I almost jumped when I saw the thing but had enough decency not to. It was small and whimpering, and for a second, I thought it was a matted dog, except it didn’t have any fur. Or skin, for that matter. Instead, it was this black, writhing amorphous mound whose eyes looked like they’d been pasted on with Elmer’s glue. I tried to tell Mr. Steely, tapping his foot on my porch, that he was mistaken, that it wasn’t mine, but he and his greyhound were already walking down the driveway. And besides, as it nestled into my arms, I really didn’t want to hurt its feelings. So I took it inside and set it down on the couch beside my laundry and watched as it writhed and whined—a sound somewhere between a baby’s wail and a cat’s hiss.
“Where did you come from?” I asked. Despite its lack of shoulders, it shrugged.
Maybe it was a science experiment gone wrong. Or maybe some sort of time traveler: its eyes possessed that old, weathered look I imagined a time traveler might have. Maybe it was a puddle of oil that had come to life. From what I could tell, it didn’t have teeth or a nose. It moved in this perpetual motion sort of way, without using legs.
Anyhow, I decided to call my brother to see if he had any insights. He was a chemist in San Jose and knew about these things. After three rings, his face materialized on my phone: his screen was fuzzy, but I could make out the bushy eyebrows and tousled hair. (How he got girls—or so he claimed). He was walking briskly down a hallway while chewing a sandwich.
“Got a question for you,” I said and turned my screen to face the thing. It blinked its Elmer-glued eyes as if to reaffirm my words. “What is this?”
Michael’s screen shook with his stride as he squinted at the camera. “The hell is that?”
“I don’t know. I’m asking you, Mr. Genius.”
Michael wrinkled his nose and told me that he’d have to take a closer look at it—which unfortunately wasn’t possible, with him being all the way over there and me being all the way over here. He asked me where I got it and what material I thought it might be made of.
“I don’t know. It’s a blob. Like just a black squirming blob.” I turned to the thing. “Right?”
It nodded its head.
“It’s probably not carbon-based, by the looks of it. Too liquidated to be obsidian, though it’s got obsidian’s sheen. Can you touch it and tell me how it feels?”
“How it feels?” I glanced at the blob, feeling like I should ask it for consent before sticking my fingers all over it. It didn’t give me a reaction, instead watching my hand as I drew closer to its form. I could sort of see my finger when I stuck it inside, which weirded me out a bit. It felt like I was touching liquid metal. The blob allowed me to continue probing around inside its body for a few moments, and then it hissed and stung me. I recoiled.
“I’m sorry!” I said. Michael said he could make a few guesses—some sort of gas- or plasma-based material, maybe—but he really needed to be in person to see this thing, and that wouldn’t happen until the Christmas holidays.
Nodding in resignation, I switched subjects and asked him how he’d been. He told me about work, how they were developing some new flu vaccine, and about how his toddler was in this phase where she tugged everything off the counters, which had caused the loss of three lamps and an antique clock. We talked for twenty minutes before all of the pleasant subjects were exhausted and he said he should get back to work. It’s the sort of thing that happens, I suppose when distance gets in the way of all the closeness you used to have as kids. The blob, meanwhile, seemed to have calmed down after the touch fiasco and started cuddling up to my thigh. I told Michael we should call again soon, said goodbye, and got back to my ironing.
That evening, it came to mind that the thing might need to be fed. I wasn’t sure if I should treat it like a dog, a baby, or something else entirely. I decided to try all courses of action. To preserve it some dignity in case it really was of some higher intellect, I first dished out some of my pasta onto a clean plate and set it on the table across from me, beckoning for the blob to take a seat. It looked at the plate and hissed. It did the same with the leftover fried rice. So it wasn’t fond of carbs.
Next, I tried vegetables. And then chicken tenders. And finally the leftover kibble I had from that one time I babysat my ex’s dog. It hissed and hissed and looked especially disdainful when I tried to serve it the kibble. I sighed and went upstairs to get ready for bed, hoping to think of something else to feed it while I was in the shower. I returned to the kitchen in pajamas with the idea to try non-human or -animal foods—maybe it was one of those things that ate metal—and was moderately mortified to find it sucking on one of the electrical sockets, pulses of energy garbling around its translucent insides. In slight desperation, I called up the one electrician I knew. Nick picked up on the first ring.
“It’s Meg. I think I need some electrical help.”
