The Waiting List

The last repairman in the city had a waiting list nine years long, and on the morning this begins, the person at the top of it died. Her name was Oona Vasquez and she had a toaster that had stopped in 2017, and she had kept it, unplugged, on the counter, the way other people keep a photograph.

The repairman's name was Teodor. He did not advertise. He had a shop with no sign, a bench with one lamp, and a ledger in which the list lived, in pencil, with each name crossed out as its turn came. He had crossed out eleven names that year. Four had died, three had moved, two had bought new, one had forgotten, and one, a man with a sewing machine, had wept when Teodor called, because he had assumed the call would never come.

He stood over Oona's name for a long time. Below it was a man named Priestley with a radio, nine years and two months on the list. Teodor could call Priestley. The rule was that he called the next name. It was his rule; nobody else had ever seen the ledger.

Instead he went to Oona's address, which was a flat above a shuttered launderette, and asked the daughter, who was packing boxes, whether the toaster was still there. It was. She had been about to put it in the skip. He asked if he could take it. She looked at him the way people look at the last of a kind, and said that her mother had talked about him, and that she had assumed he was not real.

On the bench the toaster came apart in the usual way. The fault was a hairline crack in the heating element where it met the terminal, invisible unless you knew to flex it, and Teodor knew. He had a drawer of elements from toasters that had been beyond saving. He found one that fit, soldered it, and plugged the thing in, and it glowed orange on both sides for the first time in nine years, and he let it run until the shop smelled faintly of dust burning off.

He did not cross out Oona's name. He wrote beside it, in the same pencil: done. Then he turned to Priestley, with the radio, and picked up the phone, and the list was nine years long again, minus one morning.