Page 35 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. IV #2

work out my reach and then tested the strength of my grip on a special simulation machine.
enough, he thought, and he helped me strap it to the back of my bicycle.
He put the results into a handheld computer while asking me questions about the type of detritus the machine would be required to ingest. Did I own a foot spa? Did I cough a lot? Did I consider myself a fast vacuumer or a slow one? Did I take breaks as I vacu- umed, or did I do it all at once?
The younger machine was taken on by my brother, who, at 32, was a much more sensible age to relate to it.
Did I, and he looked at me meaningfully when he asked me this, ever wear headphones on the job?
I sat for a time gazing at my new Electrolux. I thought about how many different motors and filters it had been through over the years, and how it was probably a completely different machine now to when it was born in 1986.
“Yes,” I said.
It glided over surfaces effortlessly, softly murmuring as it went, every hair, skin flake, and food fragment disap- pearing up its tubes as if it was slurping delicious soup.
He wrote something down. “Means you won’t hear any large objects rattling up the tube. I need to know that sort of thing. It’s up to you, of course, how you choose to hoover your house.”
I never felt the need for headphones. I was part of the machine, and when my brother brought the younger one round for a Hoovering competition, I felt only com- passion for him as his juvenile contraption struggled with some of the older types of dirt. Hoovering is about removing the past, and that’s what the younger people don’t understand.
He looked at the screen on the small computer.
“I have just the thing,” he said, and disappeared round the back.
He returned with an Electrolux 612 which was 27 years old. Not quite the age I was after, but close
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