Hotline Bling
by Shya Scanlon

Paul couldn’t remember whether The Idea had come to him as a result of reading The Suffering of Young Werther, or whether he’d been driven back to that book because of The Idea. In the end, he thought, it wouldn’t really matter. Once The Idea had settled in, everything else seemed to bend toward it, not so much causally as aesthetically, like a flame bends toward a finger. Anyway, Paul wasn’t alone. Death was trending, death of any kind, as was talk of the so-called fourth wave whose symptoms would not be physical. The Twitter account @normalade had made The Idea its whole brand by keeping alive a running question: would the posts suddenly stop? But this sad person’s frank openness made Paul doubt normalade’s family had much to worry about. If you were serious you shut the fuck up.