Photograph by Tomasz Sienicki, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

In the opening scene of Angie Sijun Lou’s short story, “Bubble,” which appears in our new Fall issue, no. 257, the narrator goes with her father to a parent-teacher conference—an intervention of sorts, regarding the fact that the unnamed sixth-grader “had spoken fewer than thirty words over the past academic year.” During the conference, as her teacher threatens to hold her back barring better socialization, the girl plays with a Tamagotchi Angel—a high-maintenance, limited-edition digital pet which, as it happens, was also based on a toy Lou received in real life. 

December 25, 2025 

Yesterday, my boyfriend and I went to Don Quijote in Shibuya, a twenty-four-hour, eight-floor mega discount store. We got separated in its mazelike aisles and floor-to-ceiling displays. I considered buying a samurai sword, an epilator, matcha-flavored potato chips, lychee jelly cubes, and a Kuromi key chain, but in the end, I bought nothing.      

This morning, I gave him his present, a dark brown sweater with vertical stripes that I bought in New York. He carefully removed the wrapping paper, then made me leave the room. He hadn’t known we would be exchanging gifts and reused the paper to wrap the last-minute present he’d gotten for me.      

When I opened it, I realized he must have picked it out at the Don Quijote while I’d been distracted by the lights and the sounds. It was a Tamagotchi Angel, with a pair of wings painted on its glitter case.   

December 27

My boyfriend read the Wikipedia page about the gameplay out loud to me while we were driving to Mount Aso. After a Tamagotchi dies, her spirit gets trapped in limbo. The player is tasked with raising the Tamagotchi in the afterlife until she is ready to join the league of angels in heaven. If I did a good job, she would turn into a chestnut angel, a smiling angel, a chubby angel, or a cactus angel. If I did a bad job, she would turn into a demon spirit and descend to hell. 

I rolled the windows down as we drove through a sulfurous cloud on the summit. A group of schoolgirls counted down before jumping in the air for a photo. From my angle, it looked as if the girls were rising directly from the volcanic crater, the ribbons around their necks fluttering in the mist. 

I want to name my Tamagotchi after a biblical angel, but I can’t decide if she’s a Gabriel or a Uriel. 

Photo by Angie Sijun Lou.

December 29

In Fukuoka, we stayed at a budget hotel chain geared toward Japanese businessmen. The attendant wouldn’t allow me into the spa because of my tattoos, so I waited until the middle of the night before sneaking in to bathe in total darkness.

I feel hopeful about the coming year. I want to eat more vegetables, respond to my emails in a timely manner, wake up at sunrise to journal and exercise, and devote myself to something external to me. Every day, I will train my Tamagotchi to jump over stars, feed her pie and candy, clean her poop, and turn the lights off at bedtime. Every day, her metrics will improve: Angel Power, Hunger, and Happiness. 

There is also an option to Discipline her, which I pressed once, as an experiment. It made her lose one Happy heart, and I noticed that she doesn’t beep as much as she used to.

January 1

On New Year’s Eve, we went to a Shinto shrine inside a cave on the coast of Kyushu. We arrived fifteen minutes before the gates closed. I thought we were going to get locked inside overnight because my boyfriend was taking too long trying to buy a Coca-Cola from the vending machine. 

The only person manning the shrine was a monk selling saltwater taffy from a dimly lit booth. The sign said that the taffy was made from water gathered from a breast-shaped stone inside the cave. According to Japanese mythology, the sea goddess Toyotama-hime had to return to the sea after giving birth. She attached her breasts to the cave wall so that her child could continue to be nourished by the water dripping from them. 

I bought the taffy and ate it, then washed it down with a sip of Coke. I was enjoying the fizzy combination when my Tamagotchi let out a piercing shriek, reminding me to give her candy too.

January 6

I got back to New York this afternoon and found out that the heat in my building has been broken since Christmas. My landlord keeps shuffling around in the basement, watching YouTube videos on how to fix a boiler. I walked to the grocery store with my hair wet from the shower, and by the time I came back, the strands had frozen into icicles. 

