A soft melody accompanied by the sound of waves wells up next to her ear, and the lights turn her room into a dim red and then dip it all into a mellow yellow.
Trying to glean another second of the dream escaping her, she tries to protect her eyes from the light with one arm while her other arm is seeking out the perpetrator, trying to hit the snooze button—just one more minute of the sweet subconscious, that's all she wants.
Too much to ask. The melody now turning into staccato strings, the wave sounds replaced by a nervous, ominous bass line.
Finally, her fingers find the off button.
Too little too late. Finally her type B-129 clock shuts up.
She sits up, opens her eyes, and confronts reality.
Next to her on the bedside sits her phone, filled with notifications just waiting to be read. Completing the still-life of her bedside desk is an e-ink device type A-391, a normed glass filled up to the brim with water (mineralized, no gas), and a box of tissues.
She takes one, gently approaching her face with it.
A tear rolls down her cheek, a memento of her dream.
She wipes it away and wonders what she had tried to hold on to. Jung's words now ring ominously in her ears:
“Dreams prepare, announce, or warn about certain situations, often long before they actually happen."
Her gaze falls on the clock, and another realization sets in; she must get up and stop contemplating.
After a quick shower, she stands before her white wardrobe, torn between the C-120 A-line midi dress and the Z-592 pantsuit. In the end, she picks the first as she simply isn't a fan of pants.
All dressed, she heads to the kitchen and is greeted by the beeping of her grey fridge, indicating that she's nearly out of milk.
Whatever, I'll have my coffee black then.
She pours the hot water slowly into the French Press, moving in circles to wet the coffee equally.
Through the walls, she hears the distant sound of diggers moving through the ground, maybe building another fortification against the hot streams of lava that threaten their existence at any time.
In her cocoon, though, she feels safe; the only reminder of the perilous situation is the condensed water collecting on her grey walls. No window through which sunlight could fall in, only a screen showing a flower field on a sunny day.
The smell of coffee fills the kitchen, and she pours herself the first cup of liquid black into a white mug, mass-produced according to norm 34X.
When she refills her cup a second time, a little chime warns her that she's nearing her caffeine limit for the day.
You wouldn't know from looking at the mug. All of the dishes look normal. Except all of them are marvels of high-tech, measuring whatever a user takes in and where. If she wanted to, she could pull up a sheet that'd provide an in-depth view of the coffees she'd had and in which part of her flat she was sitting. Embedded in seemingly normal white and grey porcelain.
If you were to look at the scenery from far away, it would look like an abstract painting, a melange of grey, white, and black tones that would make you question whether the painter was color-blind or trying to make a point.
Sure, a few colors are still visible on the screen, but the things used for daily life are all strictly regulated.
Envy is the enemy.
So, the maxim of the current parliament. Men and Women in grey suits, dedicated to keeping humanity alive in the face of nearly insurmountable challenges.
It's been five years since the catastrophe, and as much as she tries to remember the days before, it's like a gaping hole in her mind.
After chugging down her morning ration of bread with jam, she puts her dishes in the B31-X2 dishwasher.
Time to face the world.
She turns to the screen and says, "Switch to news, please." In an instant, moving images fill the room, and a male-non-descriptive voice's timbre resonates in the space.
Not that she really cares to know what is happening. It's depressing all along, usually just technobureaucrat gibberish with a little information on where the next big tunnels will be dug and whose neighborhood had the most productive citizens.
As the male voice now lists up new measures in place to increase citizen well-being, her attention shifts to her Computer. She logs in by scanning her retina and heads straight to her task list.
Another day of data entry awaits.
She doesn't know what it's good for, nor are they ever told what the grainy images and random letter-number combinations are.
All she knows is to look for patterns and sort images accordingly.
It might just be a plot to keep us occupied.
The chime of her phone indicates a message from her friend Emma-120.
"Have you seen the news?"
"Why?"
"Well, check channel 9, and you'll see."
She returned to the big screen and instructs: Change to Channel 9.
Instantly, the screen fills with close-ups of intricately decorated objects: a statue made seemingly of liquid gold, a cup full of ornate drawings, a pencil in the form of a sardine...
Her mouth lets out a little gasp, her eyes glued to the objects as she imagines how it'd feel to hold them.
The male speaker's voice monotonously explains: "During this morning's razzia, the police confiscated the illegally held possessions of a couple living in district 29-19X. The two had recently been reported by a neighbor, who became suspicious after the couple had become negligent in their citizen duty. During a visit, the couple tensed up whenever the visitors' gaze went close to their X01-0 storage unit. Upon exiting, the visitor claimed to have glimpsed a sheen of gold from under the carpet."
