SELFIE

SYNOPSIS
At dawn on a lakeside promenade in a waking metropolis, a runner finds the body of an impeccably
dressed man whose face has collapsed inward from the mouth. Beside the corpse lies a pristine black
phone with no brand, no SIM card, no identity. Before police and paramedics arrive, the runner slips it
into his belt bag and lies about it.
At home, the phone behaves like an object waiting to be chosen. When it lights up, it shows no apps or
data. It reflects only a version of its viewer that is slightly improved. In the glass, the runner catches
sight of himself as steadier, more composed and more invulnerable. By morning the phone has
vanished. That night it reappears on the bedside table and passes into the hands of his teenage
daughter, late for a party. In front of her friends, the device softens every face, making them just a little
more desirable. After the photo is taken, a clear viscous liquid begins to pour from the screen, touching
skin, makeup and half-open mouths. Music continues for a few seconds before an unnatural silence
takes over the apartment.
The phone is then picked up by the building porter, a tired man who eats standing in his basement flat.
In the screen he sees a fuller refrigerator, richer and more abundant than his real one. He takes a selfie
and the ceiling above him begins to open like an architectural hunger, with dampness and dark water
spreading through the plaster overhead. Later the device reappears on the pavement and is claimed by
an overworked courier already saturated with rage. In the black display, everything looks more
insulting, more culpable. His selfie triggers a lateral explosion that tears through the traffic around
him, as if his rage cannot remain confined to a single body, jolting the cars ahead and spraying the
windshields beside him, before leaving a pool of dark water beneath the van.
Among the personal effects gathered in the emergency room, the phone ends up by mistake in the bag
of a nurse who torments herself daily by comparing her tired face and overworked life to those of a
younger colleague who seems effortlessly admired. In the reflection she sees her own features clinically
corrected. When she takes the photo, the colleague's face appears on the display not as an image but as
a direction, and the nurse's body attempts to conform to a beauty incompatible with flesh. In the
aftermath, a thin trickle of water begins to fall from a closed shower at the back of the changing room.
Finally, the phone reaches the apartment of a man drained of momentum. Here it promises no beauty,
status or revenge, only a room that feels slightly cleaner, calmer, more breathable. After the selfie,
there is no spectacular death. The man is slowly emptied of the will to continue, while dampness
spreads in the corners of the ceiling above him.
Each passage leaves behind a trace of water, dampness or pressure. The phone does not break, age or
retain any visible memory. It seems only to detect the most intimate point of weakness in whoever
picks it up and translate it into a correction of reality the world cannot contain. In the epilogue, once
again at 5:47 on the same stretch of water, another runner finds the phone on the pavement. This time
there is no body. He picks it up and keeps running.