skonen_blades

It’s not a phone.
It’s a portal.
It’s not inconsequential.
It’s a lifeline.
It’s not for hiding.
It’s for going somewhere else.
It’s not reclusive.
It’s for witnessing.
It’s not useless.
It’s a tool.

It can be destructive.
It’s powerful.
It can be idle.
It’s full of noise.
It can be a vacuum.
It’s a place to flee to.
It can be worrying.
It’s a fulcrum of change.
It can be mystifying.
It’s still an unknown.

It’s a weapon for the oppressed.
It’s a platform for the previously voiceless.
It’s not controlled by one global government, corporation, or media cartel.
It decentralizes power.

It’s a Pandora’s Box
Tearing apart reality and reshaping it
And we’re all taking part.


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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 started with a phone call. That’s how I lost my leg.

I guess one could also say in a roundabout way that my arrival into this world is what will cause my eventual death. I’m not trying to cast blame here.

I was in the shower when I heard my phone ring. I jumped out the shower to answer it. I ran over my hardwood floors to answer the summons. I turned the corner on soapy feet and with a tiny squeak, my points of balance were gone.

The hallway was narrow. I was wedged in an unnatural position for a millisecond before gravity took over. My leg gave way with a loud crack of bone. Looking down, I could see a sudden extra joint in between my knee and my ankle. Bone jutted out of my leg. I was reminded immediately of a half dozen special effects that I’d seen of broken bones in the movies.

Blood flowed freely but it wasn’t jetting out so I was pretty sure I hadn’t ruptured an artery. The pain immediately put me into shock. I passed out.

I woke up. It wasn’t a dream. I went under again.

I woke up shivering. There was a lot of blood around me. I crawled to my room to get dressed. I didn’t want any ambulance technicians to find me naked and wet on the floor. That would be embarrassing. I was in shock.

I managed to get a shirt on. I wrapped another shirt around my waist as a kind of skirt before crawling to the living room and calling the emergency number.

I called the ambulance. I was so tired. I gave them my address and went to sleep.

I woke up in the ambulance twice, smiling at the attendants. They smiled back.

The next thing I remember is being in the hospital. I remember swimming back up into consciousness, the white room blinding me. I remember having a dry mouth and being really groggy.

It took me fifteen minutes to realize they my left leg was gone below the knee.

Later on, I found out that waiting so long and then twisting it around before calling the ambulance had made it impossible to set. They’d opted for amputation.

All because of a phone call. The world is a crazy place. I never found out who called. If it’s one of my friends, they’re apparently bent on taking that guilt to their grave.

I wonder if it was a telemarketer who never knew what he or she had accidentally set in motion.



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I gave my Good Conscience and Bad Conscience the week off. I sent the Good Conscience to Mexico and the Bad Conscience to Norway.

I should have confiscated their cel phones.

I currently have sixty-two texts in my phone. The two of them have been gone for a day and a half. Neither of them have any concept of the fact that they are in different time zones.

“RU up 2 smthg?” asks Good Conscience.

“Go 4 it!” says Bad Conscience.

“Slw & stdy wns teh race.” says Good Conscience.

“Snd mor $” says Bad Conscience.

I received drunk phone calls from both of them last night. They’re like ex-lovers who don’t know how to give up. I mean, they’re on vacation! I’m trying to give them time off. They have no idea what to do without me. I didn’t answer the phone.

“Nt the same w/out u” says Bad Conscience.

“Miss U” says Good Conscience.

Bad Conscience left a message telling me that he was bored without someone to influence. He said that he was just going to sit around and do nothing tomorrow if I wanted to give him a call. He’d wait. By the phone.

Good Conscience is losing it. I swear he’s going to snap. He’s surrounded by a lot of partiers in his hotel. He was crying about how much he missed me. He hopes I’m doing good, etc. He sounded drunk. It was a little worrying.

I deleted both voice messages. I changed my outgoing message to say that I won’t be answering my phone this week if either of them call.

That was two days ago.

The texts keep rolling in.

“Im nthng w/out U” says Good Conscience.

“I wnt 2 cm hme” says Bad Conscience.

“Bored. Xo” says Good Conscience.

“Wut U up 2?” says Bad Conscience.

I emptied my inbox but it just filled up again. The reply to them would just encourage them. Buried underneath that avalanche of messages are important texts and voicemail from work. It’s really starting to affect my job performance.

Poor little guys.

My shoulders feel lighter. I look to the left and right and neither of them are there. Decisions this week have been hard but they’ve definitely been quieter without the two of them yammering in either ear, cheerleading for one side or the other.

The thing is, I’m starting to miss them as much as they say they miss me.

“R U tlkng 2 BC but not me?” asks Good Conscience.

“Is GC tlking 2 U?” ask Bad Conscience.

“We gd?” asks Good Conscience.

“We still bff?” asks Bad Conscience.

I give them nothing back. They keep texting. I’m realizing that I miss them as much as they miss me.

It seems like for the first time in our entire existence, the three of us are in total agreement.

I’ve been walking around feeling listless. I have a hard time even deciding what kind of cereal to have in the morning now.

Sometimes I fantasize about meeting them in the airport and how happy we’ll all be to see each other again, to be together.

Silly thoughts. It’s too quiet here.

I pick up my phone.

“Miss U 2.”

I send it to both of them.

They’ll be home tomorrow. I’m looking forward to it.





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