affordable bankruptcy.
His gaze had not left the screen for over an hour. The phone was slick in his hands, covered in smudges of sweat.
“I should’ve used the Blueberry Explosion filter instead of Nuclear Solution. Dammit,” he said and hit the edit button.
She drew herself closer to him on the sofa. They both hadn’t eaten in a day.
“I wonder how the Americans felt when they realised that the Mexicans realised only a year after the war had ended that they, the Mexicans, had been cheated out of all the gold in Alta California,” she said. The heat was unbearable.
His thumb was swiping up so fast on his phone that his brain failed to register any of the images popping up.
“Yuyoblo17 has picked up twenty-fucking-thousand likes in the past five hours!” he said, his eyes red and bleary.
She said, “Who was the most important, do you think? Euclid or Pythagoras?”
He took a sip of water from his bottle and said, “More. More important. And I need to charge my earbuds. Silence is killing me.”
She made an attempt to get up from the sofa but could not find a solid thing to grab onto and gave up after a few tries.
“I once wrote an essay on an author who was sometimes referred to as the Chekhov of the suburbs. And now I have no clue who he was. That’s all I remember about him. Chekhov of the suburbs. No book title, no personal history, nothing about what he wrote. He or she. I guess he. Chekhov. Guy. Right?”
He looked up from his phone and regarded her for a few seconds. She raised her eyebrows and tilted her head as if to say So?
He said, “Can you pass me the charger? My phone’s dying. Right next to you. The charger. On the table, behind the lamp.”
She reached over without looking, felt around for the charger, found it and handed it to him.
She said, “Sentences, whether they’re true or false.”
He plugged the phone in and it acknowledged the connection with a soft beep.
He said, “Say that again?”
“Sentences, whether they’re true or false,” she said.
“What’s that mean?”
She rested her head against the back of the sofa and exhaled slowly.
She said, “Women are incomplete. Yes or no?”
He said nothing.
“Yes or no? Don’t think. Yes or no? Women are incomplete.”
He said, “I have to write a post of no less than 500 words by midnight. And find a photo that goes with it. And edit the photo. And find a cool filter for it.”
She said, “What’s the difference between intentional and intensional?”
He began cleaning the screen of his phone with his T-shirt.
“You just said the same two words,” he said.
“One is with a ‘t’ the other with an ‘s’.”
He said, “No idea. Are you sure they’re two different words?”
She lowered her hand on his left thigh and let it rest there.
“Yes. I am sure,” she said.
“You want me to look it up?” he said.
“Nah. It’s okay. It’s all good. Good as it gets.”
