Open your refrigerator, and listen to its hum. Interpret its speech.
TW: The refrigerator makes many inane pronouncements: ‘Not on my watch’ , ‘Our duty is to…’, ‘We salute those brave pioneers who…’ I try never to listen to its chorus of lies.
SC: Doorknob for the winter. Snake click turn turn. Sfeeeesh. Rumble tumble. Dot. Calico asphyxiation. I am a bigboy, I freeze & I fridge. Zzzap.
ML: My refrigerator is petering on like a raspy Tom Waits imploring me to crack open a box baking soda.
JA:
Fridge: Try to reseal the mysterious leaks.
Freezer: No! Don’t listen to him!
TT: Every time it rains, a she-wolf visits me. It has the ability to transform into a hallucinogenic mushroom when it sees me sad.
LW: It tells me the old regime is crumbling.
Do you have a pet? Or a visiting wild-thing? What skills might it use in the coming insurrection?
TW: Our cats are a faction of the greater global feline revolutionary coven which will seize power by telepathic means once disease, stupidity and corruption have sufficiently undermined human society. But I’ve said to much already.
SC: My pet is a black and white tuxedo cat, and has an aristocratic name. “Lord Alfred Oliver Remington the third.” I suspect his motives, but I trust in his bite. If the insurrection catches him in a good mood, he will be a useful ally.
ML: No pets, but Earl the red shouldered hawk is a frequent visitor in the back yard. He swiftly strikes down his victims leaving behind only small bones and whispers of feathers.
JA: I don’t have a pet but I recently discovered my balcony was full of very beautiful crustose lichens. It sounds like lichen can do pretty much anything, and be used for almost anything, from food to clothing to poison, and the elegant splotchy patterns they form might lay out the map for a federation of utopian communes, but perhaps its greatest contribution to the revolution might be its strategic insight into the power of symbiosis.
TT: I have a pet named Lucifer. It is a blind bat who drinks only pure blood from my neck – if I am drunk, he prefers my eye ball.
LW: Collie boy Duncan will sense the insurrection from afar and bark the rising call. His fur will embrace any tears.
Imagine yourself as the cockroach on the wall. See through its eyes as it travels. Where does it go? Does your house contain secret places, places which only it can reach?
TW: The cockroaches travel freely in and out of my mind seeing only darkness, sensing the fibres of dying roots dangling from the ceiling. My house is a secret place. How do you know about it?
ML: If I was the size of a cockroach I would slip in between my kitchen walls and finally discover what the inside of the brick chimney stack that has no actual fireplace contains. An enormous nest labyrinth? An inverse well? Perhaps it cuts down deep into the earth where the bricks give way to a dark Georgia red clay that will one day swallow the house whole.
SC: Inside one wall is a tiny crystalline cavern, a place where millipede dwell and airplane construction is constant. Obsidian airplanes, intended for no future use. Nonsensical industrialism.
JA: The cockroach crawls along the wall and moves beneath the couch. It dodges a copy of “Around the World in 80 Days” which is down there and skitters over an old go board. It navigates the ledge and finds its way to my bathroom. Crawling up the tub and up the wall, it goes behind the weird crack in my shower. This leads it to an dark space in between my bathroom and the depths of a hard to navigate closet. The cockroach does not recognize the shape of the stains in this area, nor any secret valuable or frightening artefacts which may be there.
TT: I’m walking on the wall. I see a slot on the corner. It is a gate that connects the house with the abbey where Marquis de Sade lived his teenage years. I make the big step to get inside. In a short time, I become an eyewitness to the imaginary orgies that his mind creates. Great day to be a cockroach.
LW: I as cockroach will invade the mechanism of keyholes.
CW: The fridge invents a slow magnetic cloud with its breath…the freezer is its own world of sporadic white noise blasts. It’s just me and my ghost cat friends and their friends of friends. Their role in the insurrection will be to startle and amaze as well as knock things off shelves. The cockroaches want to be around to see it so they’ve been leaving me messages with food crumbs. They are very articulate. They told me they can shrink. They can even climb through a keyhole, but I try not to worry–I look forward to their crumb messages a few times a week.
JB: We have an undercroft where we store our underwear. This is also where the cockroaches go when they’re bored with the constant complaints of the refrigerator. Many of these roaches are paid directly by the government to spy on us.
PR: The house inhabitants include very determined tiny black ants who live in a corner by a window. Occasionally they commit mass suicide by drowning themselves in Maple syrup. Their leaders must have promised them heaven and in this case they promised truly. What could be more like Heaven than maple syrup. The ants are devoted Aphid farmers and carry their treasured cattle to my Orchids to graze. Unfortunately an angry goddess who rules over the orchids destroys the aphids. Aphids look pretty fearsome but they are microscopic.This drama plays itself out weekly, I wreak havoc but the ants bravely hold their own.