FROM: ETNLbeloved
Things slip out of the electronic ether when we aren’t paying enough attention. Mundanity, love, viruses, amusement, spam… fear.
Matt felt a premonition before he opened the email. A vibration of the air that signifies your next choice will change the direction of your life forever. He glances away, prolonging the moment, and tries not to look at the backpacker in the cubicle beside him. On the periphery of vision, he senses the young German as an intense figure hunched over the keyboard, prattling out secrets, endearments or banalities with his staccato finger-tips.
The place smells of plastic and ozone.
He turns back to the monitor.
The email is from no-one he knows. He hovers over the desire to delete it without looking, but there is something about the colour and sound of the name that is like a hook in his flesh. It is not the name of an un-breathing spambot, or a nigerian fence wanting him to help offload three million dollars.
ETNLbeloved.
It is a name that sends a thrill of wanting along his nerves and a knife into his heart.
The subject is a warning in itself, the way a pigeon’s wings flap a little too fast into the face of its handler, when word of war is slipped from its spindly leg. MATT.
He needs to leave. Have a smoke.
Can't shout, can't scream. Smash the monitor. Cut, or burn. Tear free from inside my skin. Curl up and die.
With a sense of vertigo he looks down the tunnel of anxiety to the cold pixels on the screen. Blink. blink. Spam. Spam. It’s not for me. Wrong Matt. Just a lucky guess. Phish, phishing for the wrong guy.
Or it might be Lucy.