The Project




I was thinking hard at breakfast, first day of vacation. No time to grow plants of any sort, not much time for bacteria cultures. If we were going to get anything shipped to us we needed to order it before close of business today.

I was eating my cereal, staring off into space. Electra had her piece of Cocoa Pebbles, dipping it into her milk and swirling it around, then eating the softened kernel.

Suddenly she looked up at me. “Voices.”

“You’re hearing voices?” I asked. For a second I thought that we could chart her descent into madness.

Make a scale from ‘able to escape detection’ through ‘throwing excrement at the TV’ to ‘making plans to harvest the neighbor’s flesh as a doorway to a higher plane of existence.’ But could she be completely nut-burgers by the end of February?

“The engineers!” she said. “They’ve been kind of playing around with MY voice. What if we made a formal study of it? The voices of different sylphs, different settings, different microphones.”

“Conversational, singing, laughing,” I suggested.

“We could try to get the sylphs I interviewed back into the studio.”

“First we really need to understand what the sound guys actually DID. Then see if there’s any place to go further.”

“Right, right. So, what do we call this research?”

“I vote for ‘That Annoying Squeak,’ really,” I said.

“I do not squeak!” she squealed. Dad laughed. She turned on him. “Do you have anything to add?”

“Not if my remarks are being recorded,” he said, retreating behind the morning’s paper.

“You don’t squeak, dear,” Mom said, sitting down to put creamer in her coffee. “But he may be referring to how sylph voices usually sound on television.”

“Oh.” She bought it. So we named the project ‘Isolating That Annoying Television Squeak.’

All the sound guys thought it was a great project.

Mark wanted a video record of the whole effort, including Chip and Chrissy typing and gluing and so on. I got trained up on the portable camera. And I got even more trained up on the threats applicable to losing, breaking, loaning or playing with the portable camera for anything other than the approved science fair project, documentation thereof.

“Gosh,” Electra exclaimed on the ride home that day. “I can’t IMAINGE how Mr. Furrey thought you might make a video of you boys lighting your own farts.”

“Is there a story there?” Mom asked.

“No!” I protested. “No story! None at all!”

“I wasn’t talking to you, Conrad.”

“Well,” Electra said, “It’s not exactly a STORY. You know how SOME PEOPLE will make totally off-the-cuff remarks from time to time?”

“Like,” Mom replied, “the time SOMEONE had the cards for all three rooms on one side of the Clue board? And said he had a monopoly and wanted to build houses on the property?”

“OR when someone offered to drive because he’d ‘never rolled a car this expensive, yet,’ yeah,” Electra said.

“Did someone say something like that?” Mom asked.

“Well, Mr. Furrey was offering suggestions of things to record, like a standard phrase, and other things like sneezing, coughing, singing… And someone added ‘farts, both with and without a match.’ And he didn’t think Mark heard him.”

“Mark DIDN’T hear me because Mark was two rooms away and I didn’t have my mike turned on,” I said. “Someone ratted me out.”

“For shame,” Mom said. “Who could have done such a thing?”

“Well, not Electra,” I said.

“Aw, that’s sweet, how you trust her,” Mom smiled.

“No, Mrs. Loudon, he means he had control of my microphone.”

‘OH. Yeah, that works, too.”



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Index

34. Our Dream

36. Isolating The Annoying Squeak