Man Loses Cellphone in Italy: A Short Story By Michael Fine

by Michael Fine, contributing writer

© 2026 by Michael Fine

.

He doesn’t speak Italian.  The cell phone is his memory, his self-knowledge.  Bank accounts.  Phone numbers.  Wife and children.  Reservations for hotel and the airplane home. Weather.  News, so called, though that is always more of the same, always different ways of keeping the man at high alert over what will never change — and distracted from what might make a real difference.  Women, or the possibility there of, since no women ever came out of the cellphone and he could not penetrate it.  Reminders.  Appointments.  Colleagues and friends, who do not appear to have any independent existence anymore, apart from the cellphone.  Work, though what we do is not work, it is looking at the cellphone or its computer mate.  When was the last time any of us lifted a bale of shingles and bulled it up a ladder to a roof, hoed a garden or stood behind a plow or carried a basket of laundry to the river or two pails of water inside from the village pump?

One day merges into the next.  One screen after the next.  No ideas but in the cellphone.  No self that isn’t the cellphone.  The cellphone the soul of this life.

He got his words in Italian from the cellphone. But those words don’t matter– you can speak words from Google Translate but you can’t hear meaning when an answer comes back at you, faster than the speed of sound.

Then nothingness.

 

He was in Tuscany.  He must have lost his cellphone in Florence, after he picked up the rental car, a Fiat 500 with a stick shift.  Fallen from his pocket.  Or picked from his pocket.  Or lifted from the car when he stopped for a break.  It was his GPS, his map.  He had no idea where he was.  No idea where he was going.  Or how to get there. There was no one he could call. And no way to call them.  He had no money.  His credit card was in his cellphone, slipped into one of the little pockets in the case.

He noticed it was missing a few kilometers from the convenience store, the alimentari, where he stopped to get coffee and use the facilities.  He knew only he needed to drive twenty kilometers down a straight road.  So he didn’t notice anything until he looked down to check the GPS, relieved that he didn’t have to check his phone every few minutes, as was his habit.  He had been looking forward to driving for an hour or two, to have a little time to drive, see, sit and think.  To explore his own mind, to experience his own life, his own self.  In private.  For once.

He looked down to check the GPS on his phone, which wasn’t there.  It was a busy road.  The sun was bright. Hot.  Summer.  Cars and motorbikes buzzing around him.  Insects flitted in the sunshine.  A narrow road.  He found a petrol station.  He pulled over.  And turned himself and his car inside out.

There was nothing.  His cellphone wasn’t in his pockets.  Not in his jacket pockets either, his jacket, unnecessary on this hot day, stowed in the boot of the car.  Not under the seats.  Not between the seats.  Not in one of the side pockets on the doors.  Not in the glove compartment.  Not in his luggage.  It was nowhere.  It was gone.

 

He turned the car around and drove back to the alimentari where he’d stopped a few minutes before.  There was a car parked in the space he had been parked in.  He walked around that car.  Got on his hands and knees and looked under the car.  And saw nothing.  Retraced his steps out of the store, looking at the ground, from side to side.  This is silly, he thought.  It’s gone.  Went into the store, still looking at the ground and from side to side.  People must think I’m on drugs.  Or hallucinating.  Not that anyone was looking.  He walked the aisles of the store, went into the toilet and got down on his hands and knees to look behind the toilet.  He kicked at the paper on the floor. Steeled himself to deal with the faint smell of urine, excrement and disinfectant. Our toilets are cleaner at home, most of the time, he thought.  But this isn’t my country.  It is not for me to judge. He even moved the toilet brush and looked inside the container.  Nothing.

He went to the counter.

The man who had sold him coffee was stocky and dark-complected, with bushy black eyebrows and black hair.

“il telephono?” the man who had lost his cellphone said.

The clerk looked at him blankly.  He shrugged.

“Cellulare?” the man who had lost his cell phone said, suddenly understanding that the clerk might not speak Italian himself.  He held an imaginary cellphone to his ear.

