Mobile Phone

This was a mobile phone. He touched it. They said the words 'mobile phone' and he remembered these words and the words 'text message' and scrambled to keep them on the tip of his tongue. He chanted the strange but familiar sounds over and over in his head but they were slipping away, even as he toyed with them. He weighed the metal object in his hand and it was familiar.

He used to use one of these things, the thing with the name that he had freshly forgotten. His thumb twitched. He held it up to his ear and listened to the silence. Nothing. It was just a heavy metal object. There was a screen on the front of it and two buttons on the sides. He pressed these and numbers appeared on the front of it. A light glowed. He used to use this and now it was an artifact from some alien place.

The nurse plucked the thing from his hand, his only hand. He watched her open it, and of course it opened. That was the point of it. It flipped open and there were buttons with numbers. It was both a revelation and a memory. It was something to do with the numbers. Calling someone, contacting someone. It had something to do with the numbers.

He found he had made a fist around the thing, he slammed it against his knee. He thumped it against the sheets. He was crying. Like a baby. He was crying. The nurse took the object out of his hand and folded it up into himself. He cried and he pointed to the thing with his hand, his only hand and he wanted to say 'what is the name of it?' but he could not. He couldn't do anything except grunt, and it made him cry. Baby crying.

"The mobile phone?" she lifted and tilted it, flipping it open and closed, open and closed.

"Yes." he said, sobbing. "Yes. Yes. Yes."