I
The way families used to freeze during dinner, forks mid-air, believing the caller could hear when the new machine was activated. The way the outgoing message would fill the room. The sound of the felty, folksy tone the father used for strangers.
After high school, the way housemates crowded around a shared machine to fashion an outgoing message. The miniature cassette a-whir. By then, we were accustomed to hearing our own voices.
The way I’d savor, lovesick, a stricken voice preserved on tape as if in amber. The way I banked those messages. Playing them over and again as proof that once, I had made him care. Echo of skin and moisture and shine and shame. Power diminishing with repetition.
II
The way machines could confound. Gary and me, in that cavernous white apartment in West Portal. A new kind of business opened downstairs. We rented a movie in a plastic casing and a machine, a portal of a gadget: a video player. Once home, our stoned fingers couldn’t make the movie play.
The way Gary and I, still living together, locked ourselves out after a night shooting pool at the Philosopher’s Club. Fighting on our Spanish-style doorstep. The building manager, in robe and curlers, and how she muttered, “I knew you people would be trouble.”
III
The way, in film school, we passed around a tape of Street of Crocodiles. A stop-motion short from the wavy-maned Brothers Quay. New then, but it might have been unearthed post-World War I from under some cement barracks or bombed-out cafe. Screws and string and wind-up monkeys. Purr and whirring shine.
The way my film school boyfriend broke up with me after a failed night out at a Valencia Street bar. The stiff ride home, and the dismal morning-after shower fuck. The way I tried to gain his attention with a new man, a ridiculous loverboy from Morocco via Queens.
The way my boyfriend left a strained message on our machine, begging me not to throw my new man in his face. The way I repeatedly rewound, replayed. Buoyed. Valued.
IV
The way today, three decades of defunct computers are stacked in our garage. Cushioned by dew-thickened books and boxes of kid art. The old standalone dishwasher with its chewed hose. The cobwebbed mower, the rickety treadmill. A succession of memory keepers: cassette tapes, and LPs, and DVDs, and films on CD or magnetic tape.
V
The way that old film, Street of Crocodiles, presented a dusty realm of clockwork toys. Curiosity and desolation. Defunct dolls.
The way the main character is a puppet. In the beginning, she is activated by a man’s spit. All these years later, I sometimes feel like a dusty puppet. A useless machine. My exes keep dying. They never knew what I became. Remembering that puppet, that spit, echoing moisture springs to my eyes.
✶✶✶✶
Patricia Quintana Bidar is a western, working class writer and Port of Los Angeles area native. Her work has appeared in Waxwing, Wigleaf, Smokelong Quarterly, The Pinch, Atticus Review, and Moon City Review, and has been widely anthologized including in Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton), Best Small Fictions 2023 and 2024, and Best Microfiction 2023. Patricia is the author of Wild Plums (ELJ Press) and Pardon Me For Moonwalking (Unsolicited Press). She lives with her family and unusual dog outside of Oakland, Calif.
✶
Dmitry Samarov was born in Moscow in 1970. He immigrated to the US with his family in 1978. He got in trouble in 1st grade for doodling on his Lenin Red Star pin and hasn’t stopped doodling since. He graduated with a BFA in painting and printmaking from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993. He drove a cab—first in Boston, then after a time, in Chicago—which led to the publication of his illustrated work memoirs Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab (University of Chicago Press, 2011) and second cabbie book from a press not worth mentioning. He has designed and published six books since. He writes dog portraits and paints book reviews in Chicago.
✶
Whenever possible, we link book titles to Bookshop, an independent bookselling site. As a Bookshop affiliate, Another Chicago Magazine earns a small percentage from qualifying purchases.
Another Chicago Magazine 