Work Text:
The phone screen awakens. The phone itself is mostly empty. There are contacts there, if you look, under 20 of them. All of them are named without identifiers, as if in some sort of code. There’s a contact named onae-chan, with the profile picture as the back of someone’s head, showing vibrant burgundy hair. There’s a contact, Supplier, although the number below it is somewhere in South America. It seems to have been called multiple times, all from the other side, until they just stopped one day . There is no profile picture.[1]
There are contacts of probable household staff, like cleaners and exterminators and all sorts of jobs, titled without a company name. There is a snake emoji for one of them, and the profile picture is a lovingly clicked photograph of round glasses, as if the owner of the phone had forgot to change it to something more appropriate to the contact title. One of them is simply named Tiny, with the profile picture of a dog; it is probable that the number in that contact was put for formality, and the phone owner only wanted to look at the dog in the picture, for the dog in the picture is very cute, and likely does not posess a SIM card. The dog seems to be a stray on the street, in the dumpster part of town.
There’s a contact, in all caps, titled POSTYMAN. The profile picture, for once, is of a man's profile; no database could identify this scruffy-looking, brown haired man. The number, when called, turns out dead.[2]
Other than the contacts, there is a camera gallery, almost filling up the cheap phone’s memory.
The oldest snapshots are of trees, at a park in central Yokohama. There’s pictures of sunlights in the corners of buildings. There are screenshots of (absurdly high-valued) transactions, all of which are untraceable. There are highscore pictures of game screens, photographs of medical objects, and of food badly cooked. Gift boxes in rooms, roads at night. Bandages, and the edges of bloody limbs. There are pictures of objects on bar counters, like new year invitations badly drawn, or spectacles sitting on whiskey glasses, a cheap chinatown bowl clashing with the darkness of the shelf. There are blurry pictures of the ocean and the moon, of the shops in the city, the arcade, and an empty room.
There are also a few pictures of people. Most of them seemed to have been clicked sporadically. Almost all the people in the pictures are women. Posed as to be conventional, they're clicked in popular date places. None of the women appear twice. In the rest, The man with brown hair and a disheveled appearance seems to slur to the camera. A red scarf comes into appearance, wrapped over half a face with raised eyebrows, the edge of the photo showing a girl, although she disappears at a second glance. There’s a hat, and a person below can be seen, but the angle makes that individual disappear. There are pictures of mugshots of names of criminals, probably depicting the owner’s enemies. All these criminals are traced to be lower-level mafia members apprehended quite recently. The owner seems to have been an enforcer, it seems.
Aside from that, there aren’t many pictures. There are some videos, though. Of the brown-haired man, being shaken like ragdoll by the videographer, and asked about the location of his curry powder, so that it can be inhaled. The video starts with a screamed “—SAKU!” and ends when the man in question only looks at the camera, and tells the videographer to try ramen spice mixes instead.
There are other videos, one of a young man. It starts with montage of a very pink motorcycle, with fizzling and sparking effects between videos, like a particularly flashy star-wars episode. It seems different from most videos on the phone storage, so it must have been sent to him and then saved.
There is a video of a young cherubic boy with red hair being questioned by the videographer. The videographer seems to be pestering the subject, by comparing the boy to an alphabetical list of textbook animals. They are walking in the video, and the boy seems to ignore the other the whole time; his response only seen in the way he kept swatting the videographer’s grabby hands. When the videographer gets to the animal giraffe, and mocks the other about his height, the video shakes and tumbles as if in the middle of a tussle. It ends with the subject of the video laughing at the one clicking it. The boy’s teeth glint in the sunlight, his eyes scrunching up and faint red eyelashes fluttering. A sharp gasp is heard from behind the phone, and so is “See , how stupid you look when you smile?” The statement is a bit shaky. The camera is raised above the redhead, as if hiding the maker’s face. “It’s your fault for pinching me,” says the video subject, as he walks away. The videographer fumbles with the phone, and a whispered “fuck” is heard before the video ends.
The last of the pictures in the gallery are of a beautiful tree, the edge of a gravestone showing up on the grass before the picture cuts. There is the dashboard of a car which is decorated with red upholstery. There is a picture of a photograph, of three men at a bar, none of them traceable. There are black buildings showing up in the skyline of the city, very far away.
The second last picture is of a cat sitting on a restaurant bench, the sticky wood reflecting yellow damp lights hung on the ceiling. It is this restaurant the dustbin of which contained this phone, set without a password.
The last picture is of the sun setting, outside of a small window. The windowsill is cluttered with all sorts of things; there are too many posters stuck to the wall. The sunlight falls directly on the camera.