I Am Always Hungry; I Must Always Be Fed
The
device was where I always left it at night – on a small custom-made stand on my
bedside cabinet, the charging cable trailing to the wall socket. Where the
screen used to be, there was a pair of thin, gaping lips, two rows of small white
teeth, and a fat, wet tongue. At first, I thought the mouth was open in a
silent scream. Then I realised it might simply be hungry.
I
got dressed quickly, not bothering to shower, all the while trying not to glance
at the thing on the bedside cabinet. It didn’t have any eyes but I could feel
it watching me. I’m not quite sure how that works, but not much of this
situation made any kind of sense.
Downstairs, I fed the mouth a spoonful
of my breakfast cereal – the expensive stuff I like but can’t afford to buy very
often. The mouth closed and slowly began to chew. After a short while, it stopped
chewing and opened again, as if on a hinge.
I wasn’t quite sure what to do
next, so I started washing the dishes and putting away the crockery and
utensils, pretending that this was just another normal day.
Later that morning, as I sat in
front of the muted television, trying to come to terms with this new reality,
the smartphone began to slap its lips. It was a horrible sound, a thick, wet smacking
that began to irritate me. I ignored it for as long as I could but it didn’t
take long before I needed to do something.
I picked up the smartphone and
looked closely at the mouth, inspecting it properly for the first time. The
tongue was fat and pale; the lips were working away as if it were some kind of
nightmarish battery-powered children’s toy.
I
went through into the kitchen and opened a bag of popcorn. Cheap stuff, a
couple of months past its sell-by date. I didn’t think the smartphone would
mind.
Back in front of the television,
I flicked popcorn idly into the open mouth, watching in silence as it wolfed down
the snack.
In hardly any time at all, it had
consumed the whole bag.
The meal kept it quiet for a
while, but eventually it began to make more sounds – a weird, inchoate whining,
as if it were trying to formulate language and speak to me. Panic gripped me.
The last thing I wanted was for this thing to start spewing out words.
I went back to the kitchen to
look for more food.
It was the end of the month. Pay
day wasn’t until another few days. The cupboards were poorly stocked. The
fridge was near empty. I managed to grab a few things: stale bread, half a tin
of baked beans, a couple of raw sausages. Not enough to satiate the smartphone
but, I hoped, enough to keep it quiet for a while.
Now, as I sit here writing it
all down, I can hear the smartphone singing. This has been going on for hours. Its
song is wordless; it is a song of perpetual hunger.
I’ve stuffed it with every edible
scrap I have in the house, but it isn’t enough. It won’t ever be enough.
The
smartphone hungers for something else; something I’m not sure I even have left to
give. A thing that I probably ran out of years ago, after a lifetime of watching
screens, and having them watch me back: the television that acted as a
babysitter when I was a child, the screens of the videogames that stole my
teenage years, cinema screens, computer screens…and now this, a smartphone with
a mouth and a terrible agenda of its own.
But
I have no choice. I must try to feed it or this horrible song might never end.
The secret song that plays behind the screen – behind all the screens in the
world.
I have no choice at all.
Because the mouth is hungry; it
must be fed.
©
Gary McMahon,
3 June 2025
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