Why Won’t It Ring?
Inanimate objects always pained her.
Shoes too tight, as restricting as her limiting jobs, AI watches rebuking her sedentary life (“time to get moving”—passive aggressive threats, from a robotic), her 11-year old Honda Civic (that's age 77 in dog years) demanding attention like her septuagenarian mother.
And now it, her damned landline, sitting idle like the doorstop it was better suited for.
"Who has a landline?" her friend Chelsea asked, "In the 21st century? Get with it Girl! You're like one of those pitiful toddlers we see in the mall, tethered to a leash, like an astronaut outside the command module, airless and dangling, tethered as a spider's prey in a tensile web."
So, here she was, waiting for an
inanimate object to ring, for love to reach through ethernet cables, to hear a
voice over twisted wires ("you're breaking up"), head in hand, her
world gray
while others, seemingly, lived animated lives in technicolor.
"Why won't it ring?" she moaned.
about the author
Steve Gerson writes poetry and flash about life's dissonance. He has published in many journals plus his nine chapbooks: Once Planed Straight; Viral; And the Land Dreams Darkly; The 13th Floor; What Is Isn’t; There Is a Season; Have Not; Who Am I Today; and Dystopia.
you enjoy the story? Would you like to shout us a coffee?. Half of what you pay goes to the author the oher half goes to expense se.g. Maintaining the web site and setting up The Best of CaféLit book each year.
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