Melanie Browne
Go to Settings > General > Software Update
Her mother had snatched it away, for virtually no reason at all.
she screamed and wailed and threatened to call the cops
while her mother watched her hold her breath until she turned a
color very close to purple. Not purple exactly but maybe Periwinkle.
Some new fancy paint color someone bold uses in their dining room.
"Still a teenager and need to show some self discipline."
she could only hear parts of what her mother was saying now
she was still so livid with rage.
"One day very soon."
"Very soon you won't have a body, just a set of emojis for a head."
That might have done it. Or the fact that they were reading Kafka
in pre-AP English class. or the fact that she was feeling very hormonal.
Turning into a cockroach is one thing but turning into a second hand iPhone
without the latest software update was horrendous. No, worse than that
it was horrific.
Her mother kept telling her father how sorry very sorry she was.
Her father cried and played her old phone messages and drank the
cheap whiskey. Since they never allowed smartphones at the table
her sibling watched as they set her plate and gently put her on
the sideboard next to the family photo taken in Costa Rica and the
turquoise cake plate.
They could hear her texting her friends back as they ate tiny bites of salmon.
In that regard life wasn't very different from how it had been.
They could only guess how she was feeling having become an inanimate metal device
almost overnight, so they would coo at her and say encouraging things like
"It's always darkest before the dawn."
They continued on with their lives until they began to notice the smartphone was
texting the same messages over and over.
"When are you going to update this fucking phone?"
and
"I know Logan took my charger, can't you see I only have a 5% battery left?"
It's not that they weren't sympathetic to her plight, she was their youngest and very bright, they just wanted to foster independent thinking and nip that sort of entitlement in the bud.
They grieved but still took her on vacation in the summer. As they unpacked their suitcase in Boca Raton they noticed her battery was at 1%.
Her mother and father glanced at each other helplessly.
"Should we charge it?" her father asked.
"That seems cruel," her mother replied.
They drove to dinner in silence and held hands and hoped for the best.
She stayed at 1% for many years and they imagined it was the miracle that they had hoped for and that she was going to turn back into her real flesh and blood self but this did not happen.
One day while cleaning her room they saw that the phone itself had died.
They cried and then put her in the junk drawer in the kitchen and poured two glasses
Chianti and binge watched a new show on HBO.
It was slow at first but got better after the first season.
