The TVs Try to Rape Us

A Story by noosepaper

Vignette of a man who thinks his television is watching him. The First line is from the Regina Spektor song "Hero".

The TVs try to rape us and I guess that they’re succeeding

The black box has been staring at me for weeks, an unusual twist as most people stare at it instead. But this one’s different. This one glows black and white like a flea infestation on a polar bear, constantly shaking and reassessing its position. It used to make a loud cracked noise, like someone cramming tin foil into your ears, but I taped up the speakers until it was muffled enough to bear. Every button has fallen off and that enraged it, and I have no power to change.

The shiny glass never sleeps, and so I cannot sleep. My eyes are cracked and wide with anxiety, red veins swirling around the iris and eating it up. And the mucus comes out but doesn’t dry like when I sleep so I secrete without warning, I can’t leave the place. I can’t go out; the screen has hollowed out my eye pits and made them crusted with blood. I’m stuck against the wall facing the blinking snow crash. The room is silent"I can hear its whispers. I hear them shooshing and shaking and shimmying in my paranoia. I do not want to be spoken of, I do not want the spirits that whirl around inside of the box to be talking about me and laughing about me. That’s what they do they titter and snicker and cut up having a great old time in there at my expense, at my suffering. I wish I could just sleep and forget it all. Sleep is the drug of the regulars, you can escape for eight hours or so. But I cannot will sleep or wish for it. Praying never worked, and neither did God.

The only thing that continues to work is this glowing crate, my most feared demon. It isn’t fair that I was given a faulty one. The television store would not take it back and insisted it was a fine machine and had no problems, but they cannot see. They cannot see the insidious nature of this plastic box, because they all follow their obsequious reality, but only I know how to look deeper.

Tonight I plan to end the torture: I will take a hammer to that fiendish cage of graphics. I will break it and with it unleash the specters into the air and into the rest of the universe, engulfing everything and even swallowing me up with it. I am a martyr to the cause, because by cracking open the surface of hell, the evil disperses and dissipates, rather than sitting pregnant and ornery inside of an electric casket, growing fuller with frustration.

But once freed, it will feed upon whoever is nearest and then be satiated with its serpentine lust and disappear into the darkened and dilated night, in between the clouds and carbon monoxide. And I cannot say what it will do next, because I will not be around to undergo what moral disorder and heretical havoc it may conjure, for I have already endured my cause.