We Love Family

Lana’s phone buzzed. She hoped it was good news. That was something she hadn’t come by too often. It had been a long winter. Short days and cold nights transpired into stretches of despair for Lana. She struggled to remember the last time she conversed. Worries of holding a conversation, of being interesting, plagued her thoughts. She was tethered to her phone, though. She spoke digitally. All the time. But the only time she heard her voice was in the shower, humming off-key to the music playing on her phone. 

Lana checked her phone. It was her mother, Mila. Lana thought often of her mom. Across the world, in some suburb of a city she never knew, Mila moved through life with ease. Lana called her mama, but she knew that was a lie. 

The message Mila sent Lana was a photograph, a selfie. It was Mila, standing across from a billboard triptych. Each billboard had the same design: a textured Russian Federation flag waving in a digital breeze with President Putin posing in three different styles. Each billboard had different text, too. Lana used what remnants of syrilic she knew to decipher the middle billboard, the one framed directly behind Mila’s figure. The real power is in justice and truth, which is on our side, the billboard read. 

Mila was smiling in the photograph. Lana stared at the picture on the screen. She squinted. She pinched and stretched the photo, warping it and pixelating it to see if anything would change. To see if Mila’s smile changed. To see if this was a mistake, itself a piece of propaganda. 

The phone buzzed again, this time in Lana’s hand. It was a text message from Mila. stay strong, don’t believe what they say, luv u, it said. 

Lana threw the phone across the room. A flood of regret filled her lungs. She rushed to the phone. The screen was shattered. Her mother’s smile, backdropped by Putin’s eyes, fractured into hundreds of pixelated splinters.