From “Atta Boy”
by Cally Fiedorek

Up and at ’em! No excuses. He needed to get out today, stay out. Enough of this sitting around and licking wounds. There was lead in his apartment, and his phone was doing him grave harm. 

Rudy didn’t mean to sound alarmist about this—he’d seen one too many puff-piece headlines about screens and the internet changing people’s brains, transforming the whole social fabric, and he’d never cared too much for the philosophizing. Big whoop, he’d thought. Folks had probably felt the same unease about their TV sets back in the day. Maybe some beatnik wrote a pretty deep poem about it. But these last few days, cooped up in his apartment, scrolling, scrolling, waiting for a sign, he’d felt it too—that thing would be the death of him. The point of no return.