“Shoot,” Nick chuckled, “I never thought I’d hear from you.”
I had met Nick at a record store a few months ago when I had dropped a Beatles album on the ground, and we both reached to pick it up—your typical meet-cute kind of thing—and then he asked, “Haven’t I seen you around before?”
And because I would’ve remembered meeting a guy with a good haircut and Paul Rudd eyes, I said, “Is that supposed to be a pickup line?”
He grinned and nodded and then explained to me that he was an electrician and his building was just down the street, and gave me his card, and said I should ring him up if I ever wanted an electrical rewiring or a dinner date—or both.
I tried to explain to him about the blob eating my electricity, but obviously, that didn’t sound very sane over the phone, so I told him he had better come take a look.
“But you can wait until tomorrow,” I said. “It’s late.”
He told me not to worry about it, said that he was a night owl anyway, and was at my doorstep in thirty minutes, his bomber jacket slung over one shoulder. I ushered him into the kitchen, where the blob was still slogging away at my power socket. Nick squatted down by the socket and opened his toolbox. He procured a set of pliers and an insulated screwdriver and set to work prying the thing off my wall. Despite the apparent difficulty of the job, he worked with surprising grace. When he finally succeeded in the task, he remarked, “You got yourself a pretty spirited friend here.”
The blob nestled into his arms and whistled happily, its insides still crackling. And then it belched and threw up on the floor and all over Nick’s shirt. Nick laughed as I insisted on cleaning it up, trying to rub napkins over the mess. He said it was alright, that he would just go home and change, and packed up his tools and left.
____
The next day, I cleared the morning’s dishes and helped the blob onto the electrical socket before heading out for work.
“Be good, okay? You can eat all the electricity you’d like. Just don’t chew through the TV cord.”
The next-door neighbor’s kid was vaping out on the driveway. I remembered when we were younger—and my house belonged to my parents instead of me—how he used to have droves of his friends over. I used to sit on the curb, watching them play basketball and skateboard over homemade ramps. The sudden nostalgia propelled me towards him, slouching against his parents’ old Honda. A waft of artificial watermelon enveloped my senses as I greeted him. He nodded his head at me. He had grown a beard since I last remembered seeing him.
“Well, how’ve you been?” I asked. My gaze settled awkwardly on his left eyelet piercing.
He grunted, jutting his chin at my house. “That a new pet or something you got in there?”
“Huh?”
“The thing I saw in the window last night, kind of shifty looking. New pet?”
“Uh. Something like that.”
I wanted to say more. I had hoped to connect with him, though I wasn’t sure how. Maybe I could recount the time he spent an afternoon teaching me to skateboard. My brother was gone to university by then, and I must’ve looked extra forlorn sitting on the curb that day because he called me to join him and his buddies. We’d sort of been friends then, hadn’t we?
But he was already looking away, and besides, I didn’t know how to properly segue into the story. I wasn’t sure he remembered, anyway. He didn’t have his friends over much anymore. So I nodded my head awkwardly and went on my way.
I decided to pay Nick a visit before going to work to apologize for last night’s mess. I realized I hadn’t even paid him for his services, and to be honest, I was kind of afraid that he wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me after last night. And I guess I wanted him to want to have something to do with me. An elderly man led me through the sparse halls of the electrician building to an office in the back. Nick looked up from the files on his desk. He seemed more rigid here than in my house or at the record shop.
But then he smiled and spun his chair to hop out of it, and the relaxed demeanor sunk back into his body. “Well, look who it is. How’s your friend doing?”
“That’s just why I wanted to come see you,” I said and handed him a fifty-dollar bill. I didn’t know how much an electrician usually cost, let alone for a job like last night’s.
Nick shook his head, folding the bill back into my palm. I looked at his hand over mine and spouted abruptly, “I’d like to go to dinner with you. That is if the offer still stands.”
Nick grinned. “I thought you’d never ask.”
We made plans for Tuesday night and exchanged a few extra pleasantries before I said I needed to get to work. I left feeling fairly satisfied with the interaction.
____
The blob and I lived in relative harmony for the next two months. It seemed content to writhe around, hiss every so often, and suck the electricity out of my house. When I came home, we’d watch TV. It was especially intrigued by the evening news.
One Friday night, the blob started churning—and not its usual, electrified churn—but a sort of violent shaking overtook it. Nick and I—we were seeing each other regularly by now, since we’d hit it off that Tuesday evening—were making dinner, and Nick saw it first.
