The bolted-down TV remote

The cable stops the remote eighteen inches short of the window, a taut little argument replayed every time a guest reaches too far. The arc, measured on four separate occasions before the number was trusted, comes to a quarter circle, no more, tethered by a steel cord no thicker than a shoelace to a bracket driven through the nightstand's particleboard and into something structural enough to hold. The buttons carry the ordinary betrayal of use, worn to a shine on channel and volume, blank as new on the numbers nobody has pressed since cable boxes kept their own remotes. A motel remote answers to different math than a house remote: not preference, but recovery, calculated against the average nightstand drawer and the average guest who does not return what he borrows. The cord sags in a practiced U, worn smooth where countless hands have coiled it back before checkout, though nobody asked them to. It has survived water glasses set squarely on top of it, and one incident, noted only in the scuff pattern, of being thrown. Housekeeping does not dust the underside of the tether bracket, and a fine gray collar has gathered there, the one part of the fixture allowed to age undisturbed. Whether the bolt exists to deter theft or simply to arrest the drift toward the bed, where remotes are known to vanish into the bedding for days at a time, the file remains open. Tethered or loose, it changes the channel exactly as well. That much was never really in question.

R. Quist