Ring Ring Ring . . . Ring Ring Ring . . . Ring Ring Ring . . . Ring Ring Ring

“Hello? Helll-lllow? “Ah, I missed you, girl.” “Huh? Who is this?” “This is your dad.”

My breath catches in my throat. I pull the phone away from my ear and stare at the screen.

+777

I choke, tears coming fast and angry, “What type of sick joke is this?” I pull my brows together as lava-hot tears track down my pale face.

“Rylee-bug,” he says. “Prove it,” I say hatefully.

He takes a deep breath, “I have your hands tattooed on my side. Where you use to hold me when you were a little baby.”

“When you got a new bike, Rylee, I told y’all to stand outside. I went inside- and rode it out of the house, girl. I crashed in the monkey grass and bent the new wheel.”

I wait, listening to his voice. “I played Gorilla with you in the tent we made. I got on my hands and knees and made a monkey sound. You squealed and ran as I chased you. Then I was a nice monkey, Rylee. I bear hugged you.”

I cover my mouth, tears pooling. He continues, “You use to ask to make my coffee. Remember? I would pick you up, put you on the counter and you would put the filter in, pour the ground, and then watch it pour while I ate breakfast.”

“When we went out to the bus,” he paused, I thought I heard an angel crying. “We went out to the bus and I would kneel, I would hug you tight, right before the bus stopped. Then I would tell you to have a good day. And you would.”

I cry louder, bawling into the phone as I remember it all now. But he doesn’t stop. I don’t want him to stop. “Then the time you had a school project. I was standing on the first row of the auditorium without a chair, haha. No one would give a man like me a chair. I let the ladies sit. And when you were done singing- I clapped the loudest and whistled. I yelled your name, girl. Then you came up to me, I told you how good you did. Remember?”

He stops suddenly. I breathe into the silence, begging him to say more. To remind me.

“…Do you believe me now? It isn’t a joke, girl. I’m here now. I’m here,” he whispers.

“And there was the day… Christmas. When you got me my first phone,” I say.

“The one where you pay,” we say together, laughing quietly.

“I loved it so much,” I whisper, my bottom lip quivers. “I was so happy. I was happy. It was Christmas… And then—“

I can’t finish the sentence. Because three or four months later I was at his funeral. The realization sinks in.

It’s not him.

“Rylee? Rylee? Are you okay?” Ravi’s voice comes through the bedroom door that he knocks on frantically. “Answer me. Now.”

I shake, letting the phone drop to the floor. At the sound of shattering, Ravi pushes through the door, splitting the lock. He looks around wide-eyed, finding me bunched on the floor beside the bed. He wraps his arms around me, pulling me close as I cry like a baby. Clinging to his shirt like a disease.

“Ravi, he’s gone,” I say into his shoulder, the tears soaking into him as we sit on the floor, wrapped together. Ravi’s tears pool as he kisses my forehead.

“I know, honey. I know, it’s okay. I’ve got you,” he whispers, kissing me again.

 .•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•

He’s use to my episodes, where I believe I might see my dad again. He’s use to giving me his shoulder and letting me cry. And so I thank him for being there whenever I need him. I thank him for being understanding, giving me time, and being the first to support me. I thank him for loving me for me. And I thank him for so much more, words can’t express. But these three words get pretty close; I love you. 🖤

My phones ring tone blares on through the night. Finally I lift my hand out to my bed side table and grab my vibrating phone. I keep my eyes closed as I press the green call button. “Hello?” I mumble, expecting a salesman, or one of those stupid prank phone calls. “Melody? Is that you?” My eye’s shoot open as I clutch my phone like it’s trying to jump away. “Mel? Are you there?” I swallow once’s trying to calm my breathing, “Ray,” my voice is small, so small I can’t even hear it. “Melody,” Ray sounds relived, “Mel, I’ve been calling all night. Why didn’t you pick up?” Ray, his voice is like music to my ears. I feel like I was deaf and am hearing sounds for the first time in my life. “Ray, how are you. . .is this a dream?” Ray was quiet, the only reason I knew he hadn’t hung up was because I could hear the calmness of his breathing on the other end. “Mel, why didn’t you pick up?” Because the last thing I ever imagined myself doing was hearing from my dead boy friend. I thought that he was a salesman. Or someone not important enough to pick up in the middle of the night.
“I didn’t know it was you,” I finally respond. “But all week, ever since that night. The night you left me I’ve been trying to call. I’ve been up all night and all day just trying to get you to answer.” My head started hurting, and suddenly I felt like I was about to throw up. “Ray, I,” I shut my eyes trying to gather up my thoughts. “Ray, you. . .you aren’t here.” I almost hear something like a laugh on the other end, “Mel, I’m right here.” I shake my head like he’ll be able to see, “Ray that night when I left. You told me that you’d pick me up, that you’d meet me at the diner after I cooled off. But you never came Ray. You never showed up. Then. . .three days later the police found your body. . .in the woods. Ray your not here. Your. . .” I can’t bring myself to say dead. I know he is but he doesn’t know he is. And realizing you’re dead would be like realizing. . .it would be like realizing you’d been living a lie. “I’m dead,” Ray’s voice is small on the other end, “I know.” Out of all the reposens I was expecting from Ray this was the most surprising. I guess I should have seen it coming. “You do?” I ask, tears filling my in my eyes. “Mel, it would be a little hard to not remember. But that’s not the point. I want to know why you aren’t taking my calls.” I feel like I’ve been asked this question all night, “I told you Ray, I didn’t know it was. . .” Before I can finish my sentance I feel a sharp pain in my back. I let out a scream as I hear the deafening sound of laughter. “Melody!” I hear Ray’s voice coming form my phone. A dark hand reaches over and picks it up. “You’re too late,” his voice is raspy, “Nice try.” The last thing I hear before everything goes black is the sound of Ray’s voice. “Did you stab her in the back?” He asks, “Like she did to me that night?”