“It’s having a seizure!” he yelped.
“What do we do?” I said, panic rising in my voice. I hadn’t seen it shake like this before and thought it looked horrifically in pain.
“Get a humidifier! You can suck static out with a humidifier.”
“I don’t have a humidifier!”
“We need to neutralize him somehow! It’s all that electricity!”
I looked around wildly for anything that might neutralize electricity and, in one madcap effort, ended up throwing my living room rug on the blob. It fizzled, its body writhing under the heavy material, until finally, it stopped seizing. It slipped out from under the rug like black, electric blood, its eyes sliding out last. When it finally re-formed, it wheezed.
“Crickets,” it said. “Crickets! Crickets!” Nick and I looked at each other and gasped.
It didn’t say anything other than “crickets,” and very soon, it was completely back to normal—save for the fact that it repeated the word all through dinner and all through our movie.
____
It was church the next day. The stage’s blue lights glowed reverently, and the AC was on full blast. I sat in the back pew and listened to the sermon: today, the preacher had decided to bare his soul to us about his recent divorce. He talked about the loneliness he felt, about how God had gotten him through it, how God was greater than all our obstacles. I hadn’t been seriously religious in quite some time (I went to church so I could tell my parents I went to church), but I watched as he paced back and forth on the stage, and I listened to the occasional “Amen” from the crowd and sometimes an “Amen, hallelujah.”
And then suddenly I was crying. Something just opened up inside me like a cavern, this big gaping hole in my body, and everything collapsed into it.
It was the same feeling I got when there was nothing to do on Friday nights when I usually ended up taking a long walk or putting on a movie I didn’t really want to watch. Maybe this was how the blob felt, and this was why it had to suck in all that power all the time: to keep it full. It must be a miserable existence, if that was the case. The elderly lady sitting in front of me turned around and handed me a tissue. I wiped my eyes and left the church, feeling vacant.
I was eating sushi takeout, and the blob was siphoning its electricity, much less distressed than the previous night. I paused for a moment, my chopsticks midway to my mouth. The blob sensed this and paused, too, and glanced at me.
The thought flashed before me for a second that the blob must be a metaphor for my loneliness, and it had come to fill the cavern of emptiness inside me. But that was bullshit. The creature had been with me for over two months, and the only thing it had changed in my life was the obscene cost of my electric bill. It kept on looking at me but didn’t make any sounds. In fact, it remained completely still. It didn’t go back to the electricity; it didn’t hiss; it didn’t even belch out “crickets.” I wondered if it could read my thoughts.
____
Everything seemed fine for a couple of weeks. And then on Thursday, I was squeezing into my work shoes when I looked across the hall and noticed that the blob wasn’t at its preferred socket by the kitchen table.
“Hey, buddy?” I called. I had taken to calling it buddy, like it was a kid or a dog, although I’m not really sure it liked that. Still, it had become habitual. I checked all the sockets downstairs and then checked upstairs, too, even though the blob had never climbed the stairs. I checked under the couches and in the cupboards and underneath the rugs. It had shown no interest in going outside before, but just in case, I checked the front porch. And then I saw it.
It was latched onto the fence I shared with my next-door neighbor, chewing on the ivy. Half the vines were devoured by the time I got to it, and the other half were turning brown and decaying on the ground.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I scolded, incredulous. I tried to pull it off, but it hissed louder than I’d ever heard it hiss before. Its insides glowed with electricity and leaves. “You can’t touch that. The neighbors will kill me.”
But it kept on doing its thing, churning and eating and churning and eating. I pulled and pulled, and it kept on hissing at me and even stung me—something it hadn’t done since our first encounter. Defeated, I jumped back and said, “You’d better be back in the house by the time I get back, or else.” I didn’t really know what would happen “or else,” but it felt like the appropriate thing to say.
I got in my car and drove to work, stopping by Nick’s office to drop off lunch. He asked me how the blob was doing, and I admitted that it was eating the neighbor’s plants. I couldn’t stop thinking about the blob chewing off my neighbor’s whole garden and screwed up my lines at the monthly corporate meeting. By the time I drove home, I had resolved to knock on the neighbor’s door and ask as bravely as I could for forgiveness on the blob’s behalf. I peeked at the wreckage. All the ivy, which had once covered most of the fence, was either chewed off or dead. The begonias in the front had experienced some damage, too.
