The Night Mags Held Court Over a Cracker Count

No Business on a Dirty Floor

The session convened by lantern light with a bowl of crackers, which the twins had carried over between them as if it held a small sun. Within four minutes there were crumbs on the hardwood and more on the rug. Mags announced that no business would be conducted on an unswept floor.

Gus offered a broom he had built himself and began describing the joinery. Mags thanked him and picked up a remote control.

Her eufy 11S MAX runs on a lithium ion battery, which made the blackout none of its concern. A vacuum that needs a wall socket is a paperweight on a night like this one. This one can run up to 100 minutes on hardwood, and the longest meeting Mags had ever chaired was seventy-one.

It set off across the floor with its single side brush sweeping crumbs inward instead of flicking them at the guests. At 2.85 inches tall it went straight under the credenza where Mags keeps the binders and came back with a pen cap from a meeting nobody could name. The sound was about what a microwave makes, which on a dark street felt almost like company.

Gus was still on the joinery when the first crumb was gone.

The delegates entered the cat's silence as consent.

The Chair Is Asleep

Trouble came from the Caucus. Admiral Biscuit, chair of the Cat-Owners' Caucus, was asleep on a cushion in the middle of the floor, as he has been for every meeting since the Caucus was founded. Two delegates rose to ask who presided, and then, separately, to ask each other to sit down.

The Caucus, whose members hold that sharing a home with a cat is the highest form of human existence, spent nineteen minutes deciding who chairs when the chair is asleep, and ruled that Admiral Biscuit presides by breathing. A motion to wake him was defeated on the grounds that nobody has ever tried and kept the minutes. A second motion, that he be permitted to abstain, was ruled redundant.

Then came the real question: could the vacuum run in the presence of a presiding chair? Mags checked the bylaws and found them silent. She applied section four anyway.

The vacuum ran for the length of the meeting and the cat never stirred. Its infrared sensor read the cushion as an obstacle and steered a neat half circle around it, close enough to be polite and far enough to be respectful. The delegates entered the cat's silence as consent.

ORACLE Counts Crackers

Mags needed a record of the snack situation and turned to ORACLE, the HOA's assistant, which had been running on its own battery all evening and sounded rested.

ORACLE, asked how many crackers remained in the bowl, issued a Formal Report in nine parts, with a foreword, three appendices and a dedication to the cracker, and concluded that the count was four hundred and that the bowl had been made in Peru by Vikings. The bowl held about thirty. Nobody corrected it, because the foreword was still going.

By the end of the foreword the vacuum had finished the hardwood. When it rolled onto the rug, Felix said, "It changed its mind," and Ada said, "Within one and a half seconds," because BoostIQ retunes the suction that fast and she had been timing it. Then it reached the two steps down to the sunroom, paused at the edge, felt for the drop, and turned around. Gus watched this with the expression of a man who has been told a step can be declined.

The appendices began as the vacuum docked itself. Mags thanked ORACLE for its service and filed the report under Miscellaneous, where it fit nowhere else either.

A Lantern for the Resident

The last item was attendance. Mags ordered the second-best lantern set on the walkway at No. 2, at the proper distance, so that Brenda, the lane's domesticated bear, could attend the session without anyone attending her. The minutes list her as "Resident, under porch, present by lantern," and a folding chair was reserved for her in the front row. It stayed empty, which Mags ruled was the correct way to be present.

The session adjourned at eight-ten with the floor clean and the agenda untouched. The lights came back an hour later, and the router blinked itself awake. At the end of the lane the streetlight flickered once when Mags described the evening as productive.

Mags reached for her phone to schedule the next run, and Ada reminded her that the 11S MAX has no app and no WiFi, only the remote and the buttons on its body. Mags put the remote back in her cardigan pocket, where it now lives like a gavel.

Felix: is it just our house

Ada: no. only mags has a clean floor

Gus: I could build a floor that does that.

Doris: Let the record show he is standing on one.