The Nigerian Prize

I picked it up and tossed it into my waste basket under the computer desk. That was the last I thought about it that day.

The next day I was sitting at my computer reading email and enjoying a porno site link on a spam (my male libido has eyes that are bigger than my, er, stomach) when I became aware of a sound. When I say sound I should say a song. It was like an insect song, so faint and high pitched that it was surely not human. I looked to and fro to try and discover the source of this sound, finally giving up, for the sound had stopped. I figured it must have come from outside. Maybe it was an ice cream truck or something, I decided. I went back to work on the computer. Time passed. Then I heard it again. I have a second computer desk on my left side, tilted 90 degrees, to give me more work space. It is piled up with books, papers, computer disks, phones, and other litter. Still, I swear this sound was coming from that desk. It was like a roach was singing to me. Yes, a roach. I know, I know. That little African plastic thingie that looked like a roach trap, it was still sitting in the waste basket under the desk. The basket had been moved under the second desk, and when I looked down there it was. I picked it up, and sure enough, it was singing Happy Birthday in an insectlike register.

I got it now. This was some kind of Asian birthday greeting insert for gift packages. It has a solar cell, and when light hits it the song goes off. I guess it also charges up from the light. How can that work, though? If a person opens a gift and the chip hits the light, won't it take a while to start singing Happy Birthday while it charges up? Wouldn't that be a problem? How could they sell it? Never mind. I held it to the overhead light, and alternately closed and open my hand, watching it turn on and off on cue. Cute. I decided to keep it after all. I put it on my second desk, and realized it would never quit squawking unless I covered it, so I tried putting a magazine over it, which didn't silence it, then I stuck it inside a Mason shoe box I used to hold the year's receipts for my yearly income tax weekend. That silenced it.

That was the last I saw of it. You see, I can't find it. I have taken that shoe box apart, taken the table apart, looked everywhere, spent hours. But it's nowhere to be found. The trouble is that every so often, the song goes off, clear and insectlike, and close by, while I'm working at the computer, with the overhead light on. Then it stops, even while the light is still on. Then it starts up again. It might be an hour later, two hours, two days, but it will come back. It always comes back.

This problem started a good month ago. Looking back, I wish I only had that little problem. Those were days of little problems. Now I have many problems. You see, the little bugger breeds. I first heard a duet, then a trio, then a quartet, right in my computer room. Then I began to hear the song go off in other rooms, the kitchen, the laundry room, the garage, finally my bedroom. Then the number of voices grew. And grew and grew and grew. Yes, like roaches. And it started up in the dark, as if enough of them can work together to store light energy somehow. Now my house is a looney farm, a jillion little insect voices singing Happy Birthday 24/7.

Then, I got the email. I knew what it was before I got it.

It was from Nigeria.

T.L. Winslow, Fiction Author
web site: http://www.tlwinslow.com
email: tlwinslow@aol.com