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“Nuisance” by James Tate 🇺🇸 (8 Dec 19438 Jul 2015)
It was more of a nuisance than an actual apparition. It wanted my microfilm, it was spraying me with an atomizer such as one I had never seen. I even carried an umbrella around inside the house for a while. I sat in my armchair with a saucer of warm milk and took my temperature several times. I calculated some errors I had made in recent days, all the while this tingling at my temples, as though I were being spied on by satellites, as though some inscrutably virulent sanitation problem were attacking my very foundation, and hecklers were arriving by the busloads. I tried yawning—it was broken. I could tidy up a bit, pad from room to room, polish the corroding molecular remnants. After all, it’s just so much propaganda, really, it’s nothing more than a massive injection of disembodied transparencies on a simple excursion, a vacation, brief, in all likelihood, millimeter by millimeter subtracting my formulas, maiming a few of my components. But, then again, I saw nothing. I could hardly be called a witness.