Calling...Calling
Previously published in Cathedral #2
“I saw Tim today.”
“Who’s Tim?”
“A theater major in the university.”
“How do you know him?”
“I know him because he hops into my dreams like so many other lost souls.”
“That’s a drag then?”
“No.”
“I would have wondered if it was. What brought him up?”
“The curling of your toe underneath my ankle. The sound of your breath on my neck. Tim is that person outside of me, the person who I would call my male-self.”
And then I hung up. There was no reason to continue. She needed her sleep and I had my own distractions to worry about. I sat up in my chair and wandered around the room for a while. I carried the phone in my hand just in case I might need to call her again, to hear about Tim. To hear about myself.
I went to the kitchen and made myself a sandwich. It’s called surrealism nowadays. Talking on the phone in the middle of the night trying to work out the do’s and don’ts of our relationship trying to figure out why and what and what was it that we had in common besides our grand delusions about ourselves.
The phone rang. Can we call it a vibration in my hand? A sudden twitch that let me know it was time to do something about my name, the person that I would share it with the person that I would get to see and touch and feel without holding back, that for the first time I could be we and she could be we. But we need to work out all of our old problems first.
“Hello,” I said, clicking the phone on. “Is it you? Is it my love?”
A man answered, scratchy voice like the tassels on an angels forehead, a scratchy, brutal, sing-song voice a voice like you and me and we are all together.
“Calling collect,” the voice said. “Calling for your lust.”
I threw a penny on the floor and started to whistle.
“She’s gone to bed now, I think,” is what I told this strange man on the other side of the phone.
“Is she then?” he said. “And how can I call her.”
“I’ll hit redial for you.”
“Thanks then,” he said. “’preciate it very much.”
And I hit redial and felt the voice, the singsong voice scratchy-oh-why-can’t-we-all-be-friends voice travel through the phone lines to the residence of my love. And I could feel otherwise clean, like I had just removed an insect from my back.
And then, the phone rings. It rings again and it is hurled across the room by me and my and it cracks and breaks and my heart breaks with it. I’m little more than trapped here in my room.