Only the very gullible wanted the dribs. The comedians made their jokes, and the citizens of social media went to war. One thing the dribs could do that the consumers liked was bring attention to their homes. When those egg-shaped robots collected the seed-sized batteries out of the buyers’ feeders, they were the talk of the town. A young man named Victor Sweller who lived down the street from us got a second feeder and two fifty-pound bags of batteries last year. That was the beginning of the end.
“Boy, how much money does he have?” asked my wife. She watched a drib bumble its way past our apartment window. “And how many of those drib things does he own?”
“That’s just it,” I said, pacing. The floorboards creaked under my thrift store slippers. “You can’t even own the damned things! You just—” I couldn’t think of a better word. “—feed them.”
“They are kind of cute in a stupid sort of way,” she said as another drib wandered by like dandelion fluff. “I’m going to follow it and watch it eat.”
I heard the chickadees scurry when she walked out our backdoor. Our birdfeeder shook from the force of their tiny black wings. A soft rain of sunflower seeds followed suit. I joined her outside.
“Hey neighbor!” Grace said to Victor as we made our way towards his four-thousand-dollar drib feeder sticking out of his mowed lawn.
“How’s my favorite lesbians?” asked Victor The dribs hummed and sucked the tiny silver batteries into their opened chutes like the brainless vacuum cleaners they were. “Grace, Jen, have you seen my new one?”
“Your new what?” asked Grace.
“My new feeder! It’s a Deluxe. This baby costs seven thousand five hundred dollars.” He lifted a stainless-steel box from the front porch swing next to him. It opened, flaunting golden batteries. The dribs wobbled over and hummed with more enthusiasm.
“Seven thousand five hundred for that?” I asked.
“A month, yeah,” Victor added, smiling.
“You—you don’t even own the feeder?” I asked.
“Technically, no. The only thing you buy is the batteries. Everything else is a subscription, kind of like paying rent for the view.”
He looked down with a grin, watching the robots waste his money. The deluxe feeder was emptied of its special golden batteries.
The dribs hovered back to the cheaper batteries. More dribs joined them. Every drib had its own unique colorful design. I at least understood and admired that part of the craze. Victor told me earlier that week that if he uploaded pictures of ten new colors on his Drib App profile, The Drib Company would send him a promo code for ten percent off his next battery purchase.
“Do you still have that flag hanging from your front window? Not the Chicago one, but the other one?” Victor asked.
“Yeah, why?” answered Grace, turning her head away from the artificial feeding frenzy.
“Well, you know your landlord John and I go way back, right? He stopped by to see the dribs and told me how annoyed he was with it hanging there. He said it was a bit too much and doesn’t want his building to be associated with such a divisive movement.”
Victor rocked back and forth on his swing. Grace bit her lip and grasped her right hand on her left arm. I opened my mouth, but she opened hers first.
“It’s my home country’s flag. Everyone has their American flags up still, and its July 19th! It’s one thing to turn your head away from the atrocities, but another thing to be annoyed at my mere existence.”
“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger,” he said. “John just doesn’t want his building—”
“Our home,” I interrupted.
“Look, why’d you come over here in the first place if you didn’t want to hear what I had to say? Can I just finish what I’m saying?” He stopped swinging and stood up. I flipped him the bird, and Grace did the same. We walked off his lawn with the dribs flying all over.
Grace was shaking. Her keychains spun like cows in a tornado. The front door key reflected a sliver of sunshine back up into the sky. A drib mistook it as a battery. The egg-shaped gizmo bopped her on the head.
She snatched it out of the air and smashed it into the pavement. Batteries scattered in every direction. More dribs dove downward. Grace played DDR on their lifeless robot skulls. I never loved her more.
Victor paid a few more months for his Deluxe Feeder subscription before returning it to the dealership, defeated. He still held onto hope with his cheaper feeder all through winter. The batteries rusted.
“Boy, I didn’t think I killed them all,” Grace said, dripping a bit of red wine on the sweater I knitted.
“You didn’t kill a thing, sweetheart,” I said, giving her a kiss as the ball dropped at midnight.