Obliged by Her Things

Out of Milan’s closet stepped the brand new boots she’d just come home with. She narrowed her eyes at the insides of the cuffs, watching as the zippers ascended all the way to the tops of the shafts.

The sight of it was all too real. As if by some instinctive reaction to seeing things that shouldn’t be happening, there was a tension in her...but she simply gripped her thighs and leaned forward, trying to reason it out.

“I don’t really get it,” Milan said, watching the scene unfold. “I don’t really understand how all this is happening.” She glanced over at her nightstand. Her antidepressant dosage hadn’t recently changed. She pulled out her phone and looked at it, trying to rule out a dream.

She’d just picked the things up downtown after looking at them on the web. She took her car service to the fashion district. She didn’t have a cocktail between…

And suddenly her wandering thoughts were focused squarely on the boots, now in front of her. Undeniably moving on their own. Filled with...something?

Milan took a deep breath, as if she was about to jump into cold open water. Her fingers cautiously reached out to the top of the left boot, waving over the top of the cuff. The boots bobbed in place a little as Milan took her time deciding whether she should touch them or not.

She looked back at her vanity, then at the mirror. The boxes, the closet, the boots...the makeup sponges.

“I can’t believe I just let you do that without flinching,” Milan said, looking back at her pill bottle. “And now the prettiest things I’ve seen all day are standing in front of me.”

The boots seemed to react, crossing over each other and squatting a little. Milan couldn’t help but laugh.

“W-was that a curtzy?” The boots did the move again, and it made Milan retrace her own steps when she arrived back at her apartment. The blu-ray player. The city-grit and makeup feeling she wanted off her face.

And now, polite boots.

“Okay, okay…” Milan stood up, walking away from the vanity and back into the living room. She had a plan. Maybe it was a silly plan, and it still wouldn’t prove her sane, but--

“I could really use a drink,” she said conspicuously. She plopped down on her couch and gasped as one of her glass-windowed cupboards opened, producing bottles of dry vermouth and top shelf gin. “If it’s a delusion, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to record it,” she said, pointing her phone at the phenomenon.

The concentration of manacite in the air was still strong enough that even Milan’s phone was affected. It pulled itself out of her hands. Her eyes went wide as she leaned back against the couch. She studied the hovering phone filming the dance of her liquor bottles, a shaker, and a martini glass.

Her smart fridge kicked out some ice. Instead of falling to the ground, it was swept up in the same dance, magically propelled into the shaker as the liquor bottles upturned. The shaker closed, lifted into the air, and pistoned five or six times before upturning itself, pouring the cooled booze into a martini glass.

Now the glass presented itself to her, and she found herself on the other side of the camera as the phone framed Milan. She shrugged at the lens, carefully plucking the martini from mid-air and assessing it.

No olive. Just like she wanted.

“Here’s to...whatever the hell is happening to me,” She said, looking a little anxious as she tipped the drink all the way back. “I swear to god, if I watch this tomorrow, and it’s this long, insane thing where I’m trying to hold a selfie stick and do all of this with my own hands and fishing line and--”

The boots were in the doorway, walking toward her again. She’d left them in her bedroom, and watching the drink make itself had sort of distracted her. For one, until now she didn’t entirely believe she’d seen the things slide out of their bag or walk out of her closet.

They were attention-getting red patent boots, lacquered to a mirror-gloss. They came just up to Milan’s knees, and they had a confident stride as they walked across the living room to stand in front of her once more.

Milan sat up, looking down into the boots. They seemed to pose for her as she regarded them. When she leaned in to get a closer look, she felt the martini glass taken from her hand.

The boots stepped back, and Milan watched as the glass hovered over them, following them to the sink. Milan turned to face backward, kneeling on her couch to follow the animated objects acting in concert.

All the time, her phone was filming. She only now noticed that it had drifted back far enough to get an angle on the enchanted objects and Milan’s own reaction to them.

