Alon Z / Art / News reader

In a large room with a white wooden ceiling and white walls she sits on an old living room chair. In the corner of the room stands a round table with a few houseplants and a cactus. In front of her there’s a long wooden console that functions as a TV stand alongside other small objects that are placed on top of it and have been collecting dust throughout the years. Below the shelf that holds the largest layer of dust there is a drawer where she keeps expired legal documents and some silverware, and underneath the drawer there’s a cabinet with photo albums of her kids when they were younger.

The western wall of the room is made of three large floor to ceiling windows which fill the room with warm light throughout the day. On the outside of the window, the apartment is facing a second floor view of the courtyard of the building where an old date tree provides fresh dates to the neighborhood birds. The town where she lives hosts the largest zoo in the region, a few years ago they had a breakout and many of the exotic birds run away, some have been caught and returned to the zoo, though many found the nearby streets to be comfortable enough to habitat in year around, most of the residents enjoy the sight of the birds and got used to their singing. The date tree is particularly dominated by parrots which come to visit the tree in couples, one picking up the date and then carrying it to a nearby rooftop for eating while the other watches and guards the area.

Spending her afternoons in that room my mom reads the daily newspaper while occasionally being distracted by the parrots. I make an appearance in the room as well once a week, not in person but on the larger TV screen, where we do our weekly catch ups. During these calls we often run out of topics to talk about, and my mom is quick to bring up a recent news she read about to fill in the gaps. Unlike my mom I never been a fan of the news, and ever since I left home limited my consumption to weather related topics, though I appreciate it when my mom educate me on a vetted articles she finds importance in, so we often ending with a conversation about something the mayor did that week, or some corruption in city hall, or even an upcoming holiday I forgot about.

Since this is the only source of news I consume, it’s easy for me to have little judgment and once the conversation is over I’ll probably forget about it and the topic will never surface again, not until the next call at least. Though sometimes a topic will come back to me later on in the following days, and I might even mention it to someone else I encounter, my chief tendency is not to keep natural disasters to myself I noticed. Maybe I’ll change some of the details to personalize it for them, or maybe I’ll just give them the raw facts and observe their respond, hesitating once more about the meaning and relevance of it to my life, theirs or our relationship, and hoping they’ll gift it to someone else, keeping the topic alive for a little longer.