Yesterday, the Future Licked My Hand

By Fendy S. Tulodo

A glass spider climbed out of a cracked phone screen and whispered coordinates into Ezra’s palm. No one else saw it. They only saw Ezra shivering, clutching their hand like they’d just caught time catching fire.

The town was mostly flat. Trees leaned east, like they were tired of standing. A new 5G tower blinked near the edge of the school playground. No one played there anymore. Birds had stopped coming. Ezra, who fixed drones for money, had stopped believing in coincidences.

Their father, a wiry man with dust-colored eyebrows and loud hands, believed Ezra was slipping. He called it a spiritual disturbance. Said the land had spirits, not signals, and Ezra should stop making maps of bugs that didn’t exist. Ezra didn’t reply. Instead, they kept sketching—the glass spider with folded limbs, the bees with hexagonal pupils, the field with a burned oval shape. They didn’t know why, but these things came back every time they closed their eyes.

Ezra remembered something that might not be theirs: a burning field, a child holding matches, a woman screaming into a plastic bag. The memory didn’t fit anywhere in Ezra’s life. But it stung like it belonged.

They worked in silence, drawing with fingers half-numb from cold. The solar-powered sketchpad saved it all. Thirty-seven pages of things no one could verify. Ezra wrote notes in the margins. Things like: Bee #6 left behind a wing when it passed through me. It itched like grief.

At the diner, people stared. Ezra’s hand had started glowing faintly, just below the skin, like the lines of a circuit board drawn by heat. The waitress asked if they were hurt. Ezra said no, not in any normal way.

Back home, their father set fire to the sketchpad. He didn’t speak while it burned. He only said, “You can’t keep letting things in.” Ezra didn’t cry. Instead, they went to the backyard, found the spot the spider’s coordinates had described, and dug with their bare hands until the soil changed color.

They unearthed a small metal box wrapped in plastic and wire. Inside, there were photographs. People with identical eyes to Ezra, but faces unfamiliar. Names scrawled in pencil: Marlene, 1904. Iven, 1923. Luce, 1941. All of them cracked in half by time but preserved just enough to say: you came from this.

Ezra lay in the dirt and laughed quietly. They were not just one. They were many. That was the glitch, or maybe the gift.

Their body began to remember. Each photograph unlocked something—smells, gestures, sounds. Someone humming with cracked lips. A shoelace tied in double knots by trembling fingers. A barn swallowed by dust. These things weren’t hallucinations. They were downloads. Memory as inheritance.

They stopped trying to fix drones. They started building something new. Using the fragments from the phone, pieces from the metal box, and copper wire scavenged from a fence, Ezra assembled a transmitter. It pulsed when touched. They called it “Voice Eleven,” the name of the part inside them who had always drawn maps but never spoken.

Their father threatened a healing center. He said Ezra needed saving, but never asked from what. Ezra told him, softly, “I’m not sick. I’m just tuned in.”

That night, the air smelled like burning dust. Ezra turned on the transmitter. It clicked once, then began to hum. A mechanical bee flew in through the open window and landed gently on their forehead. Ezra didn’t flinch. This time, they opened their eyes wide.

The bee projected light. It showed a city made of mirrored trees and walking homes. It showed names written in the sky with breath. It showed Ezra’s face at seven, then at eighty, then as someone else entirely. The bee blinked off, fell apart, and crumbled into sand.

Ezra recorded a message for no one. They spoke into the transmitter without expectation. “If you hear this, I am not alone in here. I am all of them. And they remember things that haven’t happened yet.”

In the morning, their father watched from the porch as the wind bent sideways. It didn’t rattle the leaves or whistle—it twisted, like time hiccupped.

He said nothing. Just stood there with arms folded, as if afraid words might make it real.

Ezra smiled, then went back to wiring the next voice. There were more memories waiting. Some buried, some dreaming. All buzzing just beneath their skin.

In the distance, the new 5G tower blinked once, then went dark.
​
Ezra didn’t look back.

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​Fendy S. Tulodo lives in Malang, Indonesia, and makes art. He uses words and songs to explore how time seems to stretch or shrink for different folks, and how some bonds stay even after they end. He sells motorcycles during daylight. After sunset, he crafts melancholic tunes as Nep Kid and pens tales in various styles. His work exists in that quiet space between what is said and what is truly felt.