Our New Suspicions

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We deliberated hours, the room sealed and vaguely smelling of the previous evening’s card game, a 7 of Clubs turned up between the cushions, a bowling alley worth of empties, a calendar drooping beneath a picture of a tractor, a ladies small windbreaker balled as though in rage. Everyone always knew who played. We weren’t having a session, it wasn’t quite a meeting, we hadn’t convened formally, we weren’t even there. That’s what we decided when we voted, 5-3, to destroy the minutes upon adjourning. “Do the minutes say destroy the minutes?” F. Czerniewicz was always such a funny man.

There had been glimpses, traffic signals poorly timed, a preponderance of radio-controlled devices on the pond, a flouting of the leash law near the treatment plant, the possibility that the man in the mackintosh from Local 112 was selling household wares once more from his trunk. Although that last bit might have been just a neighbor’s spite, resentful of “persecution.” Which is exactly why we had passed the Accidental Physical Contact by-law, for cases such as this. Sympathy, after all, is what one expects only from blood relations; it’s not a public good.

We voted, 7-1, to stink up our clothes with rum, so as to facilitate our alibis. Only the teetotaler, V. Raku, opposed. Although “alibis” might have been too strong a term; “explanations” would suffice.

We voted, 6-2, to take down the banners. We voted, 5-3, to replace the banners with laminated cards to be tucked in shoppers’ bags.

We voted inconclusively, 4-4, to extend the unwritten contracts of the teens we had long ago deputized. The videotapes were proving time-consuming to transcribe. “A tie means no,” said the Interim Secretary, L. Vanis, inscrutably. There were cigarette ashes in his coffee.

Cigarette ashes? We were in a room clearly marked No Smoking. There were no windows. There were cigarette ashes in his coffee. How was that possible?

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