Page 58 - Vol. V #6

(Ghosting continued from preceding page ) random. “Hey, how was your weekend?” she
“He’s dead,” Abby said.
texted.
“Who?” Rachel asked. Abby imagined Rachel lying on a couch or a divan, her husband cooking them dinner or maybe it was vice versa. Regardless, she felt warmth radiating from the phone.
He didn’t respond by Monday. She went home
after work and finished the second season of
Breaking Bad. Abby considered that maybe
he was too ill to respond, too ill to even reach
his cell phone because something had hap- Abby told her friend The Ex-Whatever’s name. pened to him and she’d never know. Or maybe Reminded her about what happened with him his iOS hadn’t updated: she’d read online that weeks earlier. Abby was talking too fast, telling certain phones lost messages if they didn’t her friend that sure, she had only known him a update in time. short time, but surely since she was really angry
But no, that wasn’t realistic. Instead, Abby looked at his profile again: how his photo featured a too- perfect sunny day on the bay. There were the req- uisite shots of him hiking. The photos of him at a Cubs game. She looked at his Instagram account: photos of food taken recently, a few shots of him in Muir Woods from a few weeks ago.
at being ignored there was a reason for that: he
She clicked on one. “We miss you!” a poster said. “You’ll always be in our thoughts,” another read.
Her heart shook like a bee in a jar. There had to be some kind of mistake. A joke, maybe. On an- other photo, someone had posted a link. It lead to an obituary and she immediately recognized the photo as his profile picture but now with dates underneath. Her arm tightened involun- tarily. Abby looked at the date and then scrolled through her text history. He died five days after their last text.
Abby had to go outside. She threw on her run- ning shoes, a hooded sweatshirt and didn’t even bother with putting on her headphones. She found it to be a surprisingly cold July evening, with no one else on the streets and the lake encased by a lingering fog that hung like tissues on the trees and along the path. The weather had chased the joggers from their paths, and after half an hour, Abby called it quits.
Inside, her apartment was just as she’d left it: buzzing with questions about The Ex-Whatever’s death and its meaning.
She called Rachel. 49
Looking for Landscapes #3
archival pigment print 13” x 19” By Michael Woodhouse