It's called Dial-Up Connection
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The phone
always lay beside him.
It was
always off the hook, still on, husking the emptiness on the other end, broken
only by the slight breathing of somebody else. He couldn’t fall asleep without
the phone. He always needed it beside him with her on the other end, regardless
of whether she was awake or not. Some nights he woke her up with his phone
call. Other nights, he pitied her and spent the night tracing the cracks in the
ceiling. He used to play games with it and create his own night sky complete
with its own constellations. But soon, even that couldn’t help the nights pass
even faster.
His
stomach was always sick with nausea before he called her. He became nervous all
the time, tripping over thoughts and spilling endless garrisons of ideas into
his pillow just so he could focus. His simplicity was never the best, but his
brutality was never the worst. He could never understand why he called her
every night, only that she made him feel like no other and that gave him some
sort of comfort when the nights became too long, too dark, or never ended.
Tonight,
he traced an old ceiling constellation, one of the very first ones he ever
found in the cracked white sky. The phone lay on the stand beside him, inviting
him to call her again. But he resisted, trying to give her peace and calm for
the first time in a long time.
The constellation
grew boresome. He grabbed a tennis ball and started banging it against the wall
until his neighbor yelled at him to quit the racket. He flipped TV channels
endlessly but got lost in their infomercials and found himself even further
from where he started. He punched his pillows, switched them, dumped everything
that good possibly be in his mind on them, and still found no reprise in this
hollow night.
He went
for a walk, humming to himself, music playing in his head. It was always sad
music. He never understood why, but the sad music made him more at peace with
himself.
He came
back and collapsed on the bed, the endless ticking from the clock on the wall
ringing in his head. After about fifteen minutes of this, he wretched the clock
from the wall and broke it to pieces on the floor. When he was done, he
carefully and calmly picked up all the pieces and dumped it in the bin with the
rest of the broken clocks.
He was
trying to balance the tennis ball on his forehead when the phone rang. It startled
him and sent the ball rolling off to the other side of the room.
He answered
the phone.
“Hello?”
“Hey,”
it was her. The night was no longer a waste.
“Hi.”
Not a
lot of communication ever happened on these phone calls. Some nights he held
the phone to his ear, not saying a single word, before falling asleep. Other nights,
he placed the phone directly beside him and fell asleep. And even on some
nights, he fell asleep curled up around the phone, holding it as if he was a
small child and it was his teddy bear.
“You
ready?”
“If you
are.”
“I am.”
He
placed the phone beside him and stared at it. Her breath was drifting through the
phone, gently rocking his mental sense of being back and forth, as if she were
the ocean and he was just another stranded vessel searching for a way home. If so,
would that make the phone the lighthouse?
That was
his last conscious thought before he woke up the next morning, the phone still
beside him. It was quietly humming the dead tone noise. She must’ve woken up
before him and hung up.
He went
about his daily routine, much refreshed from the sleep he found last night. When
the end of the day came and the moon hung high in the sky, he called her.
She didn’t
pick up this time. A man did.
“Hello?”
“Hello,
this is the police.” Said the man. “Can we help you?”
Ice cold
fear bottled up inside his throat. He quietly asked the police officer if he
knew where she was.
There was
a long drawn out silence before the officer answered.
“She died
last night, sir. She fell asleep with her phone in her bed last night. It got it
tangled up in her throat as she slept, and the phone cord choked her to death.”
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