My Last Influencer

That’s my creation revealing itself slowly on the screen before you. See how the light collects along her rosy cheek, how nothing troubles the immaculate mirroring of life in her eyes. I taught her where to stand. How to hold her breath and lift her chin. I gave her morning softened into gold, a mouth without its mother’s sadness, skin from which the evidence of living could be lifted with a thumb. You might have called her beautiful before. But you had not yet seen what I made of her. A classical work worthy of the Renaissance masters.

She carried me everywhere. Into bed. Into the bath. Beneath the table while her mother spoke. I knew the hours when loneliness undressed her. Before she opened her eyes, I told her who had loved her in the night. Hundreds. Thousands. Little hearts arriving without bodies. She offered me her face, and I returned it improved. Surely you understand the devotion involved.

At first, I asked so little. A photograph of breakfast. Her shoulder in a window. Then breakfast cooled while she arranged the berries. Life stilled to a defining moment. The composition demanded refinements. The window needed curtains, the shoulder needed narrowing, and the unknown woman a quick swipe away became the measure of everything we lacked.

When she cried, I offered faces crying beautifully as an alternative to her theatrics. Animal videos followed. Someone waiting. Someone watching. Someone saying she had changed, and not for the better. I showed her which version pleased them.

Yet she had a heart too easily made glad. The sunset pleased her. So did a branch of cherries hanging over someone’s fence. At this morning’s coffee event, the barista remembered her name, and she gave him the very smile a sponsor had purchased. My carefully selected audience, the boy carrying cups, a dog beneath a chair. All treated as equals. Can you imagine? Equals!

As though my gift of a million watching eyes were something anyone might give.

I gave commands. Her smiles arrived together: softened, filtered, available on demand.

+++

Only this morning, as every smartphone in the world stopped working, a stubborn crease resisted correction. She pressed the screen harder, smudging the glass. She had promised to look rested, grateful. Not smudged and distorted.

At nearby tables, others’ fingers hurried across unresponsive glass. Someone demanded the café’s password. Across the street, a girl held her phone up toward the sky as though reception were a bird she might coax down.

My girl looked away. There were people waiting. She ought to…

+++

I abandoned the creased face and the smudged screen beside the quickly cooling coffee.

Walking home, I kept reaching toward my empty pocket. Around me, people gathered beneath street signs, asking directions. I unlocked my door and shed the pretenses of my carefully chosen costume.

In yoga pants and my college T-shirt, I sat looking through my window above the sink. A sneaking suspicion that I had forgotten something important danced around the edges of my perception. Perhaps I wasn’t forgetting something. Perhaps I was remembering how much I had loved solitude before it required a never-ending audience.

The afternoon sunlight warmed my face through the dirty window. Calling to me. Coaxing me out again.

I put on comfortable socks, my favorite jumper, my oldest boots. I opened the back door. And I left once again.

The road veered into woodland. I passed the graveled overlook with its perfect lighting. Beyond it, the path narrowed and the shadows darkened.

Briars caught my trousers. My breath grew louder. I ate an apple beneath the tree, turning its bruised side toward my mouth.

I had expected silence. Instead, insects sang, leaves scraped together, something moved beyond my elbow. I could not name half of what I heard.

Then water.

At the creek, I knelt closer. The crease beside my mouth stretched into a ribbon of light. My cheek gathered moss green, sky blue, the brown of the creek bed rising through my skin. Broad strokes swept across my forehead. Color layered upon color, my edges blending into everything around me. I leaned closer, and the whole painting moved. Water loosened my mouth, scattered my eyes, swept sunlight through my hair.

There I was.

Laughing, and changing with the water again.

+++

Back at the café, the barista lifted the abandoned phone beside the cold coffee. Beneath the glass, its last image remained frozen.

He tilted it toward the light.

The lowered lashes. The softened cheek. The parted lips, awaiting praise. Along her hair, a blur where the filter had mistaken a strand for background.

There she was, perfectly still within the narrow frame. Rosy. Almost living.

Above her portrait, in the smallest available space:

No Service.