Wild Fiction

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‘More practise, I think,’ Rebecca said closing the book and pushing it back into the bookshelf. She walked along the wall trailing her finger along the spines of the books until she found a space of shelf with bits and pieces of junk on it. There was a globe of the world, dusty and faded. She spun it around, looked at the countries, and laughed. ‘Do you know how old this is? Zimbabwe is called Rhodesia on this globe and even worse, Zambia’s still called Northern Rhodesia.’
The author did not reply. He was scribbling furiously on a piece of paper, his nose inches from it. Rebecca picked up a pile of framed photographs that were lying in a stack. There was one of a very young author. The others were of places she did not recognise and there were none of Genevieve.
Sitting on the shelf among the paraphernalia was a black block of metal about quarter the size of a shoe box. It had a handle to pick it up with and directly on top of the block was a large lever switch with the words ON and OFF on either side. The switch was currently in the off position. Wrapped around the block was a cable with a three-prong plug at the end of it. Rebecca blew at the dust that had accumulated on it and most of it came off in a puffy cloud that floated down to the floor. She picked it up; it was heavy and chunky.
‘What’s this?’ Rebecca asked holding it up with two hands.
The author looked at her and frowned. ‘It’s an electromagnet, it’s very strong and very dangerous, I suggest you put it back and leave it alone.’
‘How does it work?’ There was a dust free square on the shelf from where Rebecca had taken the electromagnet. She was careful to put it back in the exact same spot.
‘You plug it into the wall and hold it over whatever you want to pick up and then push the lever into the on position. When you want to let go of it you switch it off and the electromagnet releases it.’
‘Why don’t you just pick the thing up with your hands?’
‘It’s for picking up many small things like iron filings and tiny bits of metal. For example, if you had a piece of metal stuck in your eye you could hold the electromagnet over it, switch it on, and it would pull the metal splinter out.’
‘And that’s what you use it for?’
‘No it was my wife’s cheese project. She was making home-made cheese and somewhere along the line the milk or something could become contaminated with small bits of metal from one of the other machines. She’d use the magnet to pull out all the bits of metal. Don’t quote me on that though as I’m not sure exactly what she did with it. She knows more about it than I do.’
‘That doesn’t sound very dangerous to me.’

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