The call came
about three in the morning.
Earl rolled over
in bed, reached past his snoring wife. He scooped the cell phone
he left on her nightstand (closest to a wall outlet). He unplugged and
set the phone against his ear. “Hello?”
“ . . . Dad?” A
stranger’s voice. “Is . . . is that really you?”
Earl groaned.
“Wrong number, buddy. Goodnight”
“No! Wait,” his
caller said. “Please. It is you. The
experiment worked.”
Earl wiped his
sweaty, callused hand across his face, felt the scratch of his whiskers.
“Sorry, but I ain’t your daddy. I’ve got one kid, a boy about—”
“Five,” his caller
said. “No. I mean . . . I guess I’m about six now.”
Alarm bells rang
in Earl’s head. “Sounds like you're confused, buddy. Goodnight.” He disconnected,
stared at his wife for a moment, watched her sleep.
Earl used to tuck
two kids into bed at night, before the train wreck.
Amber, his daughter, died while impaled upon a few jagged fangs of twisted steel.
He slipped out of
bed and headed into the kitchen. He never drank to excess. He drank in
moderation—and often. A shot in the morning. A shot during lunch. Another after
work. One when he arrived home. One before bed so he would't dream about the wreck.
He sometimes drank
at night.
He opened his
refrigerator. He liked to keep his Scotch cold, and he disliked ice. He closed
the refrigerator while his cell phone—still in hand—rang.
He answered.
“Yeah?”
“Dad! Don’t hang
up. It’s me.”
Earl saw red. He
fought to keep his voice low. “Now see here, Mister. I don’t know if you’re
crazy, or playing a joke, or whatnot, but you leave me—”
“It’s me, Dad.
It’s Jimmy.”
Something inside
Earl turned cold. “Who the hell are you? My boy, Jimmy, sleeps in his bed.”
“I’m Jimmy from—aw
hell, just listen. I’m not supposed to use this machine for something like
this. I could go to prison. Lose my job at the very least. But I had to call you. I had to warn you, change everything.”
Earl sat at the
kitchen table. The thumb of his free hand screwed off the Scotch’s cap. He
drank straight from the bottle. “Change everything, huh?”
“You have to stop
drinking, Dad,” the stranger said. “Now.”
Earl took another
slug. “I don’t much like another man telling me what to do. Don’t call here
again.”
He disconnected,
turned off the phone’s ringer, and pushed the device across the table.
His hands shook.
He took another
slug, felt the need to drink grow stronger.
He knew his wife
cheated on him, held goings-on with that young kid who packed groceries at the
corner store. Earl let it happen. She needed someone after the accident, and
Earl failed to supply that someone.
She needed a rock,
a man, and, after he let Amber die, he never felt much like a man.
Another slug.
Liquid warmth flooded his nerves, blurred his fears. Perhaps he ought to surrender,
crawl into the bottle completely. It seemed bound to happen at some point.
He stood and
stumbled towards Jimmy’s bedroom, opened the door a crack, peered at his son,
tucked beneath his Doctor Who bed
sheets.
Earl closed the
door and returned to the kitchen. The blue light on his cell phone blinked,
coaxed him closer. The blue light meant that someone left him a voicemail.
He lifted the
phone. Its touchscreen offered two options: Hear
voicemail or Delete voicemail.
His thumb hovered.
Thanks for reading. You can catch my my novels, such as Daughters of Darkwana on Kindle,
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