As our lives become more and more immersed in a virtual world, where photos and documents are archived in a cloud or on a hard drive, images exist only so long as we have the technology to store and update them digitally.
The ephemeral existence of such images has always interested me. The photos taken on my first digital camera, and loaded to a computer that no longer works, expired long before the physical photos from my childhood and teenage years. I similarly wonder if the photos collecting on my current laptop will be around twenty years from now. So when . . .
1.
“Her name is Tammy,” Morris had announced ahead of time, which is what threw his family off. The imagined Tammy, his first girlfriend, first to be brought home anyhow, was a girl in a bikini he’d met in Tallahassee, a model, he told his fellow Harkins, who filled in the rest. Hair in pigtails, a vacationing Iowan, a girl who’d blow over, a girl you’d be teased over for the rest of your life. When Morris appeared, he was not with a girl but a woman. This Tammy—the actual Tammy—had thick, blond hair . . .
Their UK visas were all of five hours old when Sonya’s husband, Alexei, looked up from the computer and announced they would never escape Russia.
“Come on,” she said. “Ticket prices can’t be that bad.”
By now, Sonya was inured to Alexei’s bouts of melodrama and declarations of doom. He was the sort of easily persuaded catastrophist who sourced his medical advice and political opinions from Reddit.
Sonya set her passport on the kitchen table. She’d been smelling the visa itself, . . .
“The Boys’ Heart” was awarded first prize in the 2023 Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Competition, as judged by Jamil Jan Kochai.
There is only one way to know if the egg on the ground is a bird or a snake, so the boy picks it up and places it in his chest pocket. Birds can fly, but snakes can swim, which is terrifying. He studied a bird wing once while the horse ate and then went home and bandaged one of each of his dolls’ arms and his own arm until he needed it to make a paper airplane. He never wanted to be a doctor; he doesn’t like getting dirty . . .
On a beautiful spring day, in the before times, by which I mean before the pandemic, I went to visit a philosopher of Time. This was genuinely his position. I know the world is rich and various and there are all sorts of things you can do with your span of years, and I also know that many people would like to do something entirely different from the thing they have been able or permitted or encouraged to do. I know that the world gives far too much to some people and far too little to others. This is a story about one person, a philosopher of Time, who lived alone after he’d suffered a great tragedy, of which . . .