Assistant Editor Kate Jayroe: Jason R. Chun’s “Melody” deftly addresses the reality of what lingers on in the mind, even after hitting that “delete” button. Although the narrator professes to love the act of deleting emails, an undeniable attachment grows and grows, until we’re left staring at the empty walls, melodically yearning for a greater presence.
Listen to Chun read the story:
Melody
Above all, I loved to delete. Loved that barely audible click before my messages went, ether-ward, for good.
I considered it a matter of personal hygiene, no less important than brushing my teeth. Delete, delete. I did it the way I swatted mosquitoes. I took it personally. How dare you fill my retinas with your words and photos. How dare you get me involved, and I don’t care who you are—CEO, president, my mother, or Mel. Not even Mel.
Mel, Pell-Mell. Smelly Mel. Melodramatic Mel.
Melody.
Mornings for me were especially offensive. I’d see two or three of them, Mel’s messages, floating there the moment I opened my eyes. So I kept them shut. I developed a routine, perfect muscle memory, to manage.
Automatically, my hand shot out and hit the button on the bedside Timex. Sometimes I’d knock it over—never mind that it had been my brother’s clock, and they don’t make those LED screens anymore. I knew my brother wouldn’t care.
I’d get as far as the bathroom without looking. Pee sitting down, fumble for the flush lever. Wash, brush, rinse—none of these required the use of my eyes. I was an expert brusher of my teeth. In thirty years I’d brushed them some twenty thousand times.
Showering without looking was trickier. Today I got shampoo in one eye, then the other. And had to open both.
And I was ready for it, the salt-laced soap stinging red at the corners of my vision, waterfall over my eyeballs, and Mel’s messages front and center, lurid but legible. I was ready to delete.
I saw nothing. Only water.
I blinked, partly because of the soap, and partly because, what the fuck?
Mel, I thought, Earth to Mel. Good morning, Mel. It’s another beautiful fucking day. Seriously, where the hell are you?
I shut off the water. And stood there, aware of my wetness, warmth dissipating with the steam. I ran a hand through my hair and thought of my brother, those forty-minute showers he used to take. The clock radio that had been our dad’s before it was his.
My brother never met Mel. They wouldn’t have gotten along.
Melody. Melancholy. Mel, come back to me.
I felt unclean. All those messages that I had missed, that I hadn’t deleted. Somewhere, just behind my eyes, I felt those first two or three, multiplying. Twenty, thirty, two hundred, three thousand.
I looked around me, up, down. Looked for the telltale flash of pixels, the barely there overlay. I blinked and saw only the things that I could touch. The towel, the fogged-up mirror, the slick brass knob. The hands, the wrinkled fingers, all of them mine.
All day I saw the walls of the house, my house, empty walls.
Jason R. Chun‘s writing has appeared in The Offing and The Helix Magazine. He holds an MFA in fiction from The New School. He is currently working on a story collection that explores the continuity between the past and the future.
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