“Cellphone?  Speak English?”  I lost my cellphone.  Did anyone find it?”

The clerk looked at him blankly again and shrugged his shoulders as he shook his head.  The man who had lost his cell phone didn’t know what the clerk meant, if he was saying he didn’t speak English or if he was saying he didn’t know where the cellphone was or both.

Then the clerk waved his hands over one another as he shook his head, as if to say, I don’t know what you are talking about, in a way that made the man who lost his cellphone wonder if the clerk knew where the cellphone was but wasn’t telling.  Or just had no understanding of what was being asked of him.  The clerk then waved one hand, as if to say, I just don’t have any idea what you are talking about.  Now go away.

The man who lost his cellphone turned and went back to his car, his eyes searching the floor and ground on both sides of himself as he walked.  He got into his car and searched it again.  He checked his pockets again.  Still nothing.

He leaned back and put his hands over his eyes.

 

He was empty.  Alone.  Bereft.  Where was he to go?  What was he to do?

There was no one to call and no way to call them.  No one to ask for help.  No place for him to go, because he didn’t know how to get there.  If he drove anywhere and ran out of gas, he had no way to buy more.  He had no way to buy dinner from a roadside restaurant, from one of the little trattorias he passed, the ones with four or five outside tables set under a dining fly, with flowers and potted plants around them.  If he found a small hotel, a pensione, he had no way to pay for it.  His passport was in his pants pocket, so at least he had some kind of identification.  That way they’d know who had died, when they found his body. But the passport was otherwise useless.

If he cried out, who would hear or understand him?

He lectured himself.  You should always keep money and ID in two places when you travel.  Have two credit cards, in two different places.  He read that.  And his wife said it over and over.  But he was in a hurry, always.  And this is 2026.  No one loses cellphones.  No one steals.  Everything is well-regulated.  Everything is under control.  Nothing bad is going to happen.  Life goes on.  We are not at risk, not like in years past.  We are all safe, each in his or her own way.  Until we are not.

 

The clerk from the alimentari came to the door and looked out.  He looked for a full minute.  Then he turned away.

I’d better move on, the man thought.  But where am I to go?  I can drive back to Firenze – to Florence.  There are signs.  But once in Florence, where will I go?  I don’t know how to find the rental car garage again.  I don’t know anything.

He put the car into reverse, backed out of the parking space, and pulled onto the road that was still busy with traffic, a scenic route between Florence and Sienna, off the main highways, which was just a two-lane road.

Then he turned off at the first street he could find.

 

There was a line of three-story houses, white or tan with red tile roofs.  He could see a church and the turrets of a castle on a hill in front of him.  Eight hundred years old, he thought.  Or older.  Pretty cool.  Then he remembered his predicament.  There was a little green space, not a park, just an overgrown lot to his right.

He parked in front of it.  What am I going to do? he thought.

 

He opened the car door and stood up.

There were vineyards on the hill that led up to the castle.   And ancient olive trees in the courtyards of some of the houses. A bull bellowed somewhere out past the fields which surrounded the town.  A cow answered, lowing from another direction.  There were black crows nodding in the fields, nodding as they walked.  And magpies chittering and grunting in the gardens of the houses nearby.  Kites and kestrels drifting high above in the thermals, hunting.  The air smelled of coffee and basil and of the pollens of the flowers that were growing from the window boxes on some of the houses, although this was a run-down district, the houses with laundry hung from the balconies or draped over worn aluminum outside clothes driers, their tarnished arms reaching skyward, visible behind the houses and in the courtyards.

There were rusted cars on blocks in the yards.  Boys kicking a ball in a school yard down the street. Yelling at one another.  Grunting. Girls watching or walking on the street, in their own worlds, involved in their own thoughts and dramas, thinking they could play better than the boys, who were completely self-involved.

It’s spectacular, the man thought.  I wonder if I’m safe here.

