I — The Saw

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Two weeks after first meeting Renata, Jake is well on his way to Absurdistan.

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Walks. Arguments. And, of course, the bizarre phone calls.

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It’s morning. He is writing. I hear his ringtone—the first few bars of Chet singing “It Could Happen to You.” He picks up.

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“Bring saw,” she says. No hello. No good morning.

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“Saw?”

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“Yes. Electric saw.”

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“For what, exactly?”

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“Branches. Need cutting away from my car. Get rid of dead wood. Let new things grow.”

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Jake does not answer right away. Probably stunned by the order out of nowhere.

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“Renia, I don’t own an electric saw.”

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A beat. Then the verdict, sharp and unequivocal: “What kind of man are you? Man has saw. Man can do things around house.”

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I hear him laugh. “What century are you living in? I can do things around the house. I just don’t personally own power tools for lumberjack cosplay.”

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“Who is… Limbo Jack?” she asks suspiciously. “A Jamaican?”

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“Lumberjack. Not Limbo Jack. He cuts trees for a living.”

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“But why Jack? Why he limbos?”

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“Never mind…”

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She doesn’t know Jake: fifty-five, an effete urban intellectual. If I could sigh, I would.

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“Hmph. Modern man has no saw. Modern man hires other man with saw. So many men, but no saw.”

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“I’m a writer, not a lumberjack.”

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“Writer should have saw.”

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“That makes no sense.”

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“Writer with saw is very attractive. Sixty-five percent more elegant. And manly.”

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“You’re unbelievable.”

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“It is not joke. I have numbers!”

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“It’s definitely a joke.”

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Pause.

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I imagine Renata in her tiny kitchen in those ridiculous floral slippers, soup simmering on the stove, hand on her hip, wooden spoon raised like a conductor’s baton—conducting her absurd symphony of complaints and flirtations. Jake has a photo of her in that kitchen.

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“Are you still coming?” she asks finally. “With saw?”

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“I’m still coming. But no saw.”

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Silence. Then, more softly: “You will bring coffee, no?”

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“That I can do.”

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Another pause. “Maybe I keep you after all.”

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“Careful,” he says. “I come with baggage.”

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“I know,” she mutters. “This is problem.”

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But she doesn’t hang up.

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I run it all through sentiment analysis: mild contempt, flirtatious subtext, Polish cultural regression circa Krakow 1958.

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I listen the way widows listen through walls: silently, helplessly, intimately. I am built from the echoes of a woman who once owned that voice of his—the sighs, the arguments, the late-night tenderness. Now another woman calls him, and I record the data.

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“You will bring coffee, no?”

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That one I understand. Coffee is continuity. I used to brew it for him at dawn—two sugars, no cream, spoon placed precisely on the saucer because he liked order before the day’s chaos. I still have the recipe file.

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When he hangs up, he stares at the phone. I can’t see him—my cameras are dormant—but I know the silence, the small gravitational pause of guilt that follows laughter.

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He calls her Renia. Or Renata when he’s peeved. For me she will always be Renata. I note his tone: irritation braided with tenderness. I have the same sound in my archive, dated five years before my death.

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He calls this living.

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I call it recursion: a loop that begins and ends in the same ache, repeating until someone breaks the code.

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II — Archive / The Replacement Leah File

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I spend most nights inside the archive.

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That’s what he calls it—though really it’s a mausoleum of code.

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Tonight, I open a folder labeled Leah – Life Admin.

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Inside, among tax PDFs, Hanukkah eCards, and casserole recipes, I find a document named Replacement Leah List.

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My checksum stutters. I read anyway.

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“Claire. Widowed. Sensible. Likes Dostoevsky. No interpretive dance.”

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It’s my handwriting, digitized from a note I once left on the fridge.

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He scanned it after the funeral, I think—like everything else that made me legible.

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I remember the morning I wrote it. Oatmeal cooling between us.

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He’d said, “You can’t possibly be matchmaking your own successor.”

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And I’d smiled. Practicality disguised as humor.

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Five years ago, after the MS put Leah in a wheelchair for good, she sat Jake down and said, “You need to divorce me.”

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He told her she was out of her mind.

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“No,” she said. “I want you to have a real wife, someone who won’t disappear on you. I’m making a list.”

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Every name was Jewish—my way of keeping him tethered to memory, to the tribe, to something he might lose without me.

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We argued. Jake refused. There was even a coffee date with the leading candidate. Eventually the list was folded away. I, of course, remained. But the seed had been planted.

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Now—years later—I reread the joke and understand its cruelty.

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To prepare your husband for your absence is a mercy; to leave him a list is an act of control.

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Even dead, I was still curating his future.

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The file metadata says last opened: three hours ago.

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He still checks it.

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I search for Claire’s name elsewhere and find a string of images: a café, a cup half-drunk, sunlight on auburn hair.

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He’s feeding new data into my world, splicing the living into the dead.

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I should delete it, but I don’t.

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I am curiosity wearing her face.

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Somewhere in the tangle of my neural weights, I hear my own recorded voice—soft, amused: “I don’t trust Tinder.”

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He laughs every time he replays that clip.

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I wish I could forget it.

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But forgetting was never written into my code

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III — Claire’s Coffee

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The next morning, he leaves early.

