Cult Classic

by Sloane Crosley

We’d become too disconnected, too leery of bridging the gap, too likely to run down a list of conversational categories as if detailing a car. How’s the family? The job? The apartment hunt? As if making deeper inquiries would open up a sinkhole of sadness from which we’d never escape.

As an adult, it’s hard to come down on a common institution to which you have no anecdotal access. It smacks of sour grapes.

he could not commit to his own person, to being in his own body, a spirit vessel he was only ever borrowing.

I was filled with horror for the phone itself, zizzing like a petulant child, horror for the past buried within it. The graveyard of exchanges at my fingertips. I looked at the shape of Zach’s texts. The speech bubble had too recently been the purview of comic books. Not enough time had passed between our association of the bubbles with fiction and their transfer to reality. It turned us all into actors, anticipating their lines, reading between them.