By Claire Bateman

The inaccessible phone is always just out of reach, caught in a field of mutual repulsion between the desire to communicate and the desire to withhold.

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Almost too hot to touch, the incandescent phone is powered by rage—there’s nothing for it to want and it can’t forget anything.

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This is what every couple needs to maintain rapport: the phone of comprehensive mistranslation.

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What confessions, recriminations, propositions, ultimatums, and refusals did your device send sizzling into the atmosphere? It’s the amnesia phone, so nobody remembers.

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Like a psychic who channels Wikipedia, the autodidact phone inserts itself into your conversations to correct, contextualize, disambiguate, a steady chatter audible only to you. Go into “Settings” and select a rare, exotic language filter so the phone murmurs in Kawishana or Taushiro, background noise you can almost manage to ignore as though you’re strolling through an international airport on your way to your dream destination.

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Be sure to hit decline when the counterfactual phone rings, or all you’ll hear about in endless variation is how enviable your life would be if you’d just handled everything differently.

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Popularly known as the Munchkin phone, this unit is so small that you have to manipulate its keyboard with a needle-size stylus in barely discernible movements, an esoteric form of meditation known as pinprick yoga.

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Used to demonstrate product durability, the widely advertised invincible phone (or, as some call it, the suffering phone) has been repeatedly run over by Nissan Rogue touring models, stepped on by obliging elephants, and dropped from prodigious heights. Upon achieving retirement age, it will be released into the maw of an active volcano to melt and congeal with metamorphic cycles; from that point on it will be known as the molten phone.

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As seen on TV, the mitochondrial phone self-charges by contact with human skin, but what the manufacturers don’t disclose is that it efficiently extracts electrical currents from your cell membranes so that the higher the battery level goes, the more depleted you become until you can’t even lift your finger to click on a contact or a link because your body feels heavier than the couch you’re unable to peel yourself off of, heavier than the floor beneath the couch, heavier than the foundation of your home, heavier than the earth on which that foundation rests and the 5.5 quintillion-ton atmosphere that surrounds it, heavier than the galaxy, heavier than the universe itself whether it be curved or flat, open or closed, and heavier also than that very question.

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Ideal for clandestine communication, the transparent phone makes it look like you’re talking to yourself.

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The Casaubon phone holds the key to all mythologies.

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On the hush-phone you speak only with the pre-, post-, and extra-verbal—that is, infants, the comatose, and those who have taken vows of silence. To use it, you press zero-zero-zero, then cover your mouth with your hand as soon as the ringing stops and the whooshing sound lets you know the connection’s been made—from that point on, you’ll proceed solely by mentation.

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What every ordinary phone fears most is becoming obsolete; soon the entire troposphere will be wired so all you’ll have to do to connect with someone is intone their personal coordinates into the air and then start talking.

But even with direct atmospheric linkage, we’ll still count on individual devices for the hybridity of texting in crowded places, like being alone and in company at the same time.

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A standard prenatal ultrasound scan revealed the amniotic phone budding from a fetus’s fingers. Evolutionarily inevitable, it will accompany the child through growth, maturity, senescence, and then into the crematorium (after removal of the battery, which is, of course, highly explosive).

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Like the legendary Flying Dutchman, this vagrant phone’s vocation is to wander on its own itinerary between the absent and the unsought. It never rings twice at the same geographic coordinates.

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The last-chance phone is what you use while you’re describing your city to the barbarians outside the gates: your buildings are decrepit and your roads rife with holes, your water tastes of plastic, and your citizens are too pigeon-toed, bandy-legged, and witless to function as serfs, so clearly, it would be a waste of their time and resources for them to take this city, though of course they take it anyway.

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Everyone pities the liminal phone, doomed to exist painfully on the threshold of sentience without ever crossing over.

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How refreshing we find it to listen to those medieval midnights that have long since gone extinct in the natural way all nights experience except those of our current era which are never allowed to ripen and age because we kill them in their infancy with enforced perpetual luminescence, which is why we’re driven to aurally connect to that beautiful unwired obscurity accessible only through the Dark Ages phone.

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The Zen phone arrives encased in a waxy rind you have to slice with your fingernail, or if that’s not sharp enough, with a blade, and then you dig in to peel it away chunk by chunk despite its resistance—you’re sweating by the time you’ve gotten it all off, but look, there’s another coating beneath it, mottled, nubbly, and even more difficult to penetrate, and your determination knows no bounds though your fingers are starting to cramp. Beneath that layer is the silk rind which for all its delicacy and sheerness proves to be the most adhesive of all. Paradoxically, you could whisper-nudge it off only with the very lightest of touches, but you always refrain, too shy to glimpse what’s underneath: your phone’s Original Face.

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Though everyone knows that the mere presence of a cell phone significantly reduces cognitive function, no one’s willing to live without one. Desperate to protect the intelligence still remaining in the world, all the tech companies have joined forces to create the quantum phone synched with your brain waves so that it pops into existence only when someone calls you or when you want to use it—after that, it pops right back out. Upon purchasing this device, you have to pre-select the level of intent that will summon it. Some people set it at 1 for the mildest of mental itches, a few noble souls choose 11 for the desperation of a life-threatening emergency, but most pick a number somewhere between those extremes. Where the phone lives the rest of the time is anybody’s guess.

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The negation phone is every phone that wasn’t invented in time to convey apologies, declarations of passion, blood test results, massive shifts in the macroeconomic outlook, pertinent information about latitude, longitude, and elevation, and all the other nominal, ordinal, discreet, and continuous data on whose absence we can blame battles lost, patients succumbed, lovers not reunited. We grip the shape of its absence as we weep.

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But who doesn’t long for the lupine phone on which you hear the distant howling of your pack?

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Claire Bateman’s pieces are from The Pillow Museum, a fiction collection forthcoming from FC2 in early 2025. Wonders of the Invisible World, a poetry collection, was published by 42 Miles Press/Wolfson Press in September.