Skip to main content

Review

 “It’s you this time.” 


Look at everyone. All the staring faces. So many wide, watching eyes trying to mask their terror. The macabre interest hidden just behind is all to obvious— because you’ve done the same thing when the Calls came. It was you a few days ago, watching the Selection, feeling the strange thrill spasm through you. Fear from the potential, arousal from the promise, and all of it mixed by relief when someone else was chosen. You too had been part of the many quiet whispers and loaded, meaningful wordless looks. Thinking. Who would it be this time? Who? Why? Why were they chosen? 


Someone coughs and all your thinking implodes. That was then. This is now. It’s you. The stares, the quiet whispers and exchanged glances; a solar system of human emotion all about what you will undertake. You lower your gaze to the Phone. 


That’s just what it is. A Phone. Sharp, elegant glistening black. It should be worn, scuffed from all that usage, it’s paint changed from how many gripping sweating hands have held it tight to their faces. It seems almost embryonic. Fragile. Too small for the transaction it undertakes. But that’s the power of it, you think, isn’t it? That’s why all of this happens, why it all comes through. Because the thing itself is part of it, because— 


The Phone rings. The hand holding it trembles. Slightly. The presenter has been holding it too long already, you should’ve already been holding it, already waiting and prepared. Suddenly you are drenched in sweat, slick like something caught in a downpour, needing to be shaken and dried and cleaned. Your suit is your tomb. It clings to your skin, mummification robes prepared. Completed. 


The Phone rings. A second ring is unheard of.  Sacrilegious. Anger and fear splits the clustered crowd across so many watchful faces, dances from expression to expression. You study each finger clinging around the receiver. They are bone-white. Will they even let you answer?, you think, seeing each finger curled around them like that. So tight. 


A blink and the Phone is in your hand. Your fingers are the ones tight around it, gripping, sweating against the impossible paint that refuses to wear. Flesh against cool, black metal. Everyone is watching. Holding their breath.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Find Your Own Way Out

 Find Your Own Way Out What if things could be undone before you’d done them? Or after? What if you could be rewritten, and never know it? What’s beyond time, what’s beyond death? What lies out in the places between places, above and outside of places? What’s in the basement and the attic of God, the places he won’t look, won’t open up to us? That’s what the note said in the empty, cold house.  It’s handwriting was rushed, the letters looping and stretched, trying to run away from the page to somewhere else. Somewhere else beyond the ominous meaning, the fate of whoever wrote it.  Water drip-drip-drips  from the faucet. Trying to fill that uncomfortable, hungry silence. Something thumps  in the attic, wood creaking before abating back into the quiet.  There are things in the house. There is nothing in the house.  Empty picture frames that you can feel unseen smiles from. If you’d run your hands across the walls there would be the essence of dust from a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Tall Grass Kingdoms

We stay up late. Walk through the tall grass, let it’s fingertips anoint us in quiet summer rites. The disembodied orchestra rings out from everywhere, crickets creaking and frogs tolling and bats chittering; the voices of coronation, our adoring audience.  Sweep hands outward to our sides, catching waves of iridescence. Fireflies everywhere, indomitable omnipresent, and between them and the star-crowded sky above it’s like we float out in a mystical cosmos. All alight. All ablaze.  Home is somewhere far away, beyond us. Lost and forgotten like schedules, like good habits. We’re runaways, self exiles hungry for adventure. We share words, drawn so close by that impossible summertime magnetism.  But at the end of the night, standing up in the tall grass, home is just over there, over the hill and the fireflies are a dim trickle. Inviting stars turned cold, unblinking. We share fragile smiles— the last we’ll exchange.
Post a Comment
Read more