meeting organically

by Gracie Lyle

It was a dark-and-stormy night, but I buzzed with more than the rum. I was high on my new power: I could conjure companions with a swipe of my finger.

I’d been on a date every night since I downloaded the app the week before. The process still needed fine-tuning. Pulling men out of the digital ether didn’t always go as planned. I shuddered to think of the worst of them, their sulfuric odor and slime, the way they warped when I made them matter. But I kept at it. I wouldn’t leave things up to the universe anymore. I was taking matters into my own hands, no matter how many nights in a row I had to spend getting drunk in this grimy Bushwick bar. I would find The One. I might even find him tonight. Tim went to college in my hometown, and we both “liked” The Decemberists.

“There you are,” Tim said.

I couldn’t remember any of The Decemberists’ songs.

“Have you been looking for me?” The bar wasn’t crowded, and I was wearing the yellow sweater I’d described in our messages the night before.

“All my life.”

I gave him several once-overs while he ordered a beer. In an anatomical breakthrough, Tim appeared the whole six feet his profile promised.

“So,” he said. “Spill.”

I told him about last weekend, when Romy and I took edibles at the Museum of Natural History. We watched the Neanderthal Campsite diorama like it was TV. I stared at the neanderthal models until the edibles turned on me and the neanderthals started staring back. Then I was plastic, bolted to the floor, a model in Homo Sapien Museum. Romy kept talking to me, but I couldn’t hear her through the glass.

“Experiences like that will keep brick-and-mortar museums alive,” Tim said. “Digital archives and virtual tours can’t replace that kind of interaction with history.”

“Your turn,” I said.

Tim’s conversational aptitude surpassed that of his predecessors by such a wide margin that I had to rescale the data. Most of them could talk. Even parrots can talk. Tim could actually listen. He heard the way Romy’s name sounded in my mouth and guessed that she had half of an avocado tattooed on her left wrist where I had the other half tattooed on mine. He made a joke about his therapist that didn’t give me the ick. He knew his moon sign. Tim was a paradigm-shifting, Nobel Prize-worthy, God-defying revelation fit for display at the World’s Fair. We didn’t have to talk about The Decemberists once.

My phone buzzed.

Tim: I’m so sorry, but I’m stuck at work. Can we reschedule?

I looked up at the man sitting next to me.

“That’s not a good look,” he said. He’d made himself comfortable, draped his arms over the bar, and propped his feet up on the bottom of my stool. “Air quality alert? Active shooter? Nuclear missile incoming?”

“Tim?”

“Excuse me?”

I showed him Tim’s dating profile. “This is you.”

“That is not me.”

I looked back and forth between the man and his image several times. The face was spot-on: the toothy smile, the Brooklyn beard, the mole shaped like a worm in the crow’s feet around his right eye.

“But you said you were looking for me?”

“I was doing a bit.”

“A bit?”

“An improvised theatrical routine.”

“I know what a bit is.”

“Is Tim standing you up?”

“You’re Tim.”

He took out his wallet and produced a driver’s license. Mitt Anderson was wearing the same striped shirt in the picture on his ID that Tim was wearing in the first picture on his dating profile.

“It’s from Target. Everyone has it.”

I stared back and forth between the identical faces until my buzz felt more like mercury poisoning and the pictures started staring back. Was I being gaslit or Punk’d or something worse? My other dates had been disasters, but not like this. Those guys had shown up older or creepier or more like my ex than their digital avatars suggested. But the man sitting next to me looked exactly like his online profile. He was exactly what I wanted. Something had gone terribly wrong.

“So, what I’m hearing is…” Mitt finished the last of his beer. “That you’d swipe right on this face?”

I had created a monster.

Maybe I hadn’t summoned Mitt from the app—maybe I’d made him. Maybe I’d used Tim’s profile as a jumping off point, and then I’d stuffed jpegs with organs. Blown breath into text messages. Turned pixels into flesh. All those nights of monomaniacal dating and drunken manifestation had driven me mad with power, and I’d crossed a line that humans weren’t meant to cross. Mitt wasn’t The One. He was an abomination. I knew this story: the creator gets destroyed by her own creation. He would be my end.

Mitt plucked my phone out of my hand and entered his contact information. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up when his fingers brushed mine.

“Text me,” he whispered.

And then he disappeared into the night.

BIO: Gracie Lyle is a writer from Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been published in Elegant Literature and 101 Words. You can find her online @gracielyle.bsky.social