It Just Sits There

It is a perfectly marvelous gadget. There's none like it anywhere. It will foretell the present with 100% accuracy. I can guarantee it.

It sits up on my desk, by my monitor. It has no wires going in, no antennae, not even an opening. I don't know how in the world it's powered. Nothing goes in. It's a sealed box of unknown material, sort of beige and about the size of a tissue container.

It just sits there.

I can open it up at anytime. I do. The front hinges away, you see. I find inscribed in the handwriting of da Vinci a perfect description as if it were a diary of events of the day passing, as I have experienced them. It is thus my own empirical record, to include sights, sounds, smells, prominence of each in accordance with how I sense. It is always written in Italian, however, so I must keyboard it into Babel to understand what it is telling me, but it is always simply a log of the day passing.

There is only one day, written on a page which is not paper, and when I close it up, nothing happens. It just sits there. And then in a day or a week I open it again and there is the day revealed on that grey paper which is not paper.

I can never hear anything whirring or scratching in there. I don't know where the box came from; it just appeared on my desk one day. I thought maybe it belongs to Niki J but she doesn't know where it came from either. We are both extremely nonplussed.

I try and open it earlier in the morning, thinking I'll find what the day will be like. After all, if it knows what is happening without anything telling it, then maybe it knows what will happen. But it always just reports the immediate past.

I know absolutely nothing more than I'm telling you.