“Hello, this is Timmy169 Fortnite player speaking”

“TiMmEh”

“J-J-J-Jeff?”

“tImMeH”

“Jeff!”

“TiMMeh”

“I-Is this real?”

“tiMmEh”

“I thought you died 53 years ago!”

“TiMmEh”

“Wait a sec- is this Callum from down the road?!”

“Hehe”

“CALLUM YOU STUPID SIX YEAR OLD-“

“Hehehehe”

“I AM 73 YEARS OLD! YOU MUST RESPECT YOUR ELDERS CHILD!”

“Hehehehehehehehehe”

“IM TELLING YOUR PARENTS”

“Nononononooo”

“YES! YES I WILL! I WILL!”

“Nonononononononoooo”

“Hehe”

“NONONONONONONONONONOOO”

“Oh how the tables have turned 😈”

I thought I killed her, I tossed her in the lake. I even tied a cinderblock on her ankle to make sure she wouldn’t be found. I didn’t mean to kill her at first, I just got in a fit of rage during an argumnent. Next thing I know she’s on the ground not breathing. I panicked and disposed of her. I’m too good for jail. Now she’s calling me, how do I escape this, how did she escape this. Fear runs through my body, I’m a dead man whether she reports me or gets her revenge. I’m doomed. Should have made sure to hit her harder I guess, lesson learned.

Julie and Becca put together a 2,000 piece puzzle as their mother, Gabby, set the table. Julie was separating the edges and centers of the puzzle, while Becca arranged them.

“Dinner is served, girls! Come eat.”

Julie grabbed her teddy bear, and Becca walked with her to the kitchen.

“Mmm… spaghetti!” Julie stared at the food with expressive joy. “My favorite!”

“You never make spaghetti, Mom. What’s the occasion?” Becca asked.

“Oh, well… there isn’t really an occasion. Will you both sit, please?” Gabby, the sisters’ mother, sat as she started to breathe heavily.

“Mom? What’s going on?” Becca yelled. Julie squeezed her bear and started crying.

“Today is the day I escaped from your father after he died.” Gabby blurted out.

The room got silent as little Julie picked up her bread roll and took a bite.

“Oh.” The girls played with their food.

Gabby stared at the floor, then guided her eyes toward the kitchen as she heard noises. It was the home phone.

Gabby stood and slowly walked toward the kitchen, still crying. The phone rang and rang. Finally, she had the courage to pick it up.

“Hello?” Gabby said in between tears. There was no answer. “Anyone there?” Gabby was going to hang up, however, someone spoke.

“Where are you?” said the phone.

“Oh my god! Patrick?! What th-“

“It is. I love the new house! I love the new you. Please come back home. This house doesn’t suit your personality. ”

“Patri- Pa- I’ve changed! My persona- you- you don’t even know me anymore! I can- I can’t breathe…” The kids sat, staring at their mother from the other room. Gabby soon fell, grabbing the counter. This was the end.

What her kids didn’t know, is that when someone hears Patrick’s voice, they die short after. Months later, the kids were moved into a foster home. Several phones rang a day, and the kids shed a tear every time one went off.

“Dude, you have to check this out. This is so gnarly.” Alex summoned the attention of his best friend of a couple of decades, Ken. “This here may be the most epic of antiquing hauls in the history of anything.”

Ken pried himself away from his vintage television, with its curved screen and massive wood paneled frame. The picture was grainy and a little washed out, but he didn’t care. There was something timeless about it.

