Or
8 a.m. or even 9 and you look over at Sam or Chuck or whatever you named your pretend husband, you were too drunk to remember, but you do remember him husking your shirt off in the ladies or his fingers spidering under your skirt as he drove you home. Whatever. He’s here now, and his wife or girlfriend or maybe even his mother is throbbing his morning phone with text after text while he sleeps the sleep of the conquest man, or the falling in love man or the man who will never call again man. And you, you are frisky or hungover or just plain bored and you pick up his phone as his gurgly snores become funny or annoying or too much like all the other pretend husbands. The text on his phone – where r u? and you find that there are 15 other texts just like it. Or maybe this is the wrong number or maybe it will serve him right to nudge this one awake, shove the phone under his nose and demand an answer, no or’s about it. And maybe you decide to show up for yourself this time, the way you’ve been reading about on social media, or those women’s blogs, or even what is written on your lonely girl heart. Maybe, yeah, it’s time like you swore it would be time the last time or the time before that. And this time you’re going to do it.
Or maybe not.
You Have 11 New Messages
- Who the hell has an answering machine anymore? Or a landline for that matter?
- When time is always, always moving forward, why does anyone keep a scrapbook?
- At some point it becomes obvious that every message you do get also tells you every message you didn’t.
- It’s good to think that maybe one of people who didn’t call is someone playing hard to get. Boys like girls who they can’t have and girls like boys who they can’t have. Sometimes we wonder how people get made.
- Since we do have answering machines, why can’t they give us answers we can use, like why didn’t Tommybillyjohn call us back that time in tenth grade. Why we saw him talking to Lynn Klein the next day in homeroom and holding her hand under the desk. We’d still want to know. Even though we know.
- Sometimes those calls that don’t leave messages aren’t really from dead people the way we always thought.
- Beep
- We prefer to text anyway. When we meet someone who tells us they like the sound of a real voice over the phone, we wonder how we will ever communicate with this person again.
- Lots of people like answering machines. And landlines. It makes them feel rooted and secure. People like the tactile feel of scrapbooks and old photos. It makes things come to life again. People stop playing hard to get after tequila or whiskey at 2 am. Tommybillyjon didn’t like us in the first place but didn’t want to hurt our feelings. Dead people don’t need to call. They can show up anytime and anywhere dressed in either the outfit they were wearing the day they died or a Halloween sheet. We will see that person who doesn’t like to text in the supermarket. We will promise to call them soon. We will tell them that every time.
- One day, a long, long time from now there will be a telephone museum. Answering machines and landlines. Rotaries and switchboards and diorama women plugging wires into holes and recordings of “hold on, I’ll connect you,” Rooms of blackberries and bluetooths, and PDA’s and iphones and all of in rooms people will ooh over and aah over because everything gets to be remembered.
- Yes, everything gets to be remembered. One day it will be us.
Francine Witte is the author of ten books of poetry and flash fiction. Her flash fiction collection Radio Water was published by Roadside Press in January 2024. Her poetry collection is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press in summer, 2024. She is flash fiction editor of Flash Boulevard and South Florida Poetry Journal. Visit her website at francinewitte.com