The phone rang. Despite the sharpness of the ringtone, resonating more urgently after each short break, it stayed unanswered. The high pitched sound was heard five times, ten times, up to 20 times before silence filled the house again. The imagined echoes of indignation, sparked by the ignored call, hung in the air.
But contrary to what it seemed like, it hadn’t been ignored. It had been heard, and it had sparked hope. Such a strange emotion to feel in an utterly despairing moment as this. The otherwise banal occurrence of an unsuccessful search for communication had the potential to turn into a blessing. The mere lack of correspondence as a beginning of a message to the other side.
Water fell from the sky in a cold torrent of muscle-clenching stabs, hundreds of tiny pricks battering her face and bare limbs in an relentless manner. She tried envisioning it to be like the stream of hot relaxation, as provided by her shower earlier. Her mind couldn’t be fooled. Shivers assaulted her body, but that was the only movement it could make.
She tried to dig in her fingers to the the lawn underneath. Nothing she did could force any sort of action in her sprawled out figure. Part of her clung to the desperate joy of still being able to feel the grass and the mud caressing her skin. She felt the neighbour’s kid’s baseball poking her lower back like a festering tumor. The phone started ringing again. Hope.