Slow tears dripped down his face, blurring the small screen of his cell phone and the picture he’d uploaded as wallpaper. The woman staring from that screen looked to be in her late seventies, with hair gray and sparse as drought-killed grass. He remembered her wrinkles but couldn’t see them here because her smile sent them into hiding. He sniffed and wiped his eyes, then tugged his coat tighter and pulled the collar up around his face. Still, he shivered.
It was cold where he sat on a stone bench overlooking the foaming sea. Ragged waves, crested with white, pounded on the beach as if a storm had just passed. Or was coming. As he lingered in that place, a mist materialized out of the air around him, beading on his face and hair. At least it cooled his fevered cheeks.
He pressed a button on the phone for his contact list, scrolled through until he saw the word that named the woman in the picture: “Mom.” How he wanted to press “send” and hear the call going through. How he wanted to talk to the only woman who had ever cared anything about him. She would tell him that everything was going to be “all right,” and he would believe.
But he was six months too late to call her. She was gone and since then everything in his life had turned to shit. He hadn’t been able to delete her number, though. He hadn’t wanted the last vestige of her to be gone as well. It would have felt like losing the last fragment of himself.
Though now, he thought, I’m ready for that.
A rumble in the sky trembled his coat. He turned and saw a heavy fog that whited out the world. It drifted toward him and soon he’d be swallowed. He couldn’t make himself care. The phone’s light dimmed but he could still see the readouts. He had good reception but only one bar of charge left on his battery. If he were going to call anyone, it had to be now. He should call 911, tell the police where to look for his body after he’d done what he’d come here to do.
But…
He pressed the send button with his mom’s number still on the screen. It gave him a small sense of relief to think that he could tell her goodbye. Even if she wouldn’t really be there to hear him. The phone rang once, twice, a third time. He began to cry harder. The phone rang a fourth time.
“Hello?”
He stopped crying. A woman’s voice came through, an older woman’s voice. A riot of thoughts churned his mind. He couldn’t have gotten the wrong number. He’d called the right one a thousand times. Could his mother’s number have already been reissued to someone else? But then, he wouldn’t have recognized the voice.
“Hello,” the voice said again. “Who is it please?”
“M…Mom?”
Silence froze the line.
“Who is this?” the voice demanded. “Is this some kind of prank?”
“Mom! It’s me! It’s Dwayne!”
“What an awful person you are,” the voice said, cracking over the phone. “An awful, awful person. You know my son killed himself. Six months gone now. Who is this? I’ll call the police, I tell you!”
Dwayne opened his mouth to speak but at that instant his phone battery failed. The line went dead. The fog swept over him, muffling his screams.
∼ Charles Gramlich
© Copyright Charles Gramlich. All Rights Reserved.
Pen of the Damned 