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FLOATERS
©2008 by Richard S. Crawford

“Hi!”

Dirk Bruins jumped at the high pitched, unnaturally cheerful voice. “Who said that?”

“It’s me! It’s Harold! Hi!”

Except there was no one else around. The house was empty; Dirk had made sure of that. The Cartwright family was on vacation, and, like dorks, they had forgotten to cancel their newspaper subscription, so Dirk had known that they would be gone. There was some nice stuff in their house.

“Where are you Harold?”

“Up here! In your left eye!”

Harold blinked. “Where?”

The tiny voice sighed in a disconsolate way. “We’ve been together almost your entire life and you don’t even recognize me. Do you know how that hurts?”

Dirk, already prone to a certain degree of hypochondria, felt his heart start pounding already. Harold couldn’t possibly be talking to him. Harold was… Well, Harold was a floater. A bit of flotsam in his left eye. He had learned in college that floaters, little bits of cell or other debris that ended up in the vitreous humor inside your eyeball, just never went away. And he’d had one in his left eye that had a particular shape, like a little man, that he’d had all his life. So he’d named it Harold.

And now, apparently, Harold was talking to him.

Dirk ran into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and stared into the light. Harold swam into view, a ghostly translucent blob. Same shape as always, but now somehow darker, with sharper lines. “What do you want? I’m busy.”

“Just to chat,” Harold said. “We’ve been together for so long but we’ve never talked. Don’t you think we have some catching up to do?”

“No! I’ve got work to do. You just shut up, okay?” Dirk closed the refrigerator.

“Oh, I totally understand. You’re a busy guy. Say, what are you doing anyway?”

Dirk ignored the voice. Since he was in the kitchen anyway, he started rifling through the drawers. The silverware looked nice, kind of old, and maybe real silver. He scooped it up by the handful and tossed it into the sack he’d brought with him.

“Oh, so you’re stealing everything from this house!” Harold chirped. “Hey, that’s pretty cool. All this time I never knew what you did for a living. I guess I just never looked out before.”

Dirk squinted his eyes shut. “Just shut up!” he shouted. “I need you to be quiet, and we can talk later, all right?”

“Hey, I’m just asking. But fine, I’ll shut up.” The floater sounded almost petulant.

Dirk made his way from the kitchen into the living room. These people had a really nice huge television. He regretted not bringing the larger sack with him. Ah, well. At least they had a nice new game console that he could grab. He unhooked it from the television, making sure he grabbed all the wires and controllers too. He didn’t see any games on display but that didn’t matter.

“Oooh, are you going to play that when you get home?” Harold asked. “I hear these things are really good for getting you into shape. I think you probably ought to get into better shape, don’t you?”

Dirk sneered. “How would you know what kind of shape I’m in?”

“I’ve been asking around. There are some fatty deposits in your arteries near your heart that are really nice. You should check them out.”

“Yeah, right, whatever,” Dirk said. He determined to ignore Harold and get on with his business. This hadn’t been a very good haul so far. Maybe there was a safe he could open. He started lifting pictures from the walls to look behind them.

“I don’t think there are any safes in this house,” Harold said.

“How do you know I’m looking for a safe?”

“Oh, I’ve been making friends with some of the neuronal plaques in your brain. It’s all about networking, you know? And there’s some really funny little bone chips in your knees that have been keeping us in stitches with jokes all day. Here, listen to this. How many patellas does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“Would you shut the hell up?” Dirk pressed his hands to the sides of his head. “I can’t take this anymore?”

“Oh. Well, now I’m hurt. We’ve been together all your life so far. And we’ll be together for the rest of your life, too. Cause, you know, floaters, we just stick around inside your eyes, and we never go away.”

Dirk snarled. “Yeah? Well, we’ll just see about that!” He dug through his sack, searching for one particular piece of silverware. And finally he found it. A large soup spoon. “Okay, Harold. Things are going to get serious here.” He went back to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door once again.

#

It was Mrs. Cartwright who found it, resting in a bowl of grapes she had left in the refrigerator.

She could never eat grapes again.

#

“Dirk? Hey, is that you? Yeah, I just got one question for you.”

Dirk touched the gauze over his left eye. The voice didn’t even sound like Harold, but every time he heard a voice these days without immediately seeing who was talking, he got nervous. Right now he just assumed it was one of the nurses, coming in the night to wake him up for a sleeping pill. “What is it?”

“Get this. How many patellas does it take to change a lightbulb?”