Misrecognition by Madison Newbound

Author:Madison Newbound
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2024-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Elsa smoked a cigarette and looked out at the humid, gray day, the green before her almost fluorescent in the dim light before the storm, as her hand made its repeated journey from mouth to knee.

Elsa waited. In defiance, she left her phone in her room as she descended to the kitchen, only to feel overcome by a premonition. She bounded up the stairs and over to her dresser where her phone lay next to the pack of cigarettes. She had not received a match. As the hours passed, she found that the person called Sam became for her more and more abstracted. The particular combination of their features, their movements—which Elsa had studied, and which had imprinted themselves on her, or so she thought—began to elude her. And though she tried, she struggled to picture them.

Instead, there was a movement within her—which was not so much thought but felt—as she began to sense that her phone had in some sense become the person called Sam, that the two had transmuted and were now indistinguishable in her mind. And so it was in the device itself that she began to invest her happiness. This development progressed without her truly noting it, her hand reaching through space in search of the person called Sam.

She hid her phone under covers and tried to read—something she had not done since her return home, but which now bore the possibility of distraction. But as soon as the symbols on the page began to cohere, she was reminded of her phone’s proximity on the mattress just beside her and her hand grasped for its cool exterior. Illuminating its darkened screen, she found nothing at all—or worse, as her chest fluttered in false hope, a white banner announcing the occasional promotional email or news notification—and each time the loss would feel greater than the time before. The hope of a response slipped away as each hour passed without contact, so that her phone became for her a source of resentment and longing. As if it, and not the person called Sam, were the one who failed to give her what she only now realized she so desperately wanted.

In the late afternoon, Elsa decided to take a walk, though the sun was still high in the sky and the humidity filled her limbs with fatigue. Sasha stood expectantly as Elsa passed her on her way out, but she ignored her, carefully shutting the front door. The dog’s gaze followed her as she proceeded down the walkway. Elsa was already down the stone steps by the time she turned around and ran back indoors—pushing Sasha gently to the side—and up the stairs to her room. She grabbed her phone without checking it, as if this refusal forgave her inability to part with it, and slid the device into her back pocket.

Once she was on the road, she reached to turn on her phone’s notifications and headed slowly in the direction of the hill, the sun in her eyes.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.