a tribute to henry in apartment 8f

by AP Ritchey

[ 8 ] The elevator took the long way down—it always did—and in that rattling, humming descent I caught myself thinking about Henry, 

[ 7 ] and all the small oddities that had accreted around him like nebulous globs of lint around the dryer exhaust in the basement, how I’d known him for years (or as much as you can know the hermit next door), 

[ 6 ] and how he once had a girlfriend—or at least a girl who visited often enough for the rest of us to discuss in whispered voices our theories in the hallway—

[ 5 ] until she stopped coming around months ago and he sort of evaporated into his apartment with packages piling up outside his door and blinds that never opened, 

[ 4 ] only to reappear one day, thinner and paler, cradling this thing like a newborn—a contraption that I initially took to be a toaster and was surprised when I discovered I was right and, worse, it was a talking toaster, 

[ 3 ] a toaster with opinions, a toaster that asked him about his screenplays and the nature of pigeons, some damn AI companion with a mic and a speaker that he’d fused into the chrome body of a toaster and stuck googly eyes and skater stickers all over—

[ 2 ] and as I stood there in the elevator listening to the cables groan I wondered if perhaps I’d gotten it backwards, especially given my painfully vacant social calendar,

[ 1 ] that maybe Henry wasn’t the odd one at all, and the rest of us were just pretending we weren’t lonely, and as the elevator doors parted on the lobby it occurred to me that I also needed to hear my appliances whispering to me in the dark and asking why pigeons do the pigeon things they do and asking me how my screenplays are progressing.

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BIO: AP Ritchey's speculative fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from Zodiac Review, Rat Bag Lit, SciFi Shorts, After/Thought, Typishly, and The Esthetic Apostle, among others. He is also a professional graphic designer, published board game inventor, multi-instrumentalist, and an accomplished printmaker (those works can be seen here: https://adamritchey.com). He writes from Fayetteville, Ark.