The fan still hummed. It was, Mildred now knew, a very small, very loud brass band that desperately wanted to play polka music. The knowledge didn't make it any less of a fan, just a fan with a rather annoying inner life. Esmeralda, the talking goat, was still perched, with surprising agility, on the beige armchair beside Mildred, occasionally nudging Mildred's elbow with her snout.
"You see, Mildred," Esmeralda bleated, her voice still carrying that slight operatic twang, "the burden of knowledge is a heavy one. Particularly when that knowledge involves the existential yearning of a bread slicer to become a professional interpretive dancer."
Mildred rubbed her temples. "A bread slicer," she repeated, feeling the absurdity seep into her very bones. "For fuck's sake, Esmeralda. What fresh hell is this? My whole day used to be about whether the biscuits were too crumbly. Now it's… this." She gestured vaguely at the room, which seemed to shimmer with unspoken, profound, and utterly daft desires. The un-fluttering curtains, which still desired to be flamboyant squirrel opera costumes, seemed to mock her with their passive defiance.
"It is the human condition, Mildred," Esmeralda pontificated, "to expand one's horizons! Though I admit, 'fresh hell' is an apt description for most Tuesdays."
Bartholomew, the cat, rolled over on the television, a soft, rumbling snore escaping him. He remained blissfully unaware of the cosmic revelations unfolding in the living room, a truly enviable state of being, Mildred thought.
Mildred decided to try. She looked at the chipped ceramic mug on the mantelpiece, the one Esmeralda said yearned to be a lighthouse. Mildred closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to feel its yearning. She imagined vast, stormy seas, tiny ships, and a lonely, guiding light. She felt… nothing. Just the vague sense that the mug was, well, a mug.
"Nothing," she sighed, opening her eyes. "It just feels like a mug. A slightly chipped mug."
"Patience, Mildred, patience!" Esmeralda insisted, though her tone suggested that patience was a concept she herself rarely entertained. "It is not a literal, physical sensation! It is a knowing. A deep, intuitive understanding. Like knowing that your neighbour, Mrs. Henderson, secretly dyes her hair purple on Thursdays, even though it looks perfectly natural on Fridays."
Mildred considered this. Mrs. Henderson did have a suspiciously vibrant auburn on Fridays. This goat was full of surprisingly specific information.
"Alright," Mildred said, deciding to give it another go. She picked up the remote control from the coffee table. It was one of those overly complicated remotes, with far too many buttons, most of which Mildred had no idea what they did.
"This one," she mumbled to herself, "What does it want?" She focused, trying to empty her mind of all thoughts of purple hair and polka-playing fans.
A faint whisper echoed in her mind. Not a sound, exactly, more like a feeling, a profound sense of yearning. The remote desired… to be a tiny, but extremely powerful, interdimensional tuning fork, capable of shifting minor inconveniences from one universe to another. Its greatest dream was to banish all lost socks to a dimension where they would be reunited with their sole mates and live happily ever after.
Mildred dropped the remote with a small clatter. "Bloody hell," she muttered. "A tuning fork? For lost socks?"
Esmeralda nodded sagely. "Precisely. A noble pursuit, wouldn't you agree? The anguish of a single, abandoned sock is a burden upon the universal fabric."
Mildred felt a headache beginning to bloom behind her eyes, like a very slow, very determined flower. This power wasn't helpful. It was just… exhausting. And utterly mental. What was she supposed to do? Go around her house, apologising to every object for not fulfilling its destiny as a miniature astronaut or a particularly loud kazoo? It was all completely ridiculus.
She pushed herself out of the armchair again. Another monumental effort. She needed tea. Strong tea. The kettle, she now understood, yearned to be a small, but highly dramatic, foghorn on a forgotten lighthouse. Oh, the irony.
As she shuffled towards the kitchen, her foot nudged something on the floor. It was a fork. A common, everyday dinner fork that had defiantly fallen off the counter at some point. Mildred bent down, a groan escaping her. Her back, unlike the curtains, was not having a good time.
As her fingers closed around the handle of the fork, something… shifted. Not just the fork, but the air around her. The colours in the room seemed to deepen, then swirl, like paint mixed imperfectly in a bucket. The fan's whirring suddenly sounded less like polka and more like a celestial choir singing off-key. Bartholomew stirred, his fur bristling, and then, inexplicably, he began to levitate three inches above the television.
Esmeralda, for once, looked genuinely surprised. Her eyes, normally dull, widened slightly. "Mildred!" she bleated, a note of genuine alarm in her operatic voice. "What in the name of all that is beige are you doing?!"
