II


Henry soon spent the small amount of money his parents had saved for him. After a lot of searching he found a job as an apprentice to a woman who owned a phone shop and spent his days fixing broken phones. He found he was good at it, and he especially liked peeling off the shattered screen’s skin, and exposing the network of microscopic wires that made up the phone’s brain.

One day, Henry was closing shop, when he found a forgotten phone. It was an old model, an original smart phone, and it didn’t work. It was obvious why it hadn’t been collected. He took it home and set about repairing it.

No sooner was it fixed, and he had turned it on - it rang.

On the other end of the line, uncontrollable grief, cracked and distorted, rippled metallic, through the phone’s speaker.
He hung up.

There were countless messages to and from the number that had just called.

Eventually, Henry got bored of trawling, turned off the phone and put it in a drawer. Forgot about it.

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