Kyla ran to the porch, excited. Alexa had just chimed, indicating that Kyla’s air fryer had finally been delivered. She glanced through the window at the side of her door. It was there, all right. The brown packages were almost narcotic in the euphoria they incited in her. Kyla opened the door, her smile a shade too white. Better than too yellow, she always figured. In the background, her two-year-old son Devin cried out as he stubbed his toe.
The workroom was abuzz, air heavy with the hushed echoes of so many voices and mechanical parts blending. The collective sound possessed a hypnotic buzzing quality, like white noise. It was funny how the sound of everything happening at once sounded very much like nothing at all. Arthur rather liked it. He didn’t wear headphones like most of the other workers did. Even if he were to wear them, he didn’t know what he would listen to. Music always struck him as disingenuous. The distillation of emotion into recorded sound always resulted in a crude and rudimentary product that never seemed to capture the original feeling. That was another problem—the fact that music was a product for others to consume left Arthur cold. His heart was a blue glacier trapped in the otherwise warm workings of his flesh.
Kyla opened the box and took out the sleek appliance within. The color was called Starry Charcoal, and it was quite accurate in describing the graphite curves of the machine, the little sparkles that studded its exterior. Kyla grabbed the instruction manual and sat down at the kitchen table next to her little dude, who was now holding his injured toe and humming a tune from his favorite series. “Let’s get this sucker working,” she said, partly to her son and partly to no one in particular. She rubbed Devin’s back and began to read the manual.
Products. Consumers. Consumption. Accumulation. The goddamn Joneses and their terrible credit. Weren’t we, as advanced primates, supposed to have transcended this crap by now? Evolved to actually give a shit about the survival of our species and planet? The hamster wheel turned and turned, and Arthur was right there at the center of it. A Packing Guru, to be specific. That was his official job title. At the time of hire, when his manager had welcomed Arthur to the team as “our new Packing Guru,” Arthur had imagined inserting the brown recluse he’d found in his house the previous night into his manager’s nose and taping it shut. Nama-fucking-ste.
Devin was growing crabbier by the minute, hollering and inching dangerously closer and closer to a full-blown tantrum. “Hold on, little man, Mama’s trying to read,” Kyla murmured. She concentrated harder on the manual. Devin got off his chair and began scaling the stool next to their kitchen island, wailing mournfully. “Oh my god, Devin,” Kyla said, rolling her eyes and getting up from the table. “Here, have some of your beloved carrots.” She went into the fridge and retrieved a bowl of immaculately diced carrots. Kyla sat back down at the table and turned to the manual.
Unfortunately, the opportunity to use the brown recluse on his boss never presented itself, but with time, Arthur had found other ways to keep himself entertained at work. His thoughts drifted back to urinating in the coffee machine’s water reservoir that morning before the crowds rolled in. He also liked to add a few fingernail clippings or scabs in his coworkers’ lunches when they were otherwise occupied. Pizza was the best food for scabs, because they blended right in with the crispy crust and pepperoni. Yes, those things were highly satisfying, but that wasn’t the part of his job that fulfilled him.
The air fryer hummed as it cooked the broccoli bites Kyla had placed in it, setting the temp to 400 degrees Fahrenheit for eight minutes. Kyla, always one to do her homework, turned to the next page in the manual as she waited. A piece of paper fell out, no bigger than the circle she could make using her thumb and forefinger. She glanced up at Devin, whose tantrum had finally started to subside, and then looked back down at the paper.
The note, if you could call it that, was handwritten in pencil. Some funny words, not all of them English, were written with a hurried hand, along with some symbols she didn’t recognize. “Weird,” she said. The Alexa timer went off, startling her into dropping the book. She looked up in time to see Devin pulling the cord on the air fryer, and the air fryer crashing onto his head. The scalding broccoli bites fell out and landed on the unconscious boy’s foot with the stubbed toe. “Devin!” Kyla screamed in a voice she had never heard from herself before. She ran to the boy and found that he was not breathing. Carrots spilled out of his mouth. HE’S CHOKING HE’S CHOKING HE’S CHOKING HE’S CHOKING Kyla thought, and in her tidal wave of panic, she forgot that she knew how to do the Heimlich and CPR. She grabbed her phone and called 911.
Arthur realized he’d been sitting in a daze for close to a minute. He looked down at the package in front of him, little disciple to his Guru, and slipped a tiny piece of paper into it. He sealed the package with heavy duty packing tape and sent it off down the conveyor belt. People loved using products, but it was Arthur’s life’s work to let people know how it felt when the products used them. He watched the package fall into the shipment bin, and smiled.
Two years later, Devin sat at the kitchen table, watching his parents coo over his baby sister. He had suffered severe brain damage, but he knew enough to be jealous of her. To get their attention, he kicked his little feet, one scarred with tough, leathery skin, and one with skin untarnished. His parents did not notice. “Heeeere comes the airplane,” Daddy sang, twirling baby Alissa’s spoon in the air. The spoons, which Kyla had ordered online from her usual company, had just arrived today. They were a cult favorite on the internet, designed ergonomically for a baby’s mouth as well as to reduce the amount of food that got smeared on their face. With difficulty, Devin walked over to the recycling bin in the kitchen and pulled out the box from the spoons. There was something in it, a little piece of paper with what looked like scribbles on it. Devin looked at the paper for a long while, then threw it on the floor and meandered into his playroom, where he spent all evening playing with his new box.
He had no idea that in three days, his sister would die from food poisoning.
People. Things. People loving things. People hating people. And the Packing Guru had completed the circle, accomplished a beautiful and mystical task. He had made things hate people as much as he did.