"Hello. I love you."
That's the mechanical whisper in my ear. The voice is genderless, all feeling stripped away. I struggle to wake myself fully, to really grasp what is being said.
"Hello? Are you there? I love you."
The phone sputters and buzzes. High tones are clipped, low tones are lost in the noise. The flesh of the message is gone, stripped away. The phone is a bleached bone in my hand. It feels old. It feels like nothing at all.
"Can you hear me? I need to talk to you."
I try to breathe. The air is dry. It smells like a cardboard box, opened on the grass for the first time in years. Stale and rank with mildew, but fading into the fresh air. The odor of early morning. My tongue presses against my lips, pushing them apart. The sound of dead flesh ripping. I say nothing. I need to understand before I speak.
"I know you're there. Come on, talk. Please, just talk to me."
I don't know how long the voice has been here. I must have picked up the phone while asleep, to silence the ringing. I remember the ringing. *Riiinggg* On and on and without end. Then nothing. Aching silence for an eternity. Lying there, hearing nothing, feeling nothing. Thinking that that's all there'll be: nothing. And then another ring, piercing my brain, reminding me that I'm alive, damn it to hell.
"I want to explain. Please. Just tell me you're there. Tell me you're listening."
It could have rung a hundred times. It could have rung once. I lost myself so completely that I can only recall the ring and the stillness. It was perfectly real as it happened, so real that that was all there was until I let this voice in.
"Please... Oh god. Just... Please. Please."
Focus. Focus dammit. There's a voice, and it's talking. Listen to the words. The emotion is gone, lost following the words through miles of wire, caught on each junction and trunk. So deal with the words.
"This isn't all my fault. You know that. But I want to make it better. I love you, please talk to me."
I can't catch these words. They swim and dart through my fingers before I close them tight. But I'm beginning to see them. They're small, but they mean something. Something important. Listen: someone is talking.
"I know what I did. I know what I did, OK? But I know I love you."
I lay a finger on that one before it slips away. I glimpse it long enough to see how juicy it is. I've got a sense of it now. Could this be a trap? A wrong number? A recording that I set to call me up? It wouldn't be beyond me, to prod myself that way. To test my steel or maybe just to cheer myself up. Or to make things real. Maybe this isn't real?
"...."
The voice isn't saying anything. Then, there's a hiccough. Is it sobbing? The phone is heavy, trying to slip its way out of my hand. The air is rarefied, thin as on a mountain top. Morning light dulls, fades away to blackness. I clutch the phone like a life perserver, or a lottery ticktet. My jaw swings slowly open. I don't know what I'm going to say.
"I love you."
My lips fit clumsily, sheets of paper scraping together. Color returns to the world, and with it, reason. I take a single deep breath and the room stops spinning. The phone is light, a hollow nothing. I don't know why I gripped it so tightly. There's nothing here. No safety, no fear, no hope. Just unspecific words, words that could be anyone's. I move my arm up and over, positioning the phone carefully above its cradle. I let it hover just long enough to hear the voice once more.
"I love you" it says.
The phone clicks and is silent.