“All right, let’s get started. Whoever comes through clearest goes first!”
In the middle of the screen, Aunt Emcee’s face suddenly ballooned to fill the frame. Forty-some relatives, scattered across forty different stars. The connection’s too thin to show everyone at once, so the call app does the obvious thing: it blows up whoever’s talking and shrinks everyone else down into little tiles along the edge.
“Let’s start with the good news. Mana, I hear you won an award?”
“Hehe, yeah. Best in the whole—”
Mana’s face swelled to fill the entire screen. Applause. My tile—I’m Mei—got shoved into the corner, shrinking down to the size of a bean, and before long it dissolved into “and 36 others.”
“Um, I also transferred schools this year—”
Before I could finish, somebody’s sneeze cut me off. The app zoomed in on the sneeze instead. I got folded away again.
“Next up, little Sora. Has she learned to say anything yet?”
“Da… dada!”
“She said it! She just said it!”
A wave of delighted noise. Sora’s face took over the whole screen. By then, I wasn’t anywhere at all.
“Okay, roll call. Mana, Haru, Yu, Sora… yep, everyone looks healthy this year too. Meeting adjourned!”
Skipped. Same as last year. Same as the year before that.
I stood up without a word and pulled a jar from the back of the shelf. Grandma’s legendary space pickles, the ones she left behind. The whole family treated it like something sacred—“save it for next New Year”—and nobody had ever actually touched it.
I twisted the lid hard. Pop.
I tossed a pickle into my mouth. Crunch. Crunch. The instant the mic picked up that sound, the app mistook me for “the person talking the most”—and blew me up, filling the entire screen.
”…Who’s that?”
“Wait, is that the jar? Grandma’s jar?!”
“She’s eating it! We weren’t supposed to open—”
“Hold on, what’s your name again?!”
Forty people looked at me for the first time. Crunch. Crunch. I popped in another one.
That night, every phone buzzed at once. Forty notifications.
A new member has been added to the family group.
“Pickle Girl” has joined.
I ate one more pickle.