Writers Jam

The telephone waits. It waits in the corner of the room, its cord twisting like a serpent through the shadows its receiver trembling with unspoken accusations I cannot move it, cannot silence it, its pulse matches the rhythm of my unease. Sometimes it rings, a shrill, hollow cry that pierces the night but when I lift it to my ear, there is only the sound of breathing - mine,or someone else’s I cannot tell, and I cannot stop listening. In my dreams, it grows. The walls bend around it - the floor shudders beneath its weight. It coils around my arms, my throat and every word I try to speak slips through its fingers into darkness. It whispers promises I do not trust, threats I do not understand. I try to hang up but the line refuses me. The numbers I dial vanish like footprints swallowed by fog. And yet I keep calling as if repetition alone could summon an answer from some unknowable other. The phone hums with possibility and despair. It knows the secrets I have buried beneath my skin it repeats them, distorted in tones both familiar and alien. I reach for it and it recoils. I recoil. And still, it waits. Sometimes I dream I hear you through it - a voice not yours, not mine, a voice that carries everything I have tried to say, everything I have refused to hear, everything that could never be forgiven. And when I wake, the receiver lies silent but I feel it still in my chest, a phantom heartbeat that will not stop. I have learned to live with it but it is patient, relentless. It waits for the moment I will stumble, the night I will reach out and confess that I am nothing but a listener, a prisoner, a ghost speaking into a line that leads nowhere. And perhaps that is the truth: we are all just calls that are never answered.