 

An elderly woman walked down the street toward him.  She had a wizened, wrinkled face — with a big nose, big ears and sunken dark eyes.  She wore an orange sundress and a green kerchief and she carried an open blue umbrella .  She pulled a grocery cart behind her, which squeaked and groaned as she rolled it.

“Buongiorno” she said, as she approached the Fiat.

“Buongiorno,” the man who’d lost the cellphone said, in a deep voice and with the best imitation of Italian he could muster, hoping she’d hear his accent and inquire more.

But the woman walked on, slowly.  She crossed the street and entered the second house on the far side of that street, grunting quietly as she lifted the cart up three small steps of an entryway, one step at a time, opened the door, brought the cart inside, and then closed the door behind her.

 

A scruffy looking twelve-or thirteen-year-old kid with acne, wearing a bright red Inter-Milan jersey came down the street from the school yard, kicking a soccer ball as he came on.  He looked at the man standing in front of the Fiat, and without saying a word, passed the ball to him.  The man stopped the ball and passed it back to the boy, who kept kicking the ball as he trotted down the street.

 

A red bus pulled up on the corner, in front of the boy with the soccer ball as he approached the main road, hissed as it stopped, and then creaked as its doors opened.  Three people came off the bus.  The boy picked up the soccer ball and got on the bus, which closed its doors and pulled away.

The first person to come off the bus, a woman wearing a green kerchief, turned back toward Florence and walked away.

But the other two people, a man and a woman, walked down the street toward the Fiat.  One crossed the road and one walked on the same side of the road as the Fiat.

They must have cellphones, the man in front of the Fiat thought.  Maybe I could ask to borrow one.  But who would I call?  The only number I remember is the number of my childhood home.  From which everyone in his family had moved, twenty-five years before.

The man who got off the bus was walking on the side of the street where the Fiat was parked.  He was in his fifties, the man in front of the Fiat thought: a tired but hefty man, with swept-back black and salt-and-pepper hair and a deeply lined face that had several prominent brown growths or birthmarks, and a two-day beard and red eyes, and who walked slowly and unsteadily as if he had been drinking.  He carried himself as if he had been more in control of his life, once, as if he was someone who used to think he was going somewhere, but then his life had petered out, as the world bypassed him.

The woman on the other side of the street was walking much more quickly than the man.  She had bleached blonde hair that was pulled back behind her head which made her shiny forehead appear prominent.  Her thick black eyebrows gave her a powerful appearance.  She was wearing red high heels, a tight dress, and had what some might call a good figure — full without being fat — and she had tattoos on both wrists.  She was smoking a cigarette. She walked like she knew exactly where she was going and exactly what she wanted out of life, which she knew she needed to seize because no one was ever going to give her one thing unless she took what she wanted for herself.

“Buongiorno,” said the man in front of the Fiat as the woman got close.

The woman glanced over at him, somehow surprised but a little offended that some man in front of a tan Fiat was hailing her from the street.  Surprised and offended, but also curious.  Open to possibilities, life being full of endless opportunities, which are never understood unless they are explored.

“Buongiorno,” the woman said, without slowing her pace.  She looked at this man, this American, who looked out of place and older than she thought worth thinking about.

“Buongiorno,” the husky man walking on the same side of the street as the Fiat said.  He had noticed the woman on the bus but was intimidated by her then.  Now he did not want to be left out.

“I’m stranded,” the man in front of the Fiat said in English, a little loud so both people could hear but to no one in particular.  He expected to be ignored, speaking English.

“Che cos’e?” the man walking said, not understanding that the man in front of the Fiat was speaking a different language.

“Huh,” said the woman.   She had no time for hustlers or drunks and intended to keep walking by.  But then she processed what she heard.  English.  An American accent, an accent she knew more from the movies than from her own experience.  She came off the sidewalk but continued walking, more slowly but in the street.

“I’m lost.  I lost my cellphone.  I can’t tell where I’m going.  And I have no way to call anyone for help,” the man in front of the tan Fiat said.

