The Last Thing We Ever Needed by Jen Michalski

We don’t know how we ever lived without the thing. Sure, we’ve had other things in the past, but this one is the best by far. We weren’t sure we were even going to be able to get the thing. I mean, everyone wanted one, and there are never that many for the getting. So we got to the store at 5:30 in the morning after Thanksgiving to get the thing before it sold out. We got there ahead of our neighbors and our friends and even our own family members in the same house. Although we had never seen the thing or touched the thing, we heard that this thing was the best thing ever. We heard it from the television, from our neighbors. We heard it from the people in line in front of us, the ones who sent up a tent on the sidewalk outside the store the day before and roasted their Thanksgiving turkey using Sterno. We all agreed that all of us couldn’t be wrong.

We were surprised at how small it was, considering how big it used to be. But the sales person assured us that this thing is much better than the older, bigger things. We weren’t complaining—some of the older things barely fit in the car! And this thing fit right on our lap—boy, have times changed!

But there’s just one small thing. I mean, there’s the thing, and then there are the things you have to buy for the thing. Things to make it do the things you want. They, unfortunately, don’t come with the thing. So we couldn’t use the thing right away because the things to make it do the things we wanted weren’t available until Christmas. And even then, we couldn’t get all the things we wanted because other people bought things for their thing, too. But, still, we finally had some things for the thing. So we set it up in the corner of the living room after Christmas.

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By the spring, we had to move the thing to its own room. Sure, it’s a small thing, but all those other things really add up. Not that we’re complaining. We can do almost anything on that thing, and it’s almost like doing it for real. The friends we have from the thing are almost as real as the friends we used to have and the pets we have from the thing are almost as real as the pets we had to give up and the jobs we have on the thing are almost like the jobs we kind of still have, except they only pay us in thing money that we can only use it toward thing things.

But that’s okay. We don’t know how we lived before the thing. Oh, except now we sleep in the closet, since the rest of the house now houses all of the things for the thing. But we don’t really sleep very much because there’s so much to do with the thing—the thing even has a thing that’s almost like sleeping! And we don’t really go out very much because we can’t take the thing with us.

But eventually we didn’t have any money for the thing. We only had thing jobs and thing money and thing friends and thing food, and the thing, the thing just doesn’t pay for itself. So we had to give up on the thing a little. We began to sell pieces of the thing, things we didn’t use so much, to pay off the bills so we could keep most of the thing. But then we liked doing the real things so much we stopped doing the thing things and we sold most of the things for the thing.

We have so much space now, without anything in it. We sleep for real in our bedroom and go to that real job we hate. But we’re happy, we think. We reflect on our waste, our obsession with the thing, the thing that was everywhere and that everyone had and now that nobody wants because everybody has it and now everyone wants the new thing and we do, too. We hear it’s even smaller. It goes right in our brain and we don’t even need more things or even a house to store the thing’s things because we are the thing now. And boy, we don’t know how we will ever live without it.

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Jen Michalski’s first collection of fiction, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS (2007), is available from So New Media and her second is forthcoming from Dzanc (2013). She is the editor of the anthology CITY SAGES: BALTIMORE (CityLit Press 2010) and the literary quarterly jmww.

© 2010, Metazen. All rights reserved.

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Tags: February 2010

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 4:00 am