The camera then moves to show the perpetrators' pixelated faces. She estimates them to be in their 60s, and their voices break as they try to speak. The woman is crying, trying to grasp things from the clutches of the police. The man sounds angry. He whispers beneath his teeth: "We're not hurting anyone. You cannot do this to us, you inhumane pri..."
At this point, the footage cuts off, back to the studio where the male voice proceeds to reading the rule 10290b, which constitutes that personal possession of things that were not part of the official Catalogue is illegal. Because, as the male voice continues, it can lead to envy and inequality. We can't have these flare up here when in such a dire situation.
Blabla, envy is the enemy.
She completes the sermon before the voice can.
Still, she has become jittery. These things seem to happen more frequently these days. Is the government nervous about something? Is this an Overture to a broader investigation?
She does not know. All she knows is that she too is living dangerously.
She forces herself to message back.
"Damn, can you believe they did this? Insane..."
Better to stay safe. You never know who's reading.
A few days later, it's finally time for the general electric consumption adjustment again.
This means there are 10 minutes when all the sensors and lights are turned off. 10 minutes of freedom.
Even if just every few weeks for a few minutes, those are the most precious moments for her.
In the darkness of her apartment, she moves slowly to the cabinet under her bed and pulls a box out of the blankets and spare sheets underneath. Her fingers glide over the surface until they find the clip to open it up. She takes a lighter from it, and the small flame illuminates the box's contents, turning her silhouette into a black, wavy shadow on the wall, grimacing.
She takes out a mug in earthy colors and weighs it in her hand. She admires the round edges and the minor imperfections. She wonders what the person who made this mug might have thought. Were they happy? Or maybe anxious?
She tries hard to remember how she got this mug, but she knows that she was clasping it, hiding it beneath her XXL sweater dress on the day of the catastrophe.
If she could remember, she'd see herself walking through scorching heat into a small ceramic shop run by a friendly old woman. She'd know that the woman had made a comment about this becoming her new favorite mug and that she'd internalized that somehow.
She'd recall stopping at a fountain to fill the mug and how delicious those first drops of water tasted under the relentless midsummer heat.
But all of this, she does not remember.
She caresses it and stands up, maybe unconsciously trying to recreate her first experience drinking from it.
On the tip of her toes, she moves toward her kitchen to find the sink. She turns on the tap, waits for the water to cool, and fills her mug.
The water now mirrors her reflection, lit up by the lighter in her other hand. She knows she doesn't have much time left, but she can't help it.
Moving the mug to her mouth, her lips enclose around the cold surface of the mug. An image shoots in her head: the outline of a fountain.
Suddenly the lights go bright, blinding her.
She stumbles and drops the mug. Water spreads over the floor as the mug breaks into hundreds of pieces. Shattering.
A loud noise reverberates through the walls.
The door is violently opened, banging against the concrete, leaving small fissures in the wallpaper.
She senses heavy steps moving toward her.
Still blinded by the sudden bright lights, her hands move across the floor, trying to pick up the pieces. It's too late.
The image of the fountain in her head becoming clearer: a beautiful fountain under the summer sun surrounded by lush green bushes in the inner yard of an old house. A peaceful image.
The steps stop.
A moment of silence.
The only sound is the faucet dripping, drops of water hitting the sink's surface and dispersing like the final chord of a symphony into nothingness and forgetting.
Living on only, if at all, in memory.
Thanks for reading 💚
It's not my usual thing to attempt short stories.
Still, I was trying to process some of the things I started pondering, such as "How do we define individuality if all of us have the same mass-produced goods and clothes as well as access?" and what does it mean if we own ever less things that we have a real attachment to. (This was triggered by learning about Kierkegaard's philosophy). The arte documentary about China's surveillance state also still lingered in me.
I was also inspired by reading Byung Chul Han's Undinge and called this Herzensdinge, which I sense to be the opposite of Undinge. There's something very satisfying about owning some things and making them our own by imbuing them with a narrative.
Even in the digital age, I find a lot of solace in having a shelf full of books and knowing I can pull one out to search the passages I highlighted there. I also have a mug from which I could swear water tastes better when drinking. I have no explanation; maybe it's just knowing it was made by a lovely little lady selling her ceramics in a yellow witch's house a little outside of the city.