“This is so weird…” She muttered, looking right at her phone. “While you’re at it, just...like go point at the mirror or something, okay? I want, like--total, total proof this is happening.”

The phone drifted toward her bedroom door for a second, doing exactly as she asked. Milan split her attention between her hovering phone and the boots at the sink, now standing in front of the open cupboard below.

A pair of rubber gloves hovered out, flopping and hanging by their cuffs before stretching a bit. The motion seemed to straighten them, and together, they both inflated, wiggling their fingers. One glove held the martini glass while the other grabbed a clean rag. In the sink, the water gun lifted itself from its place and gently spritzed the martini glass with steaming hot water until the last trace of viscous and Milan’s lip gloss were both steamed away.

The glove held the glass upside down as the other dried the stem, leaving the rim and inside to drip dry. Like a pro, Milan noted. They gently placed the glass in a wire rack, and the gloves collapsed, returning under the sink as the water shut itself off.

The boots turned, stepping toward Milan and doing the curtzy thing again.

“Yeah, I can...certainly see you’re pretty proud of yourselves,” Milan said. It only took a glance at her phone and the desire to see the recorded video for the thing to break off recording and hover before her.

Which made her retrace her steps. One. More. Time.

She was so lost in the unreality of the last few minutes that it took her up until now to realize the obvious.

“Stand on one foot.”

The gorgeous lacquer boots obeyed, and something sparked a fire in her. The socialite grinned.

“Now hop, my little cuties.” The boots obeyed again, clicking on a toe and heel on every tiny hop. Milan put her hands to her face in sheer delight.

“Play the video,” she said to her phone. “I wanna see it.”

The phone did the work on its own, opening its media player and showing Milan the same scene she just lived. She shook her head, looking at the boots again.

“It’s not...you, is it?” She asked, looking at the boots in wonder. Now she reached down fearlessly and ran her fingers along the cool lacquer cuff. “I come home from shopping--and you...and the rest of my house...are just at my service?”

Another curtzy. Milan’s cheeks flushed. She was so compelled to get the things, too. She reached down into the boot, and the cuff pointed toward her, letting her arm descend.

“Don’t mind me,” She said. “I just wanna see.” She pushed on the high inside of a boot cuff before she pulled her hand out, watching the rest of the cuff stay in place as if a leg held it there. Now she grabbed the ankle, gently at first. When she squeezed, she could feel resistance in the boot--more than just the stiffness of the shiny, lacquered textile.

She thought of the gloves and their orientation to the boots. The way the boots ‘carried’ the glass to the sink...without gloves.

“The gloves were just for show then, hmm?” Milan asked. “You could have cleaned the thing without them.”

The next curtzy made Milan wonder if the response was actually a ‘yes’. If there was an answer for ‘no’, had she seen it yet?

Maybe something she was pretty sure she knew the answer to.

“Everything in my apartment is just...doing as I ask. It’s not--because of you, is it?” The boots didn’t really do anything. Milan chuckled a little. Maybe that was a bit esoteric.

She had it! A question she wanted answered in the negative. A very, very pertinent one given her present situation.

“Would you or anything else in this apartment do something to hurt me...on your own?” She added the last part with the thought that the boots probably couldn’t know for sure whether she’d ever stub her toe or cut herself.

Again, probably too esoteric. These were boots.

When they rose to the points of their heels and waved their toes and vamps back and forth. A shake. The ‘no’ Milan was looking for.

“Not that I thought so,” She explained to the voiceless things. “I just...wanted to be sure we were on the...same...page.” Something clicked, and she came at the question again another way.

“Are THESE BOOTS being affected by whatever else is affecting my apartment’s (how would she put it…) automated hospitality?”

A curtzy. Whatever was happening here, the boots were just another thing that seemed...happy to oblige her every request. Which brought back the spark in her eyes.

“Okay,” She grinned. “Here’s what we’re going to do next…”