The earth was able to breathe again when we’d finished feeding the sky our cobweb-cracked
smartphones, chipped CorningWare, scalped Barbies and American Girls, the smidgens and scraps of
our inconvenient, incriminating, and obsolete information, and the very last crumbs of toxic waste.
Without subtle veiling from the off-gasses emitted from millennia of clutter, everything seemed
paradoxically roomier and more intimate than before, people’s faces so vivid that we found
ourselves shaken. No wonder we had accumulated the artifactual overflow of history itself, craving
its atmospheric haze as a buffer between us. The unmitigated human presence—who could bear it?
That’s when we began to avert our eyes from each other and shrink away.
Now we comfort ourselves by standing shouting distance apart as we gaze through our individual
handheld monocular telescopes at the junk stream above us, calling out when we glimpse a familiar
configuration: “Look, aren’t those Great-Aunt Ellen’s VHS Christmas tapes?” “Of course—it’s the end
of April, just when they always pass by!”
But once or twice in a generation, meteorologists send out warnings about a discontinuity in the
trash currents, a traveling gap of naked sky. Many of the people in its path run indoors and yank down their shades to shield themselves from the traumatic sight. (For those who miss the alert
and happen to catch a glimpse of sheer pellucid blue, of clouds, of night with its uncanny distant
lights, there are treatment centers from which few return.) Others stand on their lawns
blindfolded, faces lifted—a few chant arcane verses from The Dread and Worshipful Book of the
Firmament, but everyone else aims their long-range precision rifles at the depthless
vacancy passing overhead.

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Praise for The Pillow Museum
“[Bateman’s] work and career are about making the most of every moment. I’ve been told that the difference between poetry and flash fiction is the passage of time within a piece. Bateman weaves her best magic like clockwork: every gear’s teeth chew each other in perfect time.” —Write or Die Magazine