Don't Let the Reels Hear You

The phone played my kitchen back to me at a red light on Rainier Avenue. The sound came through the car speakers, low and close: the refrigerator cycling, then the particular click of the compressor that I knew meant the coils needed cleaning. I had not turned anything on. The delivery app sat open on the dash mount, the map frozen on a route I had already finished, and from the phone's speaker grid came the creak of the hallway floorboards outside my apartment door.

The light changed. I pulled through the intersection and the sound did not stop. It followed the car, the way a phone call follows a car, except the call was the inside of my own apartment. I reached over and tapped the screen. The map shivered. The refrigerator hum dropped to a lower register, then the floorboard creak came again, two quick notes, and I heard the soft snick of my deadbolt turning in its plate.

I turned the phone face down on the passenger seat. The sound cut. Rain streaked the windshield and the wipers dragged across the glass with a rubber whine I had been hearing for six hours. I drove another three blocks before I touched the phone again.

The delivery work had been my second income for two years, since the audio editing contracts thinned. I liked the hours. I liked the grid of the city at night, the way the streets emptied after eleven and the only voices were the ones coming through the app, a woman's recorded directions telling me to turn left on Holgate, turn right on Dearborn, arrive at a building with a broken call box and a customer who never answered. I liked the silence of it. I had built my whole life around silence, the editing suite with its foam panels, the apartment with its single neighbor who worked nights, the car where the radio stayed off and the phone stayed on, because the phone was work and work was not something that could hurt me.

At the next light I picked the phone up. The delivery app had reset itself to the home screen. The route was gone. In its place, the app's icon sat at the bottom of the screen with a small red badge, the number one, which meant a notification. I swiped it open.

A reel was playing. I had not opened the reel tab. The video was a black screen, and over the black screen came the sound of my kitchen faucet dripping, the specific arrhythmic drip I had been meaning to fix for a month, the one that kept me awake on nights when the editing work ran late. The reel was six seconds long. It looped. Drip, pause, drip, drip, pause. The caption under it read: Sounds from home.

I closed the app. The phone went quiet. The rain had stopped, and the asphalt on Airport Way gleamed under the streetlights in long amber smears. I turned onto my street and killed the engine and sat in the car with the phone in my lap, my thumb on the power button. The screen stayed bright. I pressed the button again. The screen dimmed, then brightened, and the delivery app opened itself, and the same reel began to play, and this time under the dripping faucet I heard something else.

A laugh. Short, breathy, cut off at the end. My brother Danny's laugh, the way he laughed when he was stoned and watching something on his phone at two in the morning, trying not to wake me. I had not heard that laugh in three years. I had not heard it anywhere except in the recordings I refused to edit, the voicemails I kept on an old phone in a drawer, the videos I did not watch.

I held the phone against my sternum. The laugh played again. Then the faucet drip. Then the refrigerator. Then the floorboard. Then the deadbolt. Then the laugh. The reel was not six seconds anymore. It was longer. It was building something.

I powered the phone down. I held the power button until the screen went black, and I held it longer, and I sat in the car with the dead phone against my chest and listened to the building's rain gutters dripping onto the sidewalk. The drip matched the faucet. I told myself it was the rain. I told myself the laugh was a glitch, a corrupted audio file, a misfired ad. I told myself these things the way I told myself the editing work would pick up, the way I told myself I would call my mother back, the way I told myself I would say Danny's name again when I was ready.

The car door handle was cold. The stairwell