Of course getting something to watch on the old beast of a picture box was a bit of a pain thanks to the whole takeover of the digital era, but Alex had supplied a similarly vintage video cassette player.

They had a solid collection of movies, like their usual favorites “Rocky IV” and “Last Action Hero”. And with their usual trips to local rummage sales, flea markets, and antique shops, their collection grew weekly. The only real issue was having enough time to enjoy their finds between working shifts at the Safeway and making gummy worm runs to the nearby 7-11.

“Alright, so like, do a drumroll or something.” Alex made a request to Ken. “This is most deserving of an entrance filled with much righteous grandeur.”

Ken played along and drummed with his fingers on the coffee table.

“Most excellent. Ok, so here it is.” He brought a paper bag up onto the coffee table and pulled out an old telephone. “Pretty cool, right? Like this has to be from the mid 70s or something. Check out that shiny brown-orange paint job. Someone probably made plans to see a Bee Gees concert on it or complained about the taste of New Coke.”

Alex continued to show off the find. “Look, it’s got the whole numbery wheely deal. Absolutely classic. And it apparently makes a most heinous ringing sound, like there’s bells in it. Oh and we’ve got to plug it in the wall. It’s wired, my friend. Wired.”

Ken reached over and grabbed the phone’s cord and looked around for some place in the wall that could be appropriate for such a device. After a few minutes of searching, he found something that wasn’t a light switch, power outlet, or coaxial plug. It was old and dusty, but the phone plugged right in.

“There we go. Now all we have to do is wait for someone to call us.” Said Alex triumphantly. “Perhaps, it could even be a total ba—.”

They were quickly interrupted by the loud ring of the old phone.

“Uh, so, well alright. Looks like they are wasting no time trying to make contact. Let’s see who awaits us on the other end. Would you like to do the honors, my friend?” Alex waved his hand over the phone much like a Price Is Right cast member would show off a brand new Skidoo.

Ken picked up the phone and before he could say a word, a loud voice began to echo out of the other end. It said something about not getting any respect.

Alex reached over to the phone to get more information about the caller.

He said his name was Rodney and that he was trying to see if his suit jacket was done being dry cleaned. Apparently he needed it for a big show.

“Uh, I’m sorry, I think you may have the wrong number.”

The caller quickly hung up.

“Dude, Ken, that guy totally sounded like Rodney Dangerfield. It was most spot on. But that guy died like fifteen years ago or something. Most perplexing indeed.”

A minute later, the phone rang again.

This time Alex answered. It was a really convincing Andrew Dice Clay impersonator on the other end, also asking about his dry cleaning. He was not pleased when he found out he had the wrong number.

Throughout it the the evening, the phone rang with people doing very convincing impressions of famous people from the early to mid 80s. They all wanted to know about their dry cleaning.

Eventually Alex unplugged the phone, the ringing becoming so frequent that he couldn’t even hear himself think. A mysterious calm echoed across the apartment, as if a hurricane of ambiguous chaos had swept through and left a feeling of confusing unease in its wake.

Ken perked up, he had something to say.

“Yo Alex, like what if this whole phone is like a gateway or something to another time. Like our phone number, isn’t our phone number, but one for a dry cleaner in like 1983 or something. Crazy right? So when we plug this thing in, we have a direct connection to the past.”

Alex leapt up and held out his right palm. “High five, my good buddy, we totally found something that is truly most vintage.”

They buried you at sunset. As the dying sun bled its last attempts at light into the hazy pink sky, your coffin was lowered into the ground. The red glare from the sky painted the shining wood and it glowed briefly, an ember in the earth, before the effect was ruined with a handful of dirt. I was the one who threw that dirt; the sound of it hitting the lid of the coffin made me think of fists banging on wood and I shivered in the growing darkness.

The priest said words. Many words that blended together into a comforting mix that somehow excluded me. The cross around his neck seemed to glow against his robes - the power of his belief echoed from him like a type of heat. I turned away, scalded by his devoutness, and faced the darkening East. Stars were starting to appear. Shining for me and me alone. Never for you again.

The other mourners evaporated into the darkness, leaving in ones and twos: a pat on the arm, a murmured condolence. Some started towards me but retreated when words failed them. What did you say to someone who had lost everything? I was set apart, isolated in my role as chief mourner and they drifted away to return to their brightly lit homes, to put on the tv, eat the casserole they’d left warming in the oven, take a bath and move on with their lives.

For me, the grave beckoned. I’d watched them fill it, from a respectful distance of course. They’d used a digger which seemed gruesome in some way I couldn’t explain. As I watched them fill the void with load after load of earth, I’d had the strangest sense that you weren’t in there after all. I knew you were though, I’d seen your corpse - waxen and icy. I’d chosen your suit - the grey one you were wearing the night you came home late, an apologetic bunch of flowers in your arms and a faraway smile on your face. Your favourite tie - the one you said you’d bought yourself, although you never bought clothes - lay on your chest and I’d reached down and straightened the wedding ring on your finger before placing your phone into your blazer pocket.

