By Quinn Theobald
A dented flatscreen Vizio TV had been discarded on the curb in front of my apartment. I knew it was a Vizio because on the third day of it squatting there I checked the back panel where a V sticker was slapped. It was ugly in its sleekness. It was the first thing I saw when I parked on the street coming home from work. I had a clear view of it from my kitchenette window, a black rectangle in the yard, a void soaking up your attention.
It interrupted the landscape. That was the thing. You looked along the yard in front of the apartments and saw grass, grass, plants, VIZIO TV. It would have been nice for whomever was getting rid of it to think ahead and drop it off on garbage night. But then I realized it had been a week and garbage day had come and gone and for some reason they left it, a black square cut out of our yard. Enough was enough, and I went to knock on the Getts’ door, bright red heads of roses leaned against their kitchen window. Mrs. Getts answered, but when I pointed out the blasted thing she said it wasn’t theirs.
I considered taking a hammer to it, but then little pieces of TV would scatter between our blades of grass forever, never biodegrading. I did move it to the other side of the telephone pole one day, stomping down from my apartment and stomping back up. But standing at my sink again, even with it out of view, knowing it was there was enough to draw my attention. TVs were so artificial, a sheen black surface, colorless, soulless. I had never noticed this in the TV on my own wall, but now it was obvious. TVs were the antithesis of nature.
The next day coming home I stopped to lean on the hood of my car and stare. There it sat. Dented. Grotesque. How was it that such a small thing could distort the world around it? I read a study once that walking among green plants raised one’s mood. A follow-up study ought to investigate how easily a piece of human debris could shatter that effect.
That’s when it hit me. The lawn was an illusion. I had taken it as a sacred square of green, but there was the Vizio leaning against a telephone pole. A telephone pole in the yard! I stared at it hard. Somehow the telephone pole had become invisible to me. My eyes slid right off it. But it was there.
Also the sky. This open blue above me was criss-crossed by puffy white jet trails. Two planes headed in opposite directions. And that was just what I could see! The air was full of pollutant particles, ash and microplastics and who-knew-what-else.
Even behind the roses in the Getts’ window I could see the flash of their television playing. I heard the exhausted chugging of the water and AC systems. Beneath that, faintly, leaf blowers rattled away. The very road I stood on was an asphalt wasteland, a no-man’s-zone for worms and the entire ecology. Chrome cars piled around me, hunks of metal bolted together with more metal, containers for oozing black poison that would be belched out into the air. The Vizio hadn’t transformed the yard, it was just another piece of refuse dropped on top of the junkyard I made my life in.
But that didn’t mean I had to let it win.
The next day leaving work I stopped at the Home Depot. I picked up a potted Philodendron plant, the green leaves speckled with white. At home I got out of my car and crossed to the curb. Mrs. Getts was carrying groceries up to her apartment. I placed the Philodendron down, reverently, beside the dented Vizio. Ah what the hell, it hardly changed the place. But at least there was green growing beside the black box. Nature intertwined with the mechanical underbelly of civilization. Not just one or the other.
“I like your plant,” Mrs. Getts said to me as she reached her porch.
“I like your roses,” I returned. She looked up at her kitchen window.
She said kindly, “The old ones were so hard to keep care of, but the plastics look just as nice, don’t they?”
And she went into the concrete trappings of her house.
* * *
Quinn Theobald is a California-based writer and software developer. They won the Fall 2025 Letter Review Prize for short fiction and their short film Becca Comes to Visit screened at festivals internationally. In between pursuing writing and performative art, they find time to dance West Coast Swing and run DnD games.