Free This Is Only a Test by B.J. Hollars

babysitting class—but from the sick counselor’s sister,your wife of three years, who turns your son’s legs to Play-Doh in her hands. For a thousand diapers you’ll observe the way she squeezes his ankles together with a single hand and wipes, singing a campfire song while she does it.
    You will repeat this because it is the simplest way you know to show love—unmistakable, irrefutable, your pact.

Death by Refrigerator
    When inventor Oliver Evans first conceived of his “refrigeration machine” in 1805, he never dreamed it could be a killer. He, much like Jacob Perkins and John Gorrie (both of whom would soon improve upon the design), dreamed simply of extending the preservation properties of food. None of them imagined their invention had deadly potential, providing a perfect-sized trap for a curious child who dared step inside.
    I first learned of refrigerator deaths while serving as a camp counselor in a small country town in Indiana. The victim was a boy named Bobby Watson, who in the summer of 1968—while lost in the throes of a game of hide-and-seek—wedged himself into an abandoned fridge left to rust on the edge of the dock. A maintenance man wandered past moments later, tied the fridgeto the dock, and heaved it into the water, wholly unaware of the child hiding within.
    The fridge
, we informed our campers during weekly retellings,
was meant to serve as an anchor for the docks, though for Bobby it served as a coffin instead
.
    I dedicated several summers to this place and can verify the story. That is, I can verify that it
is
a story, one employed by counselors as a cautionary tale to scare campers into steering clear of the waterfront after dark. Yet no matter how well we told it (and most of us told it quite well), the campers always seemed far less afraid of drowning than the other half of the horror: being trapped inside that fridge.
    If a boy named Bobby Watson did actually die inside a refrigerator in 1968, he was hardly the first. From the 1930s through the 1960s, America’s refrigerator deaths occurred with surprising regularity. Although there’s no verifiable truth to Bobby Watson’s tale—no newspaper reports or camp records confirm his existence—the story was likely inspired by the multitude of other deaths that occurred in similar fashion.
    By the 1950s the death-by-refrigerator epidemic became a public health concern—albeit a strange one—and in response to the crisis, in August of 1956 Congress passed the Refrigerator Safety Act. The legislation required that refrigerators be designed to open from the inside, and made it illegal for shippers to transport any unit that failed to meet this standard. The act—while an important first step—did not immediately solve the problem. There were still far too many unsafe refrigerators in operation, and the government could do little to force citizens to replacetheir perfectly functional fridges. In the years to come—as compressors and fans overheated—thousands of refrigerators were disposed of, though not always responsibly.
    â€œAt least 163 [refrigerator] deaths were reported nationwide between 1956 and 1964,” reports writer Cecil Adams, adding that the number climbed even higher in the mid-1960s before eventually leveling off and falling as the newer, safer models replaced the old. Nevertheless, the tragedies continued, prompting the press (and camp counselors) to maintain focus on the problem by immortalizing this peculiar fraternity of children whose curiosity ultimately cost them their lives.
    Children like three-year-old Larry Murphy and his four-year-old cousin Paul, who in June of 1954 were discovered by a junkman as he prepared to break up an abandoned refrigerator in New London, Connecticut.
    They say Bobby’s mouth was full of fishes
.
    Or children like four-year-old Cynthia Ann Hartman and older brothers Joseph (five) and Martin (six), all of whom