long whitish tube with a large hole at one end and now the bubble was a bubbly tip at the tube . The light got brighter in the clearing.

“What?” the boy asked the lamp, “Do you recognize it?”

“It doesn’t recognize it,” the old woman responded, moving closer to the light, “It’s never been down here.”

“No,” the lamp said, “I do recognize it.”

“What is it?” the boy asked. He started swinging the floppy whitish tube, letting it flip and twist in the air.

“I told you,” the old woman said, “It doesn’t know. But I do”

“No,” the lamp repeated, “I do! I do!”

The old woman charged the lamp, grabbed it by the base.

“NO,” she screamed, “YOU DON’T!”

The boy ducked out of the way and the lamp went flying by and smashed into a tree. The light went out. The boy felt one of the glass dangly balls ricochet off his cheek and fall onto one of his shoes.

“You killed it!” he called out into the darkness.

“I know,” the old woman said.

She was moving somewhere in the darkness. The boy could hear her feet shuffling through the leaves. When next she spoke, she was somewhere behind him, near where the lamp had landed.

“Give it to me,” she said.

“Tell me why you killed the lamp?” the boy asked, but he thought he knew why.

“Give it to me,” she said again.

She was closer now.

“Where are you, boy?” she said.

He stopped breathing.

“Boy?” she said, “Boy? Give it to me.”

He inched away from the voice. He could only think one thing: murderer. It repeated in his head: murderer, murderer, murderer.

“Boy,” she said, and then softer, “Boy, come here.”

She sighed, and then, “Boy, I know what it is that you’re holding. Give it to me and I’ll show you what it’s for.”

He moved away from her, taking a step with every word.

“You’re a murderer,” he said, “You killed the lamp and it didn’t do anything. You got mad at it because it knows what the thing is and you didn’t want it to tell me.”

“No,” she said, “It’s not that I didn’t want it to tell you. It’s that, if I’m going to show you what it’s for, the light needed to be off.”

He stopped moving.

“And lamps, these lamps,” she continued, “The ones that come from the lamp planet, they only go off when they’re dead.”

“What is it for?” he asked.

He heard her move closer to him, but this time he didn’t pull away. Again, he felt her sandpaper eyebrows, smelled her burning breath.

He felt the slimy thing on his lip again, and then she said, ““It’s for turning boys into men.”