When his father died, Daniel kept him in his phone. Through upgrades, cloud syncs, and contact list reshuffles, Dad stayed. Deleting the contact felt like an irreversible cut.
Sometimes, when he couldn’t sleep, he’d scroll just to see Dad pop up. Proof, perhaps, that someone once alive could still flicker faintly inside a house of glass and code — blinking softly with a trace of life.
A year passed since the accident. Grief tempered but never drained. It only changed shape, like water pressing into new corners.
His therapist said it was time to let go.
“Objects hold energy,” she told him. “Keep the memories. Release the tether.”
He nodded, but later, the tether tugged.
Daniel sat in bed reading his father’s last message: Don’t forget to check the oil before the drive back.
He had never replied.
Now he typed: I miss you.
He stared momentarily, then pressed send.
The screen went dark. His reflection lingered in the phone – mouth slack, wrinkles forming like a crumpled lunch bag paper around his widened eyes. He plugged it into the wall and lay down.
Ten minutes later, it rattled.
Do I know you?
His chest migrated into his throat then took an elevator to his brain.
Who’s this? You’re using my father’s phone.
Another pause.
Sorry. I got this phone from Goodwill.
He almost didn’t answer but couldn’t resist.
No problem. He died last year. I just forgot to delete the number.
Minutes passed.
I’m sorry. Do you want to talk about it?
He didn’t but he did.
They texted for weeks. The stranger’s name was Anna. She lived across the city and worked at a bakery. She referred to rain as God’s drumming. Sometimes she sent photos: a tray of plump croissants, a well-fed calico on the sill, a skyline running into dusk.
He sent only thoughts.
At first it felt like therapy then confession. Then like something that had been waiting for him all along.
One night, she wrote: Maybe we should meet.
They met at a café by the lake. It was the same one in his father’s lock-screen photo. She sat by the window with a red scarf coiled around her neck. The phone rested between them. He recognized the chip near the charger port, a faint smudge of a Red Sox sticker.
“It’s strange, seeing it again,” he said, looking at the faded emblem.
She turned it over.
“I can give it back.”
He shook his head.
“No. It’s meant for a new story.”
Outside, the light shrank into Autumnal peach; the skies colored with a manageable haze. She smiled.
“Maybe you are, too.”
They stayed there like that – not touching or talking – as the espresso machine thrummed. The lake darkened in degrees as the sky settled. He thought of how hues, like signals, travel —constant, impersonal – even when no one’s paying attention.
That night, he noticed something strange.
Dad was gone.
In its place, a new contact blinked softly in the dark: Anna.
Henrick Karoliszyn is a Canadian-American writer and Doctor of Social Work living in New Orleans. His fiction was most recently selected and published in the 2025 Hemingway Shorts (Ernest Hemingway Foundation), McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and is slated for upcoming issues of Flash Fiction Magazine and BULL.
Modern Flash Fiction 