MAY 1997
GREGORY HISCHAK
Canon Wiccan
GREGORY HISCHAK
His initial reaction was "My god, how did a dead bird end up inside there?" Not lying on the glass plate for some bizarre post-mortem photocopy, something an artist with a federal grant might do, but entangled inside the very entrails of the machinery.
Earwicker squinted his eyes, bending his head to allow light to penetrate the machine's interior. His neck cracked loudly just as his bent knees had when he opened the copier's front panel to replace a toner cartridge. Earwicker's body was noisy when required to perform tasks outside his normal sphere of duties.
He looked at the silver LCD screen at the top of the copier. Informing him with step-by-step directions on toner cartridge replenishment, it remained mum about birds in the mechanism. No matter how often Earwicker punched the little star button, no dead bird icon appeared and Earwicker began to suspect the fowl was an unauthorized addition. Perhaps it had entered through a vent in the roof, working its way somehow through the building's air conditioning system to emerge into Earwicker's office copier room to be sucked into the Canon NP 6025. It was possible.
The creature, its feet hopelessly entangled in wiring, hung upside down toward the back of the Canon. Feeling pity for the bird, Earwicker took a deep breath and inserted his right arm into the copier. Carefully navigating past scalding rollers, the sinister tug of magnets and white hot metal grippers Earwicker placed his fingers around the fowl, gently working it free from its inverted death perch. Then slowly, with the skill of a heart surgeon removing a beating ticker, he extricated his hand from the machinery and finally got a good look at the creature.
It was not a bird. True it was constructed to look like a bird, the way a well-tied Deep Sparkle Pupa looks like a Caddis fly and might fool a trout but wouldn't fool another Caddis fly for a minute. In earwicker's hand lay a small coil of wire partially wrapped in semi transparent tape then covered in some kind of fabric. Feathers protruded from its base and small buttons, as from a shirt or a jacket, had been sewed across the object.
Earwicker examined it for some time, found it interesting and carried it into his cubicle, placing it on a shelf next to his Rolodex.
The Canon NP 6025 did not work the rest of that day. It did not work the following day either, its silver LCD screen flashing a stylized frowning face and long ominous rows of exclamation points. A serviceman was called in who spent an afternoon shaking his head, pointing his keys-jingling behind in the air and flirting with Doris, the temporary receptionist, before announcing he'd have to come back the next day with highly sensitive diagnostic equipment.
The following day, which was a Thursday, two events occurred almost simultaneously at the office. First: Doris, the temporary receptionist discovered that the Canon NP 6025 was working just fine and, sadly, the serviceman would not have to return. Secondly: Earwicker discovered his bird doll had vanished from beside his Rolodex. In its place a post-it note to which a lone pale yellow feather and a tersely typewritten scrap of note paper were taped.
"Don't touch the bird. Please."
Earwicker though about it over his ten o'clock cup of coffee and pop tart. Someone in the office was up to some kind of occult sneakiness. When an opportunity arose, Earwicker walked into the copier room where the Canon NP 6025 was. Feigning a paper jam he lowered the front panel of the copier and casually peered toward the back as he had on Tuesday. Not unexpectedly, his salvaged bird had returned, hanging inverted in its identical place within the Canon. Its metallic button eyes catching a soft shaft of fluorescent light stared back at him as a carved stone griffin guards from the shadows of an incense-clouded sanctuary of Bal.
Earwicker was at a loss as to how a bird talisman could possibly effect copier performance. Though to be honest, if asked, Earwicker would be at a loss to explain the normal workings of a photocopier. Somehow images were magically duplicated by coils of wire, carbon and heat or, for all he knew, tiny stenographers and graphic artists whose previous evil lives caused them to return to their next lives as components of photocopiers. We are after all just carbon and heat and probably wires ourselves, he figured.
Was it possible all business equipment harbored concealed talismans surreptitiously placed by office wiccans? Fetishes placed to counter the effects of electromagnetism and carpet static, countering the effects of all the things we do everyday that fly in the face of logic?
Earwicker blinked twice thoughtfully and then, as sometimes in this world you are forced to accept magic for what it is: mysterious and impenetrable, he closed the front of the copier and placed his document against its glass top, selecting:
8 1/2 x 11.
Copy.
The Canon worked like a charm.
© The Raven Chronicles 1997