My Tamagotchi seems like she is becoming more high maintenance than she was before, maybe because she’s evolved into a teenage angel. She has a spherical body, four legs, and puffy red lips for pouting at me. Yesterday, my boyfriend opened up her stats and looked shocked by how infrequently I had been feeding her since we returned.

I already gave her pie last week, I said. I don’t get why I have to do it again.

The next morning, he sent me a screenshot of Google’s AI response to the question, Can I feed my Tamagotchi only once?

January 8

It’s too easy to have delusions of grandeur just before the start of a new year. It’s only the second week of January, and I’ve already noticed fewer joggers flailing down the streets.

I went to visit my brother yesterday afternoon. I tried to tell him about our trip, but he was busy fussing over his cat, pureeing her food with a Nutribullet. She coughed up a hair ball, and he went to the computer and logged it on an Excel spreadsheet. My brother does everything with an intense, quasi-religious devotion, and this is why he has one million dollars in cryptocurrency and I don’t. 

I woke up to a series of high-pitched beeps in the middle of the night. I thought that my carbon monoxide alarm was going off until I realized that my brother had turned up the volume on my Tamagotchi when I wasn’t looking. I wonder if he and my boyfriend are in a conspiracy against me, and this device is supposed to teach me a lesson the way that a high schooler might get assigned to take care of an egg in home economics.

I pressed the Discipline button until my Tamagotchi lost all of her hearts, and then I buried her in the folds of my couch. 

January 11

Now that I have my brother’s infrared space heater, there is nothing left for me out in the world. On Saturday night, I barricaded myself in my room with a cup of tea and a collection of stories by Joy Williams, waiting for the warmth.

The story I liked the most was about an elderly woman who is visited by a mysterious girl. As the woman struggles to distinguish between memory and dream, the reader realizes that the woman is nearing the end of her life, and the girl she has been conversing with may or may not be a figment of her imagination.

The woman tells the girl about the last time she felt anchored in consensus reality: when she rode her childhood pet, a black horse named Abdiel, up and down a grassy hill next to her house. Like Tolstoy’s horse, Abdiel’s flesh rippled as if grazed by an unseen hand.

He was so real, such a living force, she says.

January 14 

When I woke in the morning, I thought my room looked brighter than usual, and then I saw that the magnolia tree outside my window had an inch of snow balanced on its branches. I can’t remember when I last saw snow so pristine. My first thought was, I want to go outside and ruin it. 

In Sunset Park, my boyfriend and I watched children barrel down the slope on pieces of cardboard, making snow angels in the places where they fell. I told him about the part of the Joy Williams story when the elderly woman remembers sledding down a snowy hill on a carton that once held gallon jugs of maple syrup.

Abdiel is the only seraph in Paradise Lost to denounce Satan after learning about his plan to incite a revolt among the angels. Among the faithless, Milton writes, faithful only he. 

I took my Tamagotchi out from under the cushions when I got home that night. I tried to imagine how it might feel to be at the mercy of someone who doesn’t speak my language. I would want that person to be as attentive as possible, to recognize that each of my beeps means something different, even if they sound the same. 

January 18 

I had just finished wiping my Tamagotchi’s butt when she made a celestial sound. The screen froze, and her image flickered. I thought that her final form was going to be a chubby angel because of all the candy I’d been giving her, but that’s not what she evolved into.

After doing a deep dive on the Tamagotchi Wiki, I learned that the faceless Lucky Unchi-Kun is the rarest evolution. Formed out of stardust and other angels’ poop, she is pictured as a glittering turd. Because she has no legs, she rides around the heavens on a small cloud. A Tamagotchi will evolve into a Lucky Unchi-Kun only if its owner makes numerous care mistakes but not enough to turn her into a demon spirit.

Despite being faceless, my pile of poop still managed to shed a small tear as she waved goodbye. 

Goodbye, Abdiel, I said, naming her as she disappeared into a beam of light.

Angie Sijun Lou’s stories have appeared in BOMB, ZYZZYVA, Joyland, and Fence. She is at work on a novel.