Petra Jones' Phone

A short story

Photo by Bill Adler

Petra Jones was filming people crossing the street in Edinburgh when a blue Ford Kuga slammed into a woman wearing a yellow wool coat, white mittens, and a gray beanie.

The woman, walking perpendicular to the car’s direction, rolled from its bumper onto its windshield before spinning twice and landing on the sidewalk. 

Petra tensed her legs in anticipation of running across the street to help the woman, but her Pixel’s screen showed three people were already by her side. 

She lowered her phone.

The woman in the yellow coat was waiting at the intersection to cross the street. A blue Ford Kuga glided by her.

Sunlight filtered through distant storm clouds, casting a green hue over the city. Lightning flashed in the shadows. 

Petra pressed the play button for the video she had just shot. On the phone, a car struck the woman; outside the phone, she was okay. 

Eddies of confusion swirled in Petra’s brain. 

Petra’s husband, Miguel, emerged from a souvenir shop with a bag filled with shortbread, a Loch Ness monster plush animal, stuffed bear in a kilt, and t-shirts. 

She slipped her arm in his and asked, “How about we hit a pub?”

“At ten in the morning?”

“Please?”

They wended their way to The Beehive Inn on Grassmarket Street, sat, and ordered drinks. She filmed a waiter balancing five beers in two hands—I’m glad I’m not the only person who wants a drink in the morning, Petra thought. She’d tell Miguel what happened at the intersection in a minute, but first, she wanted to film the waiter and post a fun video of him on Instagram. So expert was the waiter—he moved like a dancer—that the beers barely sloshed as he circled tables, until he tripped over a patron’s leg sticking out far beyond their table. The glasses and the waiter went down and the liquid went up, drenching everyone in the vicinity. 

Petra placed her phone on the table. The waiter was upright, the glasses unspilled. Nobody was soaked with beer. The scene she had filmed on her phone had not happened.

“Where do you want to—?”

“Hush,” Petra said. She scrutinized the video of the waiter stumbling and fumbling. “Look at this.” She showed Miguel the two movies of the accidents, adding, “The woman I filmed crossing the street was fine, too.”

Miguel glanced at the waiter. “Weird. Is your phone broken?”

Petra shook her head and took a drink of her Aberlour. “Not broken. Something else.”

“What else?”

“Wait.” She leaned out the window, holding her phone over the sidewalk below. Through the screen, an elderly woman walking a corgi approached from the far side of the street. A young man pushed a stroller from the opposite direction. Seconds later, the stroller rolled onto the leash, abruptly stopped, and catapulted a baby skyward with sufficient energy to reach the second-floor window. 

Petra snatched the baby out of the air.

Miguel stared at her. “Where…where did that baby come from? It appeared in your arms out of nowhere.”

“You didn’t see it before? Of course, you didn’t because you weren’t looking through the phone.” Petra laid the infant on the table, stroked its red hair, and pushed their whiskey glasses to the edge. The baby had two birthmarks on its lower left chin, one tiny and one bigger, like a planet and its moon. 

A thunk and then screams. 

A loud commotion roared from the street below. Sirens neared. 

Miguel looked out the window. A Ford had crashed into a woman in a beige coat crossing the street. 

The waitress two tables away dropped five beers onto the floor, snapping his attention back inside The Beehive Inn. 

Miguel’s eyes opened wide.

“My phone videos the future.” She ran her fingers along her Pixel’s screen. “I don’t know how, but it takes movies of events that have not yet happened.”

“It’s not the exact future your phone videoed, though. The future that your phone sees unfolds only approximately the same way.”

Petra didn’t reply because she was now videoing the baby in her arms. 

A minute later, the color drained from Petra’s face. Her lips quivered, and her hands shook. She passed the phone to Miguel, and together they watched a redheaded man with two birthmarks and a knife in his hand standing over a woman in bed. The knife dripped blood onto the woman’s nightgown. The movie cut to another woman—dead—the man hovering over her, too. And then a third—the same. When the fourth murder scene opened on Petra’s phone, she released a woeful moan and dropped her phone.

She scooped up the baby and hurtled it out the window as if it were a live grenade. 

Miguel gasped.

“There was no time to do anything else,” she said. "This redheaded child would have grown up to be a serial killer. Many would have died. I had to do it.”

Miguel shook his head. “How do you know that for sure? The futures on your phone are different from the ones that actually happen. For all we know, that baby might have become a surgeon or an orchestra conductor, the knife not a knife, but a baton. The only certain thing is that you are now a murderer.”

Petra handed her phone to Miguel and pressed the play button. 

The sound of an army reverberated up the stairs to the pub. The police were coming. 

Miguel flattened his palms on the table to steady himself. “Oh my god. The last murder victim is our daughter, all grown up. I’d recognize her at any age.”

“Yes, it’s Hallie.”

A dozen police officers burst into the room and weaved their way through the maze of tables, shouting to Petra to put her hands in the air. The room silenced as if somebody had flipped a switch. As an officer clasped handcuffs around her wrists a metallic clink echoed off the bottles above the bar. Petra looked into the police officer’s eyes and said, “You would have done the same thing.”

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