At least I haven’t carved up perfectly good statues, Lucas thought as he walked across the small living room into the kitchen, where he had left one of his relics on the table: a smartphone. Most people didn’t use them anymore. The technology had been made obsolete by wrist devices or augmented-reality add-ons for glasses, but Lucas had kept his. It was a keepsake. The phone was the first piece of “big” technology he had ever gotten from someone. Yu Hua had insisted on him carrying it when she found out he didn’t have a phone, and now, even though its battery had gotten to the point where it barely stayed on for a few hours at a time without being near a charger, he didn’t ever want to replace it. He picked it up, unlocked it, and was instantly looking down at the first selfie that they had ever taken together. It was a ridiculous photo, and neither he nor Yu Hua looked like they had been ready. Each was making a silly face with their tongues stuck in odd directions and with half their faces wrinkled from being caught mid-laugh as they tried to push one another out of the camera frame. But he loved it.

He had set the ridiculous photo as the background and then never changed it. He stared down at it for a moment, wavering on the edge of succumbing to memory-fueled introspection, but stopped himself before falling down that particular rabbit hole. Shrugging off the urge to mope and get lost in the picture, he went back to doing what he originally intended to, and it didn’t take him long to scroll through the few remaining contacts on his phone to find the name he was looking for: Liu.

He hesitated as he read the name and saw her image. Liu wasn’t like her older sister in any department. Even though they were both Asian immigrants, Liu had quickly adopted American habits, particularly in fashion. She quickly began curling her hair and changing how she dressed so that she would fit in. The picture of her in a relaxed t-shirt and yoga pants was the best one that he had been able to snag of Liu after he failed his chance to get a respectable picture of her posing at his wedding.

As he was mustering up his thoughts on what to say to her, he fat-thumbed the call button. The old electronic device was extra finicky, and the screen was sometimes a little too sensitive. He had just brushed the screen, but that had been enough.