I’d inexplicably left a can of WD-40 on my nightstand for weeks next to the George Orwell book. This was not the first time I’d slept with flammables.
***
I meet another engineer, who is also a blacksmith, and also a physicist. He sleeps with a knife under his pillow. He calls this knife his “bed knife,” insinuating there are others.
***
Saying where something is “staged” is an engineer’s unnecessarily codified way of designating where she left her shit. The second time I leave the blacksmith’s house, I begin a list of things I staged there. I employ a headlamp in search of staged items.
***
I lost an earring in his bed once. Weeks later I awake to a cold piece of metal against my leg, and, thinking it might be my earring, I pluck it from the sheets. It’s a security drill bit. I couldn’t judge him. Security drill bits are very specifically handy.
***
I have a complicated security system, just like everyone else. Somehow, he’s managed to disarm it. Tinkering around like that, he’s tripped a “trouble alarm,” which is logged in red ink under “Troubles and Supervisories.”
The fire department will come.
Current Sh*t 