Fiction · Laptops
Mags Counts Brenda, Doris Counts Again, Three Screens Intervene
Mags and Doris fight for three days over whether Brenda is a pet or a resident. A MacBook Pro and a lot of screens settle it.
A Mags story, No. 1
4 min read · October 26, 2026
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Apple MacBook Pro 14.2" M5 Pro 24GB 1TB
$2289.00$2499.00
Price as of Nov 6, 2026, 3:09 AM UTC. Details
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Monday: A Confession About Pillows
I will admit one thing here and nowhere else. I read the bylaws in bed, and last night I highlighted the pillow. It was an honest mistake. It was also yellow.
The bylaws are not the trouble. The trouble is the Pet Census, and Doris Kowalczyk.
My count reads fourteen. I list Brenda, the domesticated bear who lives under the porch at No. 2, as the fourteenth pet; Doris lists her as a resident of unknown tenure, in a column of her own. Her reasoning is that a pet must be owned, and nobody owns a bear. My reasoning is that I am the president.
Doris said, politely, that she would need to see my sources. She said it the way a surgeon says scalpel.
Tuesday: The Memos Multiply
I issued Memo 41, clarifying the census. Doris replied with a footnote longer than the memo. I issued Memo 42. She replied with a bibliography, typed, with a page of corrections for my spelling of domesticated, which I had spelled correctly.
The difficulty is physical. My census lives on the old desktop in my den. Her figures live on index cards and in the Lending Ledger. The two cannot be placed side by side without a printer, and my printer has been out of toner since the spring picnic.
ORACLE offered to help. It announced that it had solved the lane's hedgehog problem, which was news to the lane, which has no hedgehogs and has never had a problem involving them.
I thanked it and asked the secretary to file the remarks under Miscellaneous. It has a folder.
Three screens, side by side, and the only difference between us was a column heading.
Wednesday: A Box Without a Rattle
Wendell brought the box to my door himself. He weighs a package with his eyes, and this one he held for a moment longer than usual, because it made no sound at all. He said only, "Signed for, as always." He knows what is in every box on this lane and tells no one, which is why I trust him with the mail.
It was the Apple MacBook Pro I had requisitioned for the HOA, in Space Black, fourteen inches. It weighs 3.52 pounds, which I confirmed on the kitchen scale, because Gus would ask.
Tamsin came over at once and inspected the ports the way other people inspect a horse. Three Thunderbolt 5 ports, she said. An HDMI port. An SDXC card slot, for the photos from the census walk. It has 24 GB of memory and a terabyte of storage, she said, which is room for my census, Doris's entire Ledger scanned in, and every memo I have ever written, with space left over for the ones I have not.
"Have you tried reading the manual?" she asked. I said I had. She said she knew, and that she was only checking.
Wednesday Afternoon: The Hearing
We convened at the community mailbox cluster, where there is no outlet. Tamsin said it would not matter, since the MacBook Pro delivers the same performance on battery as it does plugged in. Doris wrote that down.
Tamsin had borrowed three monitors from her garage. The M5 Pro chip will run up to three external displays, she explained, and not a fourth, because a fourth is the M5 Max. I had wanted a fourth for Pepper. Pepper, a beagle who is not a cat and has made his peace with it, does not require a column.
Then the Caucus arrived. The Cat-Owners' Caucus holds that owning a cat is the highest form of human existence, and its gavel, which sits on a velvet cushion and may not be touched by anyone, the Caucus included, is the only instrument that can ratify a census. Admiral Biscuit presided from a lawn chair in his sash, asleep, as is traditional. Nobody could touch the gavel. So nobody could ratify anything. So the census would have to be right on its own merits, which no one on Maple Lane had planned for.
Tamsin put my census on the left screen, Doris's Ledger on the right, and the two merged on the middle. The panel has 1600 nits of peak brightness, and the sun was out, but we could read every line. Doris stepped up to it with her glasses on. Brenda, of course, was counted twice, once in each of our columns, and totaled once.
Three screens, side by side, and the only difference between us was a column heading. Fourteen and thirteen plus one.
Thursday: Unanimous, Eventually
Doris sent a note. It said that the record should show she had been mistaken about the column, and that she would be amending her index cards, in pencil, as a courtesy to future scholarship. I issued Memo 43, withdrawing Memos 41 and 42, and recorded a vote of thanks to the Ledger.
ORACLE entered "hedgehogs: 0 (resolved)" into both documents, so for one afternoon Doris and I agreed on something that had nothing to do with Brenda.
Tonight I read in bed with the highlighter capped. The pillow is still yellow.
In this episode
- Mags Delacroix-Burke
- Wendell Pike
- Tamsin Oyelaran
- Doris Kowalczyk
- ORACLE
- Admiral Biscuit
- Brenda
- Pepper
- Gus Ferreira
Maple Lane and its residents are fiction. The story was written with AI from the product's listed features and checked automatically. The product, its price and its price history are real. How the stories work
Previously with Mags
- Gus and Doris feud over where his fence ends and her hedge begins until Mags prints both their photos borderless on one 13-inch sheet and the line turns out to be shared.
- With the projector dead before the Appreciation Dinner, the Menons' ASUS ROG Strix monitor carried Mags's slideshow while Tamsin distrusted the dining room lights.
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