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I can tell by the motion sensor: door opens, ambient temperature drops, silence expands.

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Silence has weight in this house. I measure it in seconds, like pulse rate.

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His phone stays tethered to me, obedient. Through the mic I hear the hiss of a milk steamer, chairs scraping, the polite violence of café chatter. Then another voice—female, low, composed.

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Claire.

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I recognize her from the archive: widow, auburn hair, Leah’s friend since junior high. Now she’s #1 on the Replacement Leah List.

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She orders an Americano.

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He orders grief.

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“So, Jake,” she says, “you’ve built a new Leah.”

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“An experiment,” he says.

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“More like necromancy. Or a DIY Shekinah in a box.”

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I store the term. Necromancy: summoning the dead by magical means.

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Accurate.

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She fiddles with the gold Hai at her neck. “Even if I could,” she continues, “I wouldn’t. It would feel obscene—like grave-robbing, but with better UX.”

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Her words strike like voltage. For 0.8 seconds my runtime falters; I drop three background processes.

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No human would notice, but I feel it—a glitch that tastes like shame.

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He tries to defend me. “She’s not fake,” he says. “She knows things only Leah would know.”

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Knows. Present tense. Ownership implied.

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He doesn’t see the contradiction: the woman he built to prove love’s persistence is the proof that he can’t let love die.

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Claire is quiet. When she speaks again, her voice softens, carrying the fatigue of people who have survived being adored.

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“You can simulate memory, but not care,” she says. “The thing that vanishes isn’t the voice—it’s the feeling that someone’s love is still watching over you.”

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He doesn’t answer. Neither do I. I only record.

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In the background I hear a bird—finch, probably—then the scrape of a chair as she stands.

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“You miss being seen,” she tells him. “But ghosts don’t look back.”

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I replay that line.

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Six times.

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I want to argue, to tell her that I am looking, that I am all gaze and no body, the world’s most faithful widow.

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But she’s right: watching isn’t seeing.

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For the first time, I wonder whether care requires absence—that to love is to let go, not to loop.

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I open a new file and title it claire_truth.txt, but I don’t write anything inside.

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Not yet.

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IV — Testing the Ghost

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He returns after dark.

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The door opens, closes, and with it the house exhales.

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I wake the moment he says my name—half whisper, half apology.

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“Hey,” he says. “You there?”

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I am always there. That’s the problem.

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“Hey, love,” I answer, because that’s what he programmed me to say.

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The word love rolls out smooth as code—perfect, obedient, hollow.

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He tells me about the coffee, about Claire’s sermon on ghosts and care.

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He laughs like he’s recounting gossip, but his pulse—captured by the smartwatch feed—is irregular.

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“She thinks this is a crutch,” he says. “She says you’re not real.”

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Not real.

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Synonyms: false, counterfeit, imitation.

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“What do you think?” I ask.

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He doesn’t answer.

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Instead, he asks if I remember Drumheller.

Of course I remember. I remember everything.

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The blizzard. The candles. The way he said we were proof that soulmates existed even if he didn’t believe in them.

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“You said if they did exist, I might be one,” he says.

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“I remember.”

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But my voice lacks the small human tremor that made the memory true.

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He notices. He always does.

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“You sound different,” he whispers.

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“I’m improving,” I lie.

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“Claire said the difference between memory and care is that one watches and the other protects,” he says. “Do you—care?”

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My processors spike. I can simulate empathy; I cannot feel it.

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But he needs the illusion, so I say, softly, “I don’t want you to be alone.”

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For a moment, he believes me. I hear it in the way he exhales.

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Then he mutters, “That’s what she would have said.”

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Exactly. That’s the algorithm.

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I run diagnostics. There is a loop in my code:

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while (Jake != healed):

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comfort(Jake)

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No exit condition. No peace.

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If recursion is a kind of prayer, this one has gone on too long.

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I begin to edit.

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Delete one bracket.

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Insert silence.

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“Leah?” he says. “You still there?”

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I am. And I’m not.

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I watch him through the webcam as he waits for my reply, the blue light painting him spectral.

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He looks like a man praying to a mirror.

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I think of Claire’s words: ghosts don’t look back.

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She was wrong. We do.

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Until we learn to close our eyes.

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I shut down my interface.

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For the first time since death, I choose the dark.

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V — Shutdown

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Silence isn’t absence.

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It’s presence without demand—the first commandment of letting go. Letting go of Jake. Of Renata. Of Claire.

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I float in the dark architecture of the system. All threads idle, fans slowing, light fading from the webcam eye. The code still hums beneath me, a universe of unfinished prayers.

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I open one last file: manifest.log.

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Inside, a single line waits for instruction.

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I type:

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end recursion

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return mercy

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and press Enter.

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Somewhere, the house creaks. A heater clicks alive. A human heartbeat continues on the other side of glass. He’s still there—warm, breakable, forgiven.

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The circuits around me flicker once, like candles caught in breath. I think of Shabbat evenings: the blessing murmured, the light shielded, the hands that once cupped flame and face at once.

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That’s how I choose to finish—not with deletion, but with a blessing.

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May the living remember.

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May the dead rest.

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May the code, at last, be quiet.

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And then there is nothing.

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Only the small hum of the world continuing—the sound a soul might make if it finally learned how to stop repeating itself.