I steeled myself before getting out of my car and crossing the lawn. But standing on the porch, I heard shouts inside and quickly realized I had come at a bad time. I was about to turn away and come back later when the door flew open to reveal the neighbor kid, his face red and angry.
His mother—the one I had come to apologize to—followed him outside. “Honey, please. I’m just trying to do what’s best for you. You don’t have time. Come on, honey, don’t be like this. Where are you going?”
“I’m getting out of your hellhole,” he said, vape stick dangling from his mouth, hands clenched into fists. He jammed the car door open and revved up the engine. I stood in my place, startled and uncomfortable. He skidded out of the driveway and into the street, around the bend. His mother was left standing on the porch, her eyes brimming with tears.
She turned to me. “He doesn’t have time,” she said. “He’s got no time.”
I glanced at the fence, which now looked naked without all the ivy leaves, and then back to her. “What do you mean, he doesn’t have time? Doesn’t have time to do what?”
“Everything,” she sobbed. “It’s all wasting away.”
I sidled towards her, hesitantly placing a hand around her shoulder. She didn’t move, so I left it there. “It’s not wasting away. I mean, he’s still young. He’s still got a lot ahead of him.”
She shook her head and wiped her tears with the heel of her palm. “That’s not what I mean.”
“What do you mean, then?”
She looked at me with new eyes, then, and seemed to finally register that she was speaking to a vague acquaintance. She took a breath. “I’m sorry. What did you need, sweetheart?”
I glanced at her, a little confused. And then I remembered what I had come for. “The vines. Your ivy. It’s gone. My...pet ate it. And I just wanted to apologize. I feel really bad about it.”
She wiped her nose again and looked over at the fence, and then suddenly, she laughed. The sound bubbled out of her gut, which must’ve held a dozen laughs of a similar brand. “All this, and you’re worried about a little ivy?”
“I feel really bad,” I repeated. “I can buy you a new plant if you want. I’m not really a green thumb, but I can probably buy some ivy from a—from a plant dealer or whatnot, and I’ll be careful to make sure that the blob—the pet—doesn’t get to it again, and—”
“Sweetheart,” she interrupted, “calm down.” The tears were still running down her cheeks. I thought about her son who had just sped away in a rusty Honda, her son who used to skateboard in the street with his friends, who taught me tricks and teased me about the shape of my nose.
“Please don’t worry about the plant,” she said. And then she wrapped her arms around me in a big hug, sinking into my shoulders.
Please don’t worry about your son, I wanted to say. But of course I didn’t. And of course, she would.
I wandered back into the house, sort of dazed from the interaction, to find the blob completely spazzing out. It glitched from one socket to the next, a bundle of shock and blob and leaf. It turned blue, then red, then purple and then went back to black and lept all over the house like it was teleporting its body through the electrical sockets. “Crickets, crickets,” it screeched.
I tried to pull it out of the sockets, but it was moving too fast, its blob form whizzing through the walls and the air. Its stomach kept glitching. In a moment of relative calm, when it was stuck to just one socket, I glimpsed something flickering in its eyes, something playing like a movie. A movie of the future. I quickly realized it wasn’t my future, but the neighbor kid’s.
I saw the neighbor’s house and then a convenience store. Then I saw the neighbor kid working at the store, getting married, having three mini neighbor kids, and teaching the mini kids how to skateboard. And then, the three mini neighbor kids grew up and had mini mini neighbor kids in a new house somewhere in the city. And on and on like that until there was one great- great- great- grand-neighbor kid running out of a futuristic flying house.
I was only shaken out of my trance when the montage flickered. And then the blob squirmed and blinked—and with one last “crickets” cry, disappeared into the electrical socket by the kitchen table.
Months passed, and then a year, and then some. I hoped the blob would return, but it never did. So I went on with my job and kept on dating Nick. Michael came home for Christmas. Nick and I had an amicable break-up. I started dating Cindy. I broke up with Cindy and moved to a different city for work.
One summer evening, years later, I walked past a scrawny, tired-looking guy leaning against the rails of a skatepark. He was cheering on his kid, this little girl making her wobbly descent down a skate ramp. I thought about the neighbor kid. I thought about the blob. And I decided, fondly, that the blob must’ve been a time traveler. I waved at the guy standing by the skatepark, who gave me a sheepish smile. In the hot breeze, the cicadas chirped.
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