Archive 501
Vivian Galván García
A 2006 Motorola Razr Flip Phone
By Lya VengerikI am on a cliff overlooking a desert.
The air is fuzzy. Furry. I feel it like cotton on my tongue and the surface of my eyes.
The air is thick. Soupy. Chicken soup. Like my grandmother’s. I move my limbs through it with great effort.
Standing with his back to me is my old friend. I do not know his name but I know everything else about him, intimately.
He turns. His face is mine. A plunging feeling in the stomach.
This plunging feeling reaches my feet and the world stretches out into a million vertical stripes. A tree sapling pushes through the earth which is now above me. The dried pieces of soil that it moved out of the way as it emerged, fall on my face and body and I feel them between the cloth of my shirt and my skin.
There is something in my left shoe.
I check. It is an acorn. Now, I am inside the acorn. There is a world here. A whole ecosystem. I know it but I have never seen it before. It is my home.
The sky is purple. Cheap white plastic chairs are arranged in a perfect circle on a grass lawn. The smell of grass clippings and sticky lemonade fills my nose.
Music is playing here. It sounds like the color yellow mixed with a bit of gray.
God is here. He is a small bowl of uncooked rice with a wet 2006 Motorola Razr flip phone nestled in the middle.
Sprinklers are running. I cannot see them but I feel the water spraying my skin. I look down at my hand. The water droplets are collecting, merging, getting larger and larger, and now I am knee-deep in clear, bright water. I collect the water in my cupped hands and wash it over my face. It is cool, and deeply cleansing. Sunlight filters through the droplets escaping from between my fingers and they are glittering diamonds. As I wash my face the scene clears. An inner sense of peace glows and expands in my chest.
I am late.
I stand abruptly. I did not realize I had slowly laid down to float in the liquid sunlight. I start walking across the vast watery expanse. I am late. My feet stumble clumsily through the water. I am late. My pace picks up and I start running. Running and falling and getting up and running. I am so, so late.
I fall once more and this time I am fully submerged. I swim furiously and the world flips and now I am lying down on a bed of soft moss. I am completely dry. Sunlight filters through the branches and leaves of gigantic oak trees. I sit up to find that I am in a small patch of nature surrounded by a bustling city. I have been here many times before.
I am now walking through the city. The sky feels heavy above me. Now, I am in conversation with the same old friend who no longer wears my face. It is a relief. We speak of mundane things. I read him my grocery list – milk, eggs, frozen spinach, toothpaste. He produces the items on my list from his pockets and places them in my hands. I turn to place them on the table behind me. We are now in my apartment.
I hear an annoying electronic sound. I ignore it for a while. It does not stop. I head in its direction. On the coffee table in the next room, I find the source of the noise.
It is a 2006 Motorola Razr flip phone. It is ringing.