Whereupon the man walking unsteadily toward the Fiat came into the street, and he and the woman began talking to one another in Italian.  Speaking quickly.  GoogleTranslate would have been of no help, cellphone or no cellphone.

 

Both the man and the woman began asking questions in what appeared to be Italian, which the man in front of the Fiat couldn’t understand or answer.  Many questions, one right after the next.  The man in front of the Fiat tried to explain his predicament with gestures, in pantomime.  He held an imaginary cell phone in front of his ear.  Then he shook his head and waved his hands, as if to say, my cellphone is gone.  But the man and the woman had no idea what he meant, although at one point the man, being the brighter of the two, pulled out his own cellphone and offered it to the man in front of the tan Fiat.  The man in front of the tan Fiat made a sign by touching his first finger to his thumb and raising his other fingers, which he thought was the universal sign for It’s ok. That’s good. Perfect. but then he realized he had no idea what that gesture meant to Italians, so he waved the cellphone away by putting one hand over the other and waving his hands back and forth in the air, which is what he thought people did when a horse or a racing car driver crossed a finish line.  And then he realized these two people had no idea what he meant.

 

The man with the cell phone made a call.

The woman, who though not brilliant was the more perceptive of the two, asked “Americano?” to which the man in front of the tan Fiat replied “Si!  Si! Si! Si!”  feeling for the first time like they were getting somewhere, like he was getting his point across, though suddenly he wasn’t sure exactly what his point was.

“Americano!” the woman said. “Telefono!  Cellulare!”

“Si! Si! Si! Si!” the man in front of the tan Fiat said.  Finally they were getting somewhere, although he wasn’t clear where they were getting after all.  That said, he was glad to have the woman’s full attention, now, and glad that the man had stepped back a bit and was jabbering on his phone.

Two cars, apparently called by the man with the cellphone, drew up, and three or four people came out of them.  People started coming out of the houses.  They spoke rapidly to one another, gesturing at the man in front of the tan Fiat.

A crowd gathered.  The air began to smell of barbecue, of roast meat.  Someone in one of the houses was barbecuing sausage, which didn’t change one thing, but made the two men and the woman realize that the sun was going down and they were hungry.  Another bus pulled up at the corner and disgorged five or ten passengers who walked toward them and added to the growing crowd.  Cars driving down the street stopped to see what was going on.

 

Someone here must speak English, the man in front of the tan Fiat thought.  Why aren’t they asking me what the trouble is in English? he wondered.

And then he said what he was thinking out loud, quietly at first: “Does anyone here speak English?”

No one answered.

So he repeated himself, a little louder this time.

“Does anyone here speak English?”

The crowd quieted when they heard the man in front of the Fiat speak.

“DOES ANYONE HERE SPEAK ENGLISH?”: the man in front of the Fiat said again, in an outside voice this time.

The crowd hushed.

“Sure.  What do you want to know? “A girl, a young woman who looked like a high school student said, a girl in pink pigtails and a ripped t-shirt, who was in the back of the crowd.

“Thank God,” the man in front of the tan Fiat said. “I need to call the American embassy or consulate or something,  In Florence.  Firenze,” the man said.

“No problem.  I can help with that.  What happened?  You lose your cellphone?” the girl said, with an accent that sounded like she was from Brooklyn or Cranston, Rhode Island.  “Where you from?”

 

And there it was.  The transition from darkness into light.

After sorrow comes joy.  After winter, spring.

Perhaps there is hope for humanity after all, despite our many failures.

–

 

Many thanks to Carol Levitt for proofreading, and to Lauren Hall for all-around help and support.

Please click here to receive Michael Fine’s monthly short stories and his new series, What’s Crazy in Health Care.  Please invite others to join by sending them the link here.

Or join us on Substack:  https://michaelfinemd.substack.com/

Information about Michael’s books, stories, posts, talks and performances is available at www.MichaelFineMD.com or by clicking the link here.   Join us!

___

 All of Michael Fine’s stories and books are available on MichaelFineMD.com or by clicking here