A battery is standing on a nightstand and nobody has done anything with it.
This is the still life of the series and it is arranged the way a votive offering is arranged, which is to say the object is small, it is placed below the thing it is meant for, and it has been left there. The lamp is on at the right, a squat turned base with a shade the colour of weak tea, and the light comes across the tabletop at a low angle so that every gouge and burn and lifted flake in the varnish reads. The bedpost is at the left, a turned finial in shadow. The pillow behind it.
On the wall above the bed, the detector. Closed. Unlit. I will come back to that.
The battery itself is a rectangular nine-volt with the two terminals facing us, one hexagonal collar and one round socket, both brassy and rubbed bright at the rims where something has been snapped onto them and pulled off again. The casing is dark, nearly black, scuffed grey along the top edge and dented at one corner.
There is no printing on it. No brand, no voltage, no polarity marks, no date. The wrapper is gone or was never there and what is left is the bare shell. I looked at it for a long time hoping for a legible letter and found none, and painting a blank battery accurately is much harder than painting a labelled one, because a label tells you where the light stops.
Here is what the picture actually establishes, and it is not what I set out to establish.
The device is intact and shut. It is not on the ceiling in this painting; it is on the wall over the head of the bed. It shows no light at all. And the battery is already sitting on the table underneath it.
Which means the battery arrived first. Somebody bought it, or found it in a drawer, or took it out of something else, and set it down where they would see it, and then went to sleep. The intention is complete and legible and sitting in lamplight three feet from where it is needed. What has not happened is the ladder, the twist, the release of the housing.
I know that table. Everybody has that table. There is a ring on it, over by the lamp, a pale circle where a glass stood long enough to lift the finish. You can see it if the light is right. It is the same shape as the thing this series ends up being about, and it got there because somebody put a drink down and forgot it, which is exactly how the battery got there too.
The offering is made. The rite is not performed. Above it, the machine has stopped even asking.