Stories
The Digital Familiar
Sylvie’s world existed in muted blues and greys, mirroring the screen she clutched like a lifeline. She was fourteen, lonely and keenly aware of the space around her that no one chose to fill. Her bedroom, a sanctuary of dust motes and charging cables, was where her true self resided, hidden from the echoing halls of her high school. She didn’t just feel unseen; she felt fundamentally misunderstood, as if the entire social dynamic of the school was a complex language she simply wasn’t programmed to speak. She was a silent observer, always on the periphery, watching over the life she craved, a ghost moving through hallways thick with connections between everyone else.
Minding Yourself
Three stops before yours, a telepathic flare-up comes on fast, like a stream-of-consciousness flash flood you can’t escape in this train car. Immediately you regret skipping your usual afternoon coffee. Without it, everything on everyone’s mind comes rushing into yours, the inner lives of other passengers now impinging on your own, making your consciousness a mess of their thoughts—mental images in rapid succession like a montage by an auteur gone mad during post-production, this deluge accompanied by emotions surging and throbbing through the chatter of overlapping quotidian monologues.