Garfield Phone
by Kyla Phoenix
On her 40th birthday, Natalie texted her best friends and her casual friends, and her coworkers. She texted old friends she hadn’t spoken to in years. She texted her cousin Candice and her mailman and the 12-year-old down the hall who sold Girl Scout cookies. Stop by for drinks at 6, she wrote under a gif of a monkey wearing a party hat.
Then Natalie walked to a tattoo shop that looked like it had just been robbed. A man wearing a leather vest as a shirt was sitting on a large cardboard box in the middle of the room, eating a turkey sub. Shredded lettuce rolled down his bare chest.
The man in the vest put his sub down and drew a quick sketch in purple Sharpie on Natalie’s bicep. His name was Rod. Rod told Natalie he was closing up shop, and him and his pug Delilah were moving to the Florida Keys. She looked at the purple Sharpie sketch on her arm and said “do it,” so Rod finished his turkey sub and gave Natalie her first tattoo.
It wasn’t until she’d walked halfway home that she realized her purse was still on a cardboard box in the tattoo shop. Natalie slapped her forehead with her palm like a character in a silent movie, and she turned around in the crosswalk right as a Volkswagen Jetta passed a school bus on the left doing 40.
The Jetta heaved her body into the middle of the intersection, and she got hit again by a Dodge Charger with a custom paint job, blue flames on all four doors.
Natalie was probably dead by the time she hit the ground, so she wouldn’t have noticed the six-car pile-up that buried her in a heap of smoking rubber, and she wouldn’t have felt the metal bend around her body like a blanket. This was a good thing, the coroner said.
When she died, Natalie had a twenty-dollar bill in her pocket and no identifying information other than a fresh tattoo of a Garfield phone on her right bicep.
“What’s a Garfield phone?” her neighbor, who was just trying to sell Thin Mints, had asked a week before, when Natalie repeated what she’d heard on an old episode of This American Life.
“It’s a phone, but it’s shaped like Garfield. The phone part is in Garfield’s back, and his eyes open when you answer, and they close when you hang up.”
According to Ira Glass, Garfield phones had been washing up on French beaches for decades, and no one knew why. They’d appear, as if from Poseidon himself, sun-bleached gifts from the gods.
“What’s Garfield?” the neighbor asked, holding out a box of Do-Si-Dos and looking at her Apple watch.
“Garfield the cat. You know, lasagna, I hate Mondays.”
The girl did not know, so Natalie ate a whole box of cookies that night by herself and dreamed about Garfield on the beach.
If she had finished the episode, she would have learned that a shipping container had fallen off a cargo ship in the ‘80s and gotten stuck in a partially submerged French cave for forty years, leaking Garfield phones like an oil spill, a slow trickle of microplastics and orange paint.
But Natalie never finished the episode, so to her it was magic.
“Beautifully done,” the coroner said to the cops who came to identify their fresh Jane Doe. They all examined Natalie’s tattoo—a shiny, orange Garfield phone on a bed of soft sand, turquoise waves licking its paws. Garfield’s eyes were open.
The two cops who’d been assigned the case agreed it was indeed beautifully done, and they called around to all the local shops to see who’d done it.
Rod and his pug Delilah were crossing the Florida-Georgia line on the freeway with the windows down when the police called, and Rod told them wrong number motherfuckers because Rod wasn’t a fucking narc.
In the back of his truck, in a box under a framed photo of Rod’s ex-wife, was Natalie’s purse, which held everything that made her something other than a Jane Doe. Plus some gum, and a gift card to Ruby Tuesdays, and a paper from a fortune cookie she’d gotten years ago. A job well done will take the road less traveled, the fortune said, and on the other side it translated “pasta salad” into Mandarin.
Even if Rod hadn’t been blasting Sabbath in the front seat, he wouldn’t have heard Natalie’s phone before it died two days later because it didn’t ring. Not even once.
Natalie’s best friends and her casual friends and her work friends and the mailman and her cousin Candice and the girl down the hall didn’t go to Natalie’s party, and they didn’t notice she was gone.
Natalie was declared missing when her best work friends tried to fire her for forgetting to show up for two weeks.
The cops told them about the Garfield phone tattoo on their Jane Doe. “Beautifully done,” they said. “Incredible line work.”
But her coworkers assured them that Natalie was certainly not a Garfield phone tattoo kind of woman.
Rumors about what happened to Natalie spread around the office for weeks. Some people thought she’d run away. Some people thought she’d been murdered. Others didn’t remember Natalie at all and thought an elaborate prank was being played. They joked about this so-called Natalie. “Good one,” they’d reply when the people who knew Natalie said they hoped she was at peace.
In the Florida Keys, Rod and Delilah got a job drawing caricatures of tourists on the beach. When he found Natalie’s purse, Rod kept the Ruby Tuesday’s gift card and mailed her wallet to the address on her ID, but it came back. Return to sender. Again, he mailed it. And again. Eventually, the busy season ended, and Rod drove up to Fort Lauderdale, and the wallet got left behind.
The coroner paperclipped a photo of Natalie’s face and her Garfield phone tattoo to an elaborate description of her injuries, and he stuck it in a filing cabinet next to a hundred other women who would never be claimed, and he picked up beer and ground beef on his way home.
Kyla Phoenix just finished her MFA at the University of South Carolina. She has four black cats.