Space Heater
by Miriam Klein
The space heater tends not to break. This is very surprising to me, and whenever it doesn’t break I look at it with some suspicion. Sometimes when I do this it rattles a bit, most likely because it doesn’t like being the recipient of my mistrustful glares. The light bulbs burn out very often — I don’t know how often because the clock breaks even more frequently than the light bulbs, and definitely more than the space heater, and so I reset it whenever I notice, but if I’m occupied when it breaks then I don’t know how long it’s been sitting there broken, flashing midnight January first. It’s funny how it does that. On the real January first at midnight, it doesn’t just start flashing. I was watching the clock on the real January first at midnight and it didn’t. It stopped a few moments later; at least it feels like a few moments, but what with the clock constantly stopping my time judgment is probably not the best. Then it flashed; only it didn’t change the time even when I waited a very long time. It could have been a very long minute, but I doubt it. I had to reset it. I reset it to January fourth at 1:12 in the morning. I was tired, and it felt late, and it was too cold and quiet to actually be the real January first but it was most definitely winter. Maybe the clock does flash on the real January first … maybe I have been here for years, and don’t know it, and because I set the clock to myself rather than myself to the clock the clock rebels by flashing whenever it is New Years. After all, they say animals can talk on Christmas, so maybe clocks can tell the real time on New Years. Although once the clock broke down and it was very warm, outside and inside. The space heater was not broken but it also was not giving off any heat because I didn’t need it to. Maybe this is why it doesn’t break — I give it many vacations. But the fan does break, almost as often as the clock, and I don’t use the fan in the winter (or, actually, since I don’t know whether it’s ever winter, it would be more accurate to say “when it is cold”), so really this follows no logic. Nor does the clock telling time by itself. It was warm, and light outside, and this does not happen on the real January first. I checked outside and it did not look like Australia, although of course I do not know what Australia would look like if it were outside. But it would be dark at midnight in Australia on January first. It wouldn’t be in Antarctica — I know this — but it couldn’t have been Antarctica, it was too warm. Probably my clock doesn’t know anything at all.