Selina Marcille

Experimental 2nd person flash fiction (wildly unedited)

            Your alarm goes off, the ringing a tolling bell in the headache already forming behind your eyes.  You’re just grateful that you were able to sleep to the alarm today and not have to get up at 4 in the morning to pee and not be able to fall back asleep. 

            You’re out of coffee, so you scrounge around for some of the tea bags you know your mother left here the last time she visited over two years ago. Any port in the storm- any caffeine in the blood.  You leave it steeping on the sink in the bathroom as you start the water.  You sit with your hand in the flow, frustrated that the hot water heater has been on its last legs for months but your landlord refuses to do anything about it.  Now he at least had an excuse for not calling you back.   

            The water hits the max temperature and you slide in, uncaring about the red almost burn marks you’ll have to show for it later.  You give yourself 30 seconds to stand in the spray and think about it.  The reports you heard on the radio were grim about getting any of the servers back up and running.  The worldwide internet outage crippled the structural integrity of every country in the world in mere hours.  At least that is what the shock jocks on the radio speculate; without the internet, communication beyond just your neighbors and those within shouting distance was impossible.

            You finish your thirty count and grab the shampoo bottle.  It’s no use dwelling on why you decided to cut the cord and get rid of a landline years ago.  Now, apart from the radio, the few people with old-fashioned wall outlet phones weren’t ‘out of touch,’ they were essential.  Your mother still has a landline.

            The temperature starts to drop and you scrub harder, determined to get through this one act of normalcy without having to tip toe dance to get the rest of the soap out in the freezing cold. 

            You recall your mother’s warm hands as she gently scrubbed your head in the pink bathtub from your childhood home.  The wallpaper border near the ceiling has a pattern on it- a boat, an anchor, a whale, a seashell, and a lighthouse.  She hums a soothing song as you follow the pattern with your eyes, looking for the place where the pattern breaks- the glitch.  It’s in the corner near the linen closet- the start and ending point meet and the white whale meets the boat.

            You come back to yourself as the final remnants of warmth float down the drain with the remainder of your soapy conditioner.  Tomorrow, you convince yourself.  Tomorrow, I’ll go fast enough to use conditioner. 

            You’ve felt stuck since the outage.  You don’t trust your electric car to go the distance needed to get to your mother’s house, especially since so many other electronic systems are failing.  If only you’d kept that old diesel pickup truck with the high clutch.  That thing was older than you were and would probably be roaring down the highway long after you’re gone. 

            Toweling off, the warmth from the tea slakes away the shivers from the shower.  You walk back into your room and slip into your warmest pair of sweatpants.  It feels strange to be dressing so down in the middle of the week, but work was cancelled.  What work was there to do without access to computers and e-mail and document files and processors?  You tried to go to work the first day after the outage.  It had been only a short walk to your office, but when you got there, your keycard wouldn’t open the door.  You had smacked yourself in the head.  Of course it wouldn’t work.  But you still waited.  Your cellphone still had some battery left and you tried to call your boss, but no calls would go through.

            After waiting for almost 40 minutes, one of the security guards walked around the front.  You knew him and had shared a good laugh over your favorite sitcom a handful of times.  Today, he looked grim. “There ain’t nobody here.  Best to go home and wait and see.”

            You did.  It was a lark at first- fun.  You put on your coziest clothes and spent the day relaxing.  The TVs weren’t working- everything was streaming now.  You organized your closet, cleaned out your junk drawer, and even did a deep clean of the bathroom, including scrubbing the grout that started to turn brown where it peeled away from the tiles. 

            You sang as loud as you wanted and thought you would look back on this day later as just a strange blip in the timeline of your life.  The blip kept growing.  As the news broadcasts began to take over the morning DJs talk shows spreading news of failing infrastructure, all you can do it wait.

            And wait you do.  You realize by day 2 that without your technology, you have very little to do to occupy yourself and your mind.  You try reading, but realize the only books you have in the house are the self-help ones your brother sent you after he went on the Himalayan Yoga retreat and some old cookbooks.  You reach for your phone to place an order for some fiction books, but then remember that you can’t.

            This happens again and again in the early days.  The reaching for a device for entertainment, for information, for a recipe, for a GPS to figure out where the closest grocery store is because you can’t order your food online anymore, then quickly remembering that the convenient life as you knew it might be a thing of the past.

            After toweling off your hair, you make your way back to the bathroom.  Despite the short stint of scalding water, the mirror is still quite fogged over.  You use your towel to brush it away and step back in fright.

            The mirror.  There’s a face in the mirror.  And it’s not yours.

            After all, who can recognize themselves without technology today??