About Connections

by GS Wiley
13 pages / 5000 words
Available file types - html, lit, pdf, prc

Healing takes a long time after Bryan loses Max to a freak car. Bryan's one connection to Max is via text message, and he sends long letters to Max's disconnected number, the way he never did when Max was alive. Then even that connection is lost when Max's phone number is assigned to Sarah, a single mom with a habit of losing her phones. It's Christmas, Bryan is alone, and he can't even text Max to tell Max how he feels. Maybe it's Christmas magic, or maybe it's one last present from Max, but Bryan finds a human connection to help him start over, in the most unexpected way.

Sample

When Bryan was a boy, his mother taught him how to send letters to Heaven.

“Put it in here,” she said, lifting the safety grille over their backyard fire pit in Pickering, Ontario. Hesitantly, Bryan slipped the picture he'd drawn for his recently deceased grandfather into the flames. He watched it brown, then burn and disintegrate before his eyes. “The paper is gone,” his mother explained, “but the smoke carries your message up to Grandad.”

Twenty years later, when Max died, Bryan thought about that. He considered burning a note for Max, but only briefly. He didn't think that would make him feel any better.

Nothing made Bryan feel any better. Not the university psychologist he visited twice, not the group session for bereaved partners at which he was the only gay participant and the only person -- along with a war widow whose husband had died in Afghanistan -- under the age of forty. Finally, six months later, just when Bryan was beginning to think he'd be stuck in paralyzing depression for the rest of his life, Max himself showed him the way out.

Max had always loved technology. He'd hosted a weekly tech program on the campus radio station, and he'd spent the end of every term providing twenty-four-hour tech support for panicking students with term papers and final essays trapped on laptops or lost on hard drives.

He'd also been a text-messaging addict and, during term-time, Bryan remembered getting at least four or five text messages a day from him. Usually, they were quick notes: “Love you! M. xx” or “Good luck on your exam.” Sometimes, they were longer, letters telling Bryan about some minor inconvenience -- like a canceled class or a lack of carrot muffins in the campus coffee shop -- or major disaster -- like a network crash or a rampant virus -- that marred Max's day.

Bryan had never sent nearly as many messages to Max. Still, one day months after the always-distracted Max stepped off a curb in front of a driver going to fast to stop, Bryan sat in the campus library and took out his cell phone.

There was a photo of the two of them, of Bryan and Max hugging and laughing, on the screen. It spurred Bryan on, and he opened a blank text message. I don't know why I'm writing this, he began, a little self-consciously, his fingers pressing the keys with nothing like Max's speed. But I've missed you a lot lately. I've gone down to part-time with my classes this term, because I knew I couldn't handle a full load, but I'm not even sure if that's going to be manageable.

He went on, talking about Max's obituary that had appeared in the campus paper, about the memorial service in the quadrangle and about the funeral, with a good turn-out from Max's old high school buddies, at Max's parents home in Saskatoon. It was like the letter Bryan had written to his late grandfather, minus the drawing of a fire truck and a purple elephant, and he signed it: Love always, Bryan. Then he hit “Send.”