Mildred felt a strange tingling sensation, starting in her fingertips and spreading through her whole body, like a thousand tiny champagne bubbles popping inside her. The fork in her hand felt… powerful. Not just a fork anymore. It felt like a scepter. A very shiny, three-pronged scepter.
Suddenly, a voice, deep and resonant, yet still somehow Mildred's own, boomed through the room. "I… I am become Mildred! Destroyer of… un-fluttered curtains! Seeker of lost socks! Unwitting therapist to the inanimate!"
Bartholomew, still floating, let out a tiny, high-pitched meow. The curtains, for the first time, gave a violent, indignant shudder, though they still did not flutter in the way a curtain should.
Esmeralda stared, her unkempt beard twitching. "You… you've done it! You've somehow… ascended!"
"Ascended to what?" Mildred's voice, now booming and slightly echoing, asked. She looked at her reflection in the darkened television screen. Her hair seemed to glow with a faint, greenish aura, like old cheese. Her sensible slippers were now emitting tiny sparks.
"To godhood, Mildred! To absolute, unfathomable… mild divinity!" Esmeralda declared, jumping down from the armchair with a thump. "By simply touching that particular fork, at that particular angle, on that particular Tuesday (or was it Wednesday?), you have stumbled upon the cosmic lever! You are now the Grand Arbiter of Domestic Disarray! The Supreme Overlord of the Small and Mundane!"
Mildred looked at the fork. It was just a fork. A slightly sticky one. "This old thing?" she said, her booming voice making the windows rattle. "This fork?"
"This particular fork, Mildred," Esmeralda explained, rushing around her, clearly excited, "is no ordinary utensil! It is a relic! A forgotten cosmic tuning fork for the very fabric of triviality! It has been awaiting the touch of one truly oblivious enough to wield its power without intention or malice! And that, Mildred, is you!"
Mildred frowned, her glowing brow furrowing. "So, I'm a god. What, exactly, can I do? Can I make the curtains flutter now?"
Esmeralda hesitated. "Well, not directly. Your powers are… broader. More existential. For instance, you could, with a mere thought, make every single lightbulb in the city suddenly believe it's a tiny, frustrated pigeon trapped in a glass cage."
Mildred stared at a lightbulb. It looked perfectly happy being a lightbulb. The thought of a city full of frustrated pigeon-lightbulbs filled her with profound weariness. "That sounds like a colossal pain in the arse," she boomed.
"Or!" Esmeralda continued, undeterred, "you could make every single dust mote in your house spontaneously combust into tiny, adorable glitter bombs whenever a doorbell rings!"
Mildred looked at the dancing dust motes. The idea of them becoming glitter bombs was… intriguing. And messy. She still had to dust on Saturday. This god business sounded like more trouble than it was worth. There was no real concensus on how to handle this new power.
"But why me?" Mildred's booming voice seemed to fill the very air with bewilderment. "And why now? I was just trying to pick up a fork."
"The universe, Mildred," Esmeralda proclaimed, striking a dramatic pose, "does not operate on a schedule! It merely… happens. And you, with your delightful beige aesthetic and your astonishing lack of ambition, were the perfect recipient for such a wildly inconvenient and utterly useless cosmic ability! You simply recieved it."
Mildred sighed, a cosmic sigh that rattled the very foundations of her semi-detached house. Her hair still glowed. Her slippers still sparked. Bartholomew still floated, looking mildly annoyed. She looked at the fork in her hand. The Fateful Fork. It seemed to pulse with a low, thrumming energy.
She decided to try something. Anything. Something that would actually be useful. Not pigeon-lightbulbs. Not glitter bombs.
"Alright, you bloody fork," Mildred boomed. "I wish for… I wish for that blasted kettle to boil faster! And for it to boil with the enthusiastic ferocity of a thousand tiny, angry dragons!"
The kettle in the kitchen, which had previously been dreaming of being a foghorn, suddenly let out a deafening shriek. Steam billowed from its spout with an alarming intensity. The walls vibrated. A tiny crack appeared in the ceiling above it.
"Oh, bugger," Mildred boomed, looking at the ceiling. This god business was going to be a lot more complicated than she thought. And she still hadn't had her tea. The water, she could sense, was now boiling with the kind of aggressive enthusiasm usually reserved for professional wrestlers. This was not the relaxing cup she had envisioned. This was going to be a very, very long chapter indeed. And she still needed to figure out how to get Bartholomew down.