Application for Subscription Value Audit

Microfiction: The Subscription April 2022

On the third of the month, the charge appeared again.

Twelve dollars. Same as last month. Same as the month before. Nineteen months in sequence, the charge had arrived on the third, been debited, and been ignored.

The service was a language learning application. The subject had subscribed during a period of genuine enthusiasm. The enthusiasm was real. There had been a trip. The trip was planned. The language would be useful.

The trip had been rescheduled twice and then quietly retired from the planning documents.

The application was still installed. This had been verified in January, when the charge had briefly caught the subject's attention. The app was there. It contained the subject's progress from the active period: forty-three days in, a streak that had ended on a Thursday, three months after the subscription began.

The app had been closed after the verification. It had not been opened since.

The subscription renewed automatically. This was a feature.

At the point of original signup, the auto-renewal had been presented as a convenience. The subject had agreed. The subject had been thinking about the trip.

The charge appeared on the third.

The subject reviewed the bank statement on the fourteenth, noticed the charge, considered canceling, and was briefly uncertain whether canceling would mean losing the progress. The forty-three days. The streak record.

The uncertainty was resolved by not canceling.

The account is active. The subscription is current. The user has not arrived.

The application sends an email on the twenty-second of each month. The email says: We miss you. Your streak is waiting.

The subject does not open these emails. They are not deleted either. They accumulate in the subscriptions folder, nineteen months deep.

The trip is still possible. Conditions are not optimal. The subscription is available if they become so.

Twelve dollars. Third of the month.