Elimeno

“What is it you wanted to show me?” I asked him with a melancholy tone.

“Come in. This is frikkin’ awesome,” Bobby said and headed back to his bedroom.

“I have to say, you’re definitely raising my expectations here. It’s gonna’ be pretty hard at this point to even impress me.” I closed the front door behind me and followed him back to his room. “Breakfast, Bobby! That’s what’s on the line! If this isn’t good—”

“I found a time machine!” Bobby hollered over his shoulder to me as I entered his room.

I stopped in my tracks as I stared at him. He had the biggest grin on his face and was standing alongside a lamp that I had unquestionably never had the honor of making an acquaintance with.

The lamp was rather unusual, to say the least. With a silhouette of sleek curves and a dazzling display of colors, it took me a moment to fully digest everything it had to offer.

Its spherical base was deep red and shined a smidge where light softly refracted, giving me the impression it was smooth to the touch. At the northern pole of the base it flowed upwards into the shape of a hand, which embraced a glass orb that cascaded from a dark to diluted purple. Metal braces wove around the fingers of the hand and proceeded to above the purple orb and supported a second, smaller orb that mimicked the same cascading color scheme as the bigger orb. The shade of the lamp was a touch weatherworn and came off as a creamy white color that I assumed to be a bit darker than its native hue.

“I’m going to Perkins.” I dully responded with shattered hopes, and then turned to leave.

“No, no, it’s real, Ricky! C’mon, man. Just one second, and I’ll show you!”

As Bobby began fidgeting with the lamp, I stopped a few feet outside his bedroom door, lowered my head with a deep disappointment in myself and then returned to his room.

“Fine, but whether we go to work or the future, you might want to put some damn pants on! And hurry up, we’ve only got about,” I paused and glanced down at my watch, noting it was 8:40 a.m., “twenty minutes to get to wo—” and he was gone.

The chain he had pulled under the shade still dangled about on its own as if it did it for fun, whether someone had tampered with it or not. I began to look around the room just when my eyes caught something that was undeniably different about the lamp: smack dab in the middle of the spherical base was an eye staring back at me.

The iris of the eye was an emerald green and a dial was incorporated into ranged from one to seven. It even had an arrow that was attached at its pupil, which pointed in-between the seven and the one. I met its stare with fear-dowsed eyes as goose bumps began to colonize down my arms and neck.

 “Bobby?” I softly asked to an unresponsive bedroom. After repeating his name a few more times, I searched his house up and down, noting every nook, if not cranny.

In the end he was nowhere to be found, and that’s when it kicked in. A maddening curiosity began taunting me to the point of questioning my sanity.

Oh come on! Nothing could possibly happen. He’s probably got a camera somewhere. He’s pulling a trick to see if I try it.

I made it a few steps out of Bobby’s bedroom telling myself I wasn’t even going to mess with that damned lamp, when a thought ran across my mind.

Is he even smart enough to pull off something like this?

I ran back in to the bedroom, approached the lamp and said, “Fuck it, then.”

I pulled the chain on the lamp and—