Waiting for a Call (a Fictional Story)

The streets are bathed in the shadowy silver light of the full moon. The distant barking of dog – from its pitch it sounds like a large dog – is echoing against the houses and trees. I’m sitting cross-legged on my bed in the darkness of the room staring out the window. I’m wondering if he’ll call.

He wrote earlier in the day in his email that he had something important to tell me and that he’d call later. It’s not any easy thing for me to do – to wait – and he knows it. But I had no choice.

The entire ride home was spent contemplating what he was going to tell me. That he got a promotion? That he won the lottery? Or maybe someone he knows did something noteworthy? My mind must have considered hundreds of possibilities in my twenty minute trek home.

I sat through the 6 o’clock news with my phone next to me. He didn’t call. I ate a quick dinner of a bologna sandwich and a bag of kettle cooked potato chips, and he still didn’t call.

At one point my impatient self tried calling him, but the call went right to voice mail. I sighed in frustration. I didn’t leave a message.

Almost midnight. I decide to go to bed. Although, if I had stayed up waiting for the phone to ring, it wouldn’t have been the first time I’d done that. But one lives and learns that sometimes people forget, or they get involved in something so intense that they forget everything else … even promises.

The story should end with some exceptional reason why he didn’t call like he said he would. But it doesn’t. He didn’t have a reason other than he forgot. He forgot.

When I press him for the news he was supposed to share, he says, “oh, it was nothing really. I wanted to let you know that I was thinking of you. That’s all.”

That was all. Deflated. Annoyed. Bothered by his insensitivity, knowing how I get impatient and that my minds tries to consider all possible outcomes. So he was thinking of me. I think of him hundreds of times each day.

But I move on. You won’t find me waiting up for another call promised but never delivered. End of story.