Selina Charlotte "Charlie" Brooks brought the small cellular telephone closer, turning it a bit to remove some of the glare reflected back from an overhead streetlight. In the dark, the telephone's small screen was surprisingly bright, a brilliant candy-white square that her relatives only one or two generations back would have considered magical, if not other-worldly. Its light reflected now from her nose and cheeks as she read the line of text, her lips moving soundlessly as she read silently from left to right.

Yes, she had read it correctly but now, the second time through, still made no sense. What frogs? What did it mean?

The telephone vibrated in her hand again and she nearly screamed, her grip loosening involuntarily and then tightening again as she felt the phone slide from her palm. Somehow, she managed to hang on to it and she heaved a sigh of relief, forcing herself to take two slow, deep calming breaths.

Here, on the side of a dark road at nearly ten-dark-thirty at night was not the place to go having hysterics or getting all worked up. Home was just up the block and around the corner—not far, really; she had walked this same route night after night for nearly a year without incident and never once had been alarmed or in fear for her safety. If Port Poplin was anything, it was safe. And while that's part of what made it so damn boring, it was a boon to young ladies who had to walk home from work in the middle of the night.

The phone vibrated again but she was ready for it this time—waiting for it, in fact. It meant that a new text message had been received, but had not yet been read. It also established a pattern of reminders that would continue until she read the message or until the phone's battery died, whichever came first. But to Charlie Brooks, it went beyond that. It meant that despite her apprehension a few moments ago, all was well with the world. There was a certain order to things and that the physical order was being followed. The first text message, weird as it was, had been the equivalent of a wrong number and this, the as-of-yet unread message, would be a short, impersonal and apologetic phrase from that same hapless individual who had so innocently and inadvertently disrupted her quiet walk home with all that gobble-de-gook about the frogs. And just to put a fine point on that notion of cosmic order and progression, Charlie decided to wait until the phone vibrated again before reading the message.

Should be any time now. Charlie frequently played these little games in her mind while walking the quarter mile from the coffee shop to her apartment. It helped pass the time and make each night different from the last. One night she counted how many steps she had to take from the coffee shop to her front door. Another night, she counted how many times she could sing Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" through from start to finish if she kept her footsteps in synch with the beat: I'm (step) just a poor (step) boy no(step)body loves(step) me… And just last night, she'd tried to walk all the way home swinging her arms with her stride as opposed to against her stride, as most people normally walk.

Tonight, she would wait until the phone vibrated again before reading the message. It had to be coming within the next ten footsteps. Though Charlie never had timed the interval between the phone's message reminders, they always had seemed to come after no more than a minute had lapsed.

…eight…(step)…nine…(step)…ten…(step)…eleven…

Charlie stopped. Something was wrong. Had the battery died? That didn't make sense; she kept it on the charger at work and had all five bars when her shift ended at ten. The phone's LCD screen was dark but that was normal; it shut off after a few seconds to conserve power. One touch to any of the phone's buttons would activate the light and she did it by rote, without conscious thought. After a full year, Charlie knew her phone intimately and could, if necessary, go through all of its functions while blindfolded.

Here, because her eyes were now accustomed to the dark, the telephone's LCD panel was bright enough to be used as a flashlight. Squinting, she read the display:

NEW MESSAGE
-DUPLICATE-

Duplicate? That didn't make sense, and could only mean one thing. Instead of the Sorry, I meant that for someone else message she had expected, someone had pinged her again with the frog message. She pressed any key and sure enough, there it was again:

The frogs are
making quite
the ruckus.

And now there was something else that made no sense. Normally, the sender's telephone number would appear beneath the text message, along with the time that it had been sent. But in this case, as in the first iteration of the cryptic message, no identifying information appeared.

"Now that's just too weird," Charlie breathed, puzzled, tapping the LCD panel lightly with a nail as if she thought that act might procure more information from the recalcitrant device.

"It's got to be a joke," she said finally. "It's Sharon or Hattie. They're getting me back for the Justin Timberlake thing."

Satisfied with this, she started walking again but didn't get far before stopping cold. With her first step, she'd pressed "Enter" to reply. By her second step, she should have been able to scroll down twice, accepting the defaults, to begin forming her reply with a practiced succession of nimble moves over the keypad. And by her third step, she'd finally look down at the phone to make sure she hadn't lost her sense of touch or her familiarity with the device. But when she did bring the phone up to double-check her spelling, she saw only this:

The frogs are
making quite
the ruckus.

"Damn it!" Charlie cried out in frustration while pressing the END button to shut off the phone or, at the very least, clear the screen. Nothing happened.

What had started fifteen minutes earlier as a routine walk from the coffee shop on Beach Drive to her apartment up on Knob Hill had now transformed into a maddening one-on-one struggle between herself and her cell phone. It clearly had malfunctioned and that was something Charlie took very personally; she had never had one indication of trouble with the phone and had, in fact, enthusiastically recommended the model to several of her friends over the past year. But now, not only could she not turn off the phone, she couldn't even clear that unsolicited and now somewhat alarming message from the screen:

The frogs are
making quite
the ruckus.

Eventually, Charlie did make it safely home to storm through the front door of the apartment and throw her purse onto the couch. Her cat, sensing the mood, avoided any potential conflict by retiring immediately to a safe spot beneath her bed, but did listen for some time as Charlie stormed about the room searching for the user's manual that had come with the phone. And later, when she finally succumbed to exhaustion and fell into a fitful sleep, the cat ventured out to make sure his food and water bowl was still where he always expected it to be. It was.

The only thing different was the glow in the room. It came from Charlie's cell phone, resting on top of the dining table. Having never malfunctioned before, it did so now with a maddening finality, its bright front panel blazing unerringly, framing that same puzzling message, until winking out suddenly in the wee hours of morning with its battery depleted and its purpose served.

In time, the cat found its way back to the bedroom and slept until two the following afternoon.

Posted by Jim W Coleman at 06:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)