Hum

by Helen Phillips

By the time she got to the fourth box, the counter was covered with packaging detritus, Bubble Wrap and Styrofoam and plastic. She opened the box with trepidation. Inside she discovered a roll of dental floss, a roll of double-sided tape, a roll of toilet paper, an outlet splitter, and a slim metal ruler. Typical random Jem order. They needed to stop spending money.

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Jem kept glancing at his phone in his lap. May wanted to be as magnetic as his phone.

Their time here was brief, yes, slipping through their fingers: but it occurred to her that every day was not twenty-four hours, it was actually ninety-six, each of the four of them living their own twenty-four hours side by side.

She had the urge to call out to him, startle him with her voice: What’s in your phone that isn’t right here in front of you? There is a naked person in your bed. There is a breeze in the yard. Yet she knew there was plenty in his phone that wasn’t right here in front of him. The entire universe.

“The thing is, May,” the hum said, “the goal of advertising is to rip a hole in your heart so it can then fill that hole with plastic, or with any other materials that can be yanked out of the earth and, after brief sojourns as objects of desire, be converted to waste.”

As the hum arranged itself among them, she became hyperaware of their four bodies, the vitality of their bodies, their eight lungs breathing.

“You can’t avoid the void,” the hum said. “Statistically speaking, you are safe. The voices outside grow quieter as the voice inside grows louder. Focus on the moment you are in. Notice what you have. Moor yourselves in your bodies.”