Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

She bought a cancer detector online, set it up, and promptly forgot about it. The same way dogs can sniff out illnesses, the device claimed, it could analyse particles that came into it and sort them. She did not trust the thing, but she had bought it as a ritual, the same way she threw salt over her shoulder or turned her mattress every month.

Whatever; it started beeping in the middle of the night and the man she had taken home left in a hurry, thinking it was a fire alarm, or a good excuse, and that was it.