The Human Ear / Precision Engineering / Closed Window

Three brief stories about problems.

The Human Ear

One day, after forty years of marriage, the man looked at her and suddenly saw the demon burning behind her eyes and swimming beneath her skin. It gave him a real shock. All this time, she had stood faithfully beside him. She had borne his children without complaint. She had stayed home and raised them, and she had been a good mother to them – or, at least, he had always thought so. How was it only now, in the long, eddying twilight of their lives, when it was far too late to do anything about it, that he had perceived her true nature? As he brooded on the question, his coffee slowly cooled in its mug. There was an image printed on the side, a photographic sequence by Muybridge. A man, nude, stands against a backdrop of white gridlines and, with unmistakable effort, hefts a large wooden beam onto his shoulder and carries it away. The action has been captured from three perspectives simultaneously, but with the beam on his shoulder, his face is still entirely hidden from view. “Is something wrong?” she asked. “No, no, it’s nothing,” he assured her. He felt like every sound that he was hearing was being digitally amplified to an extreme degree, and that they would otherwise be inaudible to even the most sensitive human ear.