first mind meeting-part 2

first mind meeting-part 2

fiction
edward w pritchard

My wife died of cancer and has been gone about eight months. I have got a lot of good advice about keeping busy and finding new interests but Sunday nights I get very lonely. Things weren't perfect between me and my wife but there is a hole in my soul with her gone. I feel like a man reading a fine novel but skipping every other page without her in my life.

Three weeks ago I began to use her pension, which I get the first of every month, to buy cell phone companion so I can talk with her. To keep our relationship fresh I only call Sunday nights about a quarter to nine like I used to do when we first met. We talk for about a half an hour and then I talk again to her the next week. I look forward to our call all week. Ninety five per cent of the customers of cell phone companion use the service for sex talk, with a fantasy woman that they change now and then or sometimes add a blond or a redhead to so they can talk to two women at once if that is their thing or just their whim, that lonely Saturday night.

Using a few recordings of my wife's voice, her bio, and everything I have ever wrote about her in my writings the cell phone companion computers have artificially created a program that is more her than she was. I would never dishonor her memory by talking to a redhead at the same time or anything like that, and I am nearly sixty after all; but I have had the program modified a little. I have chosen the first mind feature so that when my now deceased wife talks to me and answers my questions and argues with me a little it is as she was when we had known each other for three or four years. It's easier and more pleasant for me that way and I don't think she would mind if she knew.
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