It was your phone of course that had given you away. A cliche of course - the wrong message at the wrong time, seen by the wrong eyes. Or the right eyes - it was all a matter of perspective. Your death was a matter of perspective too. You hadn’t known what had hit you - metaphorically of course. I was much too subtle for that.

The moon had risen now, pale and large like a great unblinking eye. Your eyes had looked like that, wide and round in surprise, at the moment of your death. The hint of accusation shadowing the blue that I’d first fallen in love with. This had just made me angry. How dare you accuse me? Who did you think you… were?

Silence now in the graveyard. Just the whispering of the wind sighing through the leaves in the trees. I tore my eyes away from the darker patch of dark that was your grave and turned to leave and that’s when the idea occured to me. An idea that was at once both terrible and strangely compelling. I could call you and hear your phone ringing beneath the ground. I could wait for the answer machine and leave you a final message - telling you that I may have ended your life but you’d ended mine first. You’d destroyed me in a far worse way than I’d destroyed you. A terrible idea but my phone was already in my hand, following the familiar pattern of your number…

It rang once, twice… then silence.

A click. My phone was pressed to my ear and I listened, straining to hear whatever lay down there beneath the dirt… or was it the sound of after… of beyond? A silence that was filled with the terror of waiting, with the idea of grave worms and rot and the stench of decomposition. A hungry silence that grew and became a world in which I was frozen in a fear more eternal than one human could bear. A fear that promised to stretch and reach into all existence and beyond…

Then a voice. No. Your voice. The words that snapped the final thread of my sanity and sent me tumbling, like a leaf in a hurricane, into the swirling darkness of madness.

“I know what you did.”

“Dolly from Vanderbay Industries. How may we be of service today!”

“Good afternoon Dolly! I am inquiring on pricing for your latest product as my company is interested in expan-“

I stopped listening.

The voice on the phone turned into ringing in my ears as my eyes glazed over. Returning me to that day we lost you.

I still remember the sounds of the rain hitting the shed tin roof as they dragged your body out on the stretcher. I still remember how they peeled back the thin plastic tarp to have me identify your face.

“Yes” was all I could mutter out before my chest locked in my breath and tears of realization fell from my eyes.

I had lost you. You were dead.

“Excuse me miss, are you able to give me a quote for 10 skids of tin roofing?”

I feel the shake in my hands still and my voice return. “Y-yes! I’ll just need a name sir”

I sit so still, gripping the phone. I hope you say his name.

“Dave Samnder”

A tear falls from my eye as I relay the name into the computer. Typing in the order and waiting for the quote to load up.

“You’re still dead” I wanted to scream

“Three thousand five hundred dollars” is what I said.

DING LING LING DING LING the alarm called,I turn off the alarm,”a new day “ I said.I went to the window and saw a phone laying on the street,I look at the Date it was September 16th and that was when my friend die in a car crash.I went to the street and picked up the phone “hello “the voice called “wait I said this sound sounds familliar”that was when I recognize that is the friend that die in the car crash.This was when I got confused my dead friend talked to me in the phone.

Then I recognize how he dead but I still cannot understand.A dead people say to me so I brought that home and put it on my desk I look carefully so I can see if there is another voice but there was no sound so I decide to put it on my desk forever so if there was a voice I can heard it.

I watch you rub your face in exasperation.

I watch you flop down on your couch angrily.

Long day Carter? I whisper to myself and laugh.

I watch you click on the television and watch it intensely.

You look relived as you kick your feet up and unwind.

You sip your cup of coffee (I’m sure it’s cold by now), but you gulp it down happily.

You laugh uncontrollably at the screen, your probably watching your favorite show The Office

I smile at you, you poor unsuspecting man.

How dare you have fun after you bashed me over the head and left me in that field to die?

I calm myself down, after this phone call you won’t be at peace anymore.

I dial your number in my phone, laughing to myself already.

Ring..ring..ring..

Click.

“Hello?” You mutter sleepily.

“Miss me Carter?”

You inhale sharply and sit up straight.

“WHO IS THIS?!” You yell and look around.

I suppress my laughter.

“Don’t tell me you forgot about me after…” I count the months in my head, “4 measly months?”

You look scared as the color drains from your face.

“WHO IS THIS?!” Your on your feet now, and you’ve come to look out the window.

“A ghost of your past darling.”

I laugh to myself as I hang up the phone.

It’s rather fun to watch you squirm Carter.