In my head, I saw the little blinking cursor on my e-mail’s chat function. Then I saw my usual string of text starting to fill it in one word at a time, like it had so often.
Me: Things I’m seeing without you:
This was a game we played on occasion, looking out the windows of our respective rooms, half a country away, and just describing what we saw. If we were doing it simultaneously, it was possible, Jonah said, to be in two worlds at once.
He was cheesy like that.
Me: Steam coming off the pavement. Motion detector lights popping on and off like little lightning flashes.
Me: Rabbits. Baby rabbits? How can you tell a baby rabbit from a small adult rabbit? Are small rabbits confused for babies in the rabbit world? Is it humiliating?
A couple of times we tried the game with video chat, pointing our laptop cameras out the window, actually seeing what the other saw, but it wasn’t the same. It was always better with words. Translating the world for each other.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Bognanni is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was awarded a teaching/writing fellowship for his work. His short fiction and humor pieces have appeared in Gulf Coast, The Bellingham Review, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He is a 2008 Pushcart nominee, and his short story “The Body Eternal” was chosen by Stephen King as one of the “100 Most Distinguished Stories of 2006” in Best American Short Stories. He is currently a visiting instructor of creative writing at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He once played in a terrible high-school punk band.
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The House of Tomorrow Page 33