Modernity

A cell phone is her only connection to the present. She carries it wih her in a pocket. Within the long sweeping skirts that she wears each day — each skirt layered with patchwork fabrics or transparent crinolines, or sliky flying strips — within each skirt is a pocket. A lot of the time her hand is in her pocket fingering the phone. Holding it, waiting for a pulse. The messages from Enrique recorded in her voicemail are three years old. She’s expecting the new one. The new message that he never sends. He never calls.

Still…sometimes she speaks to him on the phone — into the phone. No one listens on the other end, but she talks into the phone anyway. That phone (it’s clunky and red with a ring like a hissing racoon) is her one connection to the past, to the outside world, to any orbits other than her own concentrated and small one. The phone is her only concession to the time in which she lives.