The Television Grew Legs One Day

Words by Anna O’Boyle

The Television grew legs one day and walked right up to me with an open on-screen mouth.
The words it spoke I had heard before and they bored me anyway so I walked away.
I walked right into a wide-open world; it was one I had not known.
There were people who talked like TVs and I did want to ask but I did not know what to say.
Again I walked away.
I came across a field and in it were growing flowers but the seeds in the centre looked like little children’s teeth
And when it shook they all fell to the floor and I lay down beside them and looked a little closer.
I could not tell what they were but I swallowed a seed to see if it would stick in the tooth-shaped gap at the back of my mouth.
When I woke up I was in the room with the legged TV and this time it didn’t say anything just smiled and smiled and smiled.
Its teeth were the seeds I had swallowed
But it bored me to just sit and stare at a TV screen smile and so once again I walked away.
This time the wide-open world was empty and the sun did not shine on the green grass but rain sank deep into watered-down mud.
I slipped and slid along what I wouldn’t call a street until I came to what I would call a motorway road and sat down on set-black-tar.
For a while I sat and thought about nothing, only that I really wanted to be drunk.
After I did that for five hours I got up and walked in every direction except forward along the road.
A very long time away was a billboard and it stood like Jesus did at the very height of a hill.
It was advertising these pills that were seed-shaped like little children’s teeth.
Everything apart from the pictures had been scratched away by motorway-pirates so I couldn’t know anything new.
But I climbed up the little ladder and sat over the top of it so I could see in every direction except forward.
Behind me a very long time away were trees taller than I had seen even in my old-world dreams.
I didn’t know where else to go so I decided the trees would have to tell me something.
It was a very long time walk and on the way I went through eight different worlds but after two days I got to the trees.
Their trunks were the size of semi-detached houses and when I put my hand to the bark I could hear it hum through my blood.
It was like the sound the T.V made before it grew legs and walked right up to me, but when it was switched off.
It was like the sound of ice cubes melting.
The bark didn’t move but I knew that inside it was shaking and so I stayed for another five hours to see if it would stop.
Five hours came past and it felt like my palm was stuck to the tree and in that time the shaking never once stopped so I decided instead to fall asleep.
I lay with my head against the trunk and the shaking sound was so loud in my ears but soft like a lullaby so it wasn’t hard to fall asleep.
When I was dreaming I was sat again on the motorway billboard but this time the only direction I could see was forward and right in front of me was the biggest and oldest face I had ever seen in any life and any world.
There were lines deep like the red river of Virginia and the skin was tracing paper.
There was not female or male just age, and the copper blue patina of age.
I sat and stared and waited for the old cave mouth to open and I knew when it did I would walk on the air and enter.
With each other we stayed like that for five hours, and it was then I realised the mouth would not open.
Nothing even moved; the two eyes stayed like mountain peaks through the cloud-forest.
It was only then, when I had decided to stay like that, in this secret pact, that I woke up.
There was neither light nor dark in this one world and I did not know if it was night nor day but the air inclined itself to twilight and so I settled on that.