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The phone we found with the boy’s body was troubling me. I turned it around in my hand.
It was late in the police station. My officers had gone home but as the acting chief, I was the one to turn the lights out at the end of the day. The paperwork of leadership. I was by myself. My brain was spinning.
The phone in my hand was an iPhone but the logo I was looking at didn’t have a bite out of the apple. My first thought was that it was a cheap Chinese knock-off. Bu it was also slightly curved. I have to admit, it fit in my hand a lot better than a plain rounded rectangle of my regular phone. I’m not up on my technology. Maybe it was a few generations ahead of mine. But why would a knockoff have a different shape than what it was trying to imitate?
The boy’s body had no ID. It was found in the forest near our town by a hunter. The clothes on the body were a little strange. Bright colours that didn’t go together. One sleeve was transparent plastic. One pantleg was shorter than the other. A copper necklace that looked out of place on a teenage boy. Small cheek piercings like I hadn’t seen before but he didn’t look like a punk or a misfit. Very clean shaven. Nice hair. No dye or strange shaved designs. Lots of hair oil, though. Almost like back in the fifties.
The fads of city kids come and go and I’m none the wiser, old man that I am. We get a lot of travelers through here. This is a small town near a main highway. Half our income these days is from the truck stops ever since the mill shut down.
This boy’s phone. I was looking at the screen now. It appeared unlocked which seemed unusual. The keyboard was standard, caps lock if you wanted and numbers and symbols if you tapped the right button. But there was a third keyboard with symbols I’d never seen. Not just upside-down exclamation points like in Spanish or Chinese characters or another language. At a guess, I’d have to say math symbols but I had been looking online for hours to match them and I couldn’t.
A full keyboard of them.
And the icons. It still wasn’t connecting to our wifi but the icons were confusing me, too. I’m used to games I’ve never seen before on my teenager’s phone. But I recognize snapchat. I recognize facebook. I recognize Google and Youtube. These were like them but different. Snapchat’s ghost logo has no arms. Facebook’s looking had a lower-case t instead of an f. Google was an R instead of a G and YouTube, while still called YouTube, was blue instead of Red.
And it wouldn’t connect to our wifi. It just couldn’t find it.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say he sidestepped here from another place. A different earth.
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It was late in the police station. My officers had gone home but as the acting chief, I was the one to turn the lights out at the end of the day. The paperwork of leadership. I was by myself. My brain was spinning.
The phone in my hand was an iPhone but the logo I was looking at didn’t have a bite out of the apple. My first thought was that it was a cheap Chinese knock-off. Bu it was also slightly curved. I have to admit, it fit in my hand a lot better than a plain rounded rectangle of my regular phone. I’m not up on my technology. Maybe it was a few generations ahead of mine. But why would a knockoff have a different shape than what it was trying to imitate?
The boy’s body had no ID. It was found in the forest near our town by a hunter. The clothes on the body were a little strange. Bright colours that didn’t go together. One sleeve was transparent plastic. One pantleg was shorter than the other. A copper necklace that looked out of place on a teenage boy. Small cheek piercings like I hadn’t seen before but he didn’t look like a punk or a misfit. Very clean shaven. Nice hair. No dye or strange shaved designs. Lots of hair oil, though. Almost like back in the fifties.
The fads of city kids come and go and I’m none the wiser, old man that I am. We get a lot of travelers through here. This is a small town near a main highway. Half our income these days is from the truck stops ever since the mill shut down.
This boy’s phone. I was looking at the screen now. It appeared unlocked which seemed unusual. The keyboard was standard, caps lock if you wanted and numbers and symbols if you tapped the right button. But there was a third keyboard with symbols I’d never seen. Not just upside-down exclamation points like in Spanish or Chinese characters or another language. At a guess, I’d have to say math symbols but I had been looking online for hours to match them and I couldn’t.
A full keyboard of them.
And the icons. It still wasn’t connecting to our wifi but the icons were confusing me, too. I’m used to games I’ve never seen before on my teenager’s phone. But I recognize snapchat. I recognize facebook. I recognize Google and Youtube. These were like them but different. Snapchat’s ghost logo has no arms. Facebook’s looking had a lower-case t instead of an f. Google was an R instead of a G and YouTube, while still called YouTube, was blue instead of Red.
And it wouldn’t connect to our wifi. It just couldn’t find it.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say he sidestepped here from another place. A different earth.
tags