“You’ll polish yourself off one day” said the distorted reflection of Irene Pollock as her husband Stanley vigorously applied Brasso to the curvaceous jug of a chromium plated 1959 Pifco, part of his collection of over 2,000 electric kettles.
Mrs. Pollock’s talking head disappeared from the kettle and out of earshot momentarily. In the ensuing silence, as she attended to some ironing, Stanley Pollock stopped polishing for a second.
He stared at his own face, reflected in the manner of a fisheye lens in the Pifco’s plump, shiny body. If he gripped its tactile Bakelite handle and revolved the base enough to get the angle just right, his face appeared completely symmetrical. And that is just how he would have wanted it, because Stanley Pollock and his voices were obsessed with symmetrical order.
“Tidiness and everything in its rightful place.” the voices would whisper, “Side by side, ascending, descending, numerical or alphabetical – it is the symmetry that matters” they insisted. Stanley nodded in tacit agreement.
Just then a familiar, uninvited voice jarred the delicious silence.
“I might just as well be invisible to you.” it said.
The suddenness of Mrs. Pollock’s intervention made him jump, causing his image to distort alarmingly in the kettle’s shiny chromium body. The sight of his nose, now fat, now thin; in turns bullfrog-bloated, then elongated like Pinocchio’s, began to panic him. “Not right!” his voices shouted at him, “This is not right!”.
“The Invisible Woman is what I might as well be. If you spent half as much time on me as you do on those bloody kettles…”
Now he caught sight of Irene ironing away behind him, her wobbly kettle-image stretching and shrinking, still talking.
“All bloody day, polish, polish, polish. You’ll go blind if you’re not careful…”
Her monologue continued to drone, warping and bending, like her reflection. “Definitely not right” said one of his voices. The others concurred.
When the police finally gained entry, they found Stanley Pollock kneeling next to a blood-stained steam iron and fussing over his wife – or should I say his late wife – whose battered body was lying on the floor in what one officer described as “kit-form”. Irene Pollock’s arms, legs and head had been detached from her torso, and carefully laid out on the floor, where Stanley Pollock was busy rearranging them, symmetrically.
A constable dusted the steam iron for fingerprints.
“What made you do it?” enquired Detective Inspector Trubshaw as he handcuffed a tearful Stanley and led him to the waiting police van.
“She told me I’d go blind,” he sobbed, “What does she know about kettles? I would rather die than be without my beautiful chromium babies! Who will polish them now?”
“I’ll have a word with the prison governor.” replied Trubshaw as, with a kindly glint in his eye, he helped Stanley climb into the van and slammed the door shut.
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Colin Gibson 2026