The Box Fan in the Bedroom Window

The box fan set in the bedroom window is a square of grey stamped metal, with a plastic grille screwed to the front and a three-speed switch on the side. It has been running since the sun left the window, and the air it pushes is warm but moving, which is the point of it.

The grille is a field of square holes pressed into grey plastic, with a round emblem at the center worn smooth. Behind it, four blades the color of old bone are fixed to a hub. Once or twice in the month somebody wipes the front of the grille with a damp rag, and the rag comes away grey; the backs of the blades do not get wiped at all.

The switch is on the right side of the frame, set in a stamped hole, with a faceplate that rattles. The first click is low, good for sleeping; the second is where it runs; the third is too loud and shakes the window. The cord comes out of the frame black and stiff, loops once under the sill, and runs to the outlet the lamp uses. Behind the hub is the motor, a cylinder of dark metal with slots cut for air; by midnight it is warm, and its warmth is in the air it throws.

The fan fills the window frame poorly. The sash is lowered onto its top edge, and a strip of cardboard is folded and wedged into the gap above, because the fan is shorter than the window. The window screen stands between the fan and the dark, and the fan presses it into a shallow curve. On the sill the fan faces one way or the other. Facing out, it throws the day's heat into the dark. Facing in, it pulls the night air across the room. Somebody in the house has an opinion about which is right, and the direction changes with the argument.

Through the night the fan walks. The vibration moves it an inch along the sill, so that by morning one foot hangs a little off the edge, and somebody nudges it back square before the sun is on the window. By the end of July the walking has rubbed a clean arc in the dust on the sill, and the paint is worn through where the feet sit.

The motor smells of hot dust for the first nights of July — dust in the seam where the grille's two halves snap together, dust on the backs of the blades, dust in the coils of the cord where it was stored stiff all winter. After those nights the smell goes, and the sound settles into a drone with a rattle in it from the faceplate and a knock where the frame meets the sill.

The fan runs from the time the room is too close to sleep until first light. The air it moves is not cold; it is the same air, only moved. It works because in July the air outside at two in the morning is cooler than the air inside, and the fan is what lets the room trade one for the other. The cord lies across the floor, stepped on twice, plugging in beside the lamp. What the fan throws at the bed by three in the morning is the room's own air, returned and barely cooler.