Hum

by Helen Phillips

The differences were subtle, even more subtle than she had anticipated, and her first reaction was relief—just faint shifts in shading, minuscule alterations to the known topography, her features wavering a bit between familiarity and unfamiliarity, the way she might look in a picture taken from a strange angle. Entranced, she stared at herself, trying to understand her face. She couldn’t put her finger on what had changed in these intervening hours. All the minute deviations added up to some sort of transformation, undeniable but also undetectable.

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.

Yet she knew there was plenty in his phone that wasn’t right here in front of him. The entire universe.

If not for these pictures, these sturdy images pulled out of the blur of her memory, her life would have no solidity.

She was so tired that happiness felt elusive, though flashes of bliss were frequent.

“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.”

“For better or worse, I absorbed billions of sentences during my first minute of existence.”