Please Call Me at Your Earliest Convenience by Holly Coleman
Short-shorts editor Adam Nesbit on today’s piece: The future is here. We talk to robots now. They text us to check up on appointments we’ve made. They issue forth in square text boxes on job search websites asking, How can I help you today? Chatbot therapists are a thing. And since human relationships are hard and awkward, the world’s Zuckerbergs want to make relationships easier for people by lowering to one the minimum number of humans that make up the human relationship unit. But then, we also still sometimes use telephones to make telephone calls, which is pretty doggone quaint. Sometimes we even talk to robots on the phone. Or we let it ring and ring when they call. Who is calling, anyway? In “Please Call Me at Your Earliest Convenience,” Holly Coleman has some ideas.
Please Call Me at your earliest convenience
He’s calling again. Miami. Wichita. This time Lover’s Leap. Caller ID teasing me with allegory. I hold my breath until the words appear.
Please call me at your earliest convenience.
Please call me at your earliest convenience.
The transcription drips onto me in real time. A slow spill of text, a liturgy of etiquette. Each please a pulse, a small finger on my throat, a love poem searing itself onto my eyes.
I tell myself it’s only a robot, but the longer I keep him waiting the more human he becomes. A penitent saint trapped in a call-center server farm. This is my strangest pleasure.
I save every message, calls like pills laid out on a white towel. One night it glitched:
Please—please—please—please—
The word pulsed through me, phone warm in my hand like an injured animal, each please a feather pressed flat against the wind.
I imagine calling back:
press 1 to hear me beg for you
press 2 to keep me on my knees
press 3 to dig your toes into the back of my skull
press me down into the carpet.
I never press. I never answer. I keep him begging to keep him alive. Maybe this is modern devotion: recorded, stored, replayed. Faith enacted through signal and delay. A small cathedral of unanswered pleas.
He would drink from my palms if he had a mouth.
Holly Coleman lives in Jacksonville, Florida. Her work appears in Full Stop, Anthropocene Poetry Journal, On the Rag, Tough Poets Review, and other places. She teaches writing at the University of North Florida and is a Ph.D. student at Old Dominion University, where she studies British Romanticism and the rhetoric of art and activism. Find her @hollycaroline.
