Tevun-Krus #50

The Girl Who Couldn't Use a Touchscreen - @RickTalbot

"The Girl Who Couldn't Use a Touchscreen" originally appeared in Tevun-Krus #28: Theological SF

The Girl Who Couldn't Use a Touchscreen

by RickTalbot

My parents told me not to worry. Not to frazzle and roil and dread about my disability.

"Don't let it bother you," Mom said. And she'd elaborate at length: "The other girls may be able to do things that you can't do, but that doesn't mean that you're not as good as they are. And they can't do all the things that you can, by the way. You are so much better at art and music than they could ever hope to be. And who ever said that we all need to be the same?"

I said so. All the other girls can use a tablet. They can control the touchscreen by running their fingers across the screen, or jabbing at it with their thumbs or index fingers or sometimes with their middle finger, but never the ring finger or the pinky. The touchscreen responds to them. It does what they tell it to. But if I try to use a tablet, no way. Nothing happens. It just sits there unresponsive and lifeless.

So I insisted and mom relented: she took me to the doctor. His office was in one of those shiny buildings on University Avenue – one of the older ones from the nineteen-seventies that looked like weird concrete bunkers with glass slits for Windows. Why should a bunker have windows? Either go all in and have none, or don't be a bunker at all. But a bunker with windows? That's just a cheap simulation.

The chairs were covered in faded blue corduroy upholstery. Gold colored flecks had been sprinkled on them. It made them look like someone had gotten sick all over them and that it could never be washed out. I sat down while my mother talked to the receptionist. They spoke in hushed tones. I don't know why – we were the only ones there.

The doctor came in through the front door. He hung his overcoat on a peg, and he removed his hat and placed it on top of the coat. It was a fedora or a Stetson - I'm not exactly sure. But it was an old style that nobody really wore anymore, and was last popular in the classic films from the first half of the twentieth century. You know the films – the ones without any colors in them that they show at school, to demonstrate how people lived decades ago, to prove how much more evolved we are now. It seems these old hats were a relic from a more brutal time.

"Are these the first patients, Sally?"

Sally handed the doctor a tablet. He used his fingers to elegantly navigate what must have been my medical information, because he spoke to me without looking up from the screen.

"Ginny, I'm Doctor Theodorus. Would you follow me?"

He turned and walked into the examination room without looking at me.

Mom said, "Let's go," and we went in after him.

"Have a seat Ginny," he said. He pointed at a bed. I went to sit.

"Oh wait, hold on."

I stopped. He quickly pulled some sanitary paper from a cupboard and spread it onto the bed.

"Go ahead."

I sat on the bed and he continued studying my medical information on the tablet.

"So, Ginny, tell me what brings you here today."

"I can't control touchscreens."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, when I touch them with my fingers, nothing happens."