The Phone

‘Never touch the phone’

That was the first lesson Rue received from her mother. While the other parents were busy helping with English and Arithmetic, she was taught the old rotary phone standing on its pedestal was to never be tinkered with. It had belonged to great-grandfather she was told, but her fascination only lingered so long as her defiance of the rule, she couldn’t care less where it had come from.

When the warning had been first issued, Rue took it with the same seriousness as she did everything else. Mere days later, she would come to learn the importance of those words, etched into her fingers courtesy of her father’s cane. The hand that had messed around with the phone deserved to be burned, he had insisted, but her mother thought a caning sufficed. That turned out to be a lie however, when she had taken her daughter by the shoulders, shaking until tears fell out, yelling over and over again about why Rue would ever defy her.

It only took days for the welts and wounds to heal, but the day she could finally open her door without wincing or crying was the one where glass finally covered the pedestal. Thereon, both she and the phone lived similar lives in that house - displayed for the gawkers, paraded around only to be locked back in again. The dinner table always grew silent when she took her place, even all the begging did not excuse her to her room. Instead, they ate, accompanied by heavy breathing. She knew better than to scrape the cutlery against her plate or chew loudly enough to announce her existence. She simply swallowed it all.

The house fractured, growing more silent every day. Her mother cried, hugging herself to sleep, arms refusing to budge even when her daughter tugged at them until she fell to the ground, covered in exhaustion and wrapped in a nightmare. Her father preferred the study, its dark walls lit up by the paltry fire, beside which he looked both more human and more monstrous than he otherwise did. Every night, the fire received fodder in the form of paper, always the same size, and smelling slightly of rose. It always reduced her to tears. She once hugged her mother, but was pushed away before she could discern the scent. But it was enough to recognise that it wasn't rose.

Her elder brother left when he was eighteen, with dwindled visits for three years until she herself was of the same age. The day she reached adulthood, Rue was ready. With all her belongings neatly set in a suitcase and a bag, she vowed to never look back. The boot slammed down to the sight of her mother peering from behind a white column, holding a sturdy piece of cardboard in her hand. Rue never understood the reasoning behind anything her parents did, everything was received with little to no pushback on her part, and the final gesture with the box was no less. Her mother said only one thing while handing it to her.

‘Never, ever, touch the phone’

Those last words didn’t matter now. Hands that would usually itch away for the fear of spiders dug through the boxes, gathering dust as they moved along. Rue wiped them on her pants, reaching for another box in the mess that her husband had brought in the day they had bought the house. She recognised perhaps ten items that belonged to her, from when her brother had hand-delivered them, the day he cleared out their childhood home. She had refused any part of the profits from the sale, settling for clutter she never requested.

Only a day ago had she received a frantic call from her brother, asking if she had seen a small cardboard box dressed like a gift, complete with a ribbon. She had wanted to tease him about not handing her her birthday gift properly, it being her thirtieth and all, but hearing him struggle to breathe, she shut herself up. Her hands had torn through the brittle and stuck to the damp ones, but she was not going to leave the room without locating the box tethered to the pink ribbon. When she had finally located it, her legs gave out with the same strength as the bottom of the old paper carton. A plethora of photographs hit the ground, a family wearing the faces of her own, yet completely unrecognisable.

They sat on the porch of the house, smiling. Her mother’s clone with her hands pressed around someone who looked like Rue, tickling so hard that tears were almost visible through the laminate. To their side sat a man and a boy with his arms around the man, the tussle doing nothing to hide the twinkle in their eyes. But strangest of all, was the tall girl who stood behind them all, arms wide and face frozen, as if asking who dared to take the picture without her. Rue had known the anonymous girl would be frozen in time even then, but she had not understood until her brother explained it all.

That second phone call ran repeatedly through her head as she finally caught a glint of gold in the nearly dark room. Her brother’s words echoed within her ears, the sorrow only amplified by the guilt coursing through her. Thoughts of her husband, most definitely in the kitchen preparing their dinner, were lost amongst the regret she had managed to build up in a matter of hours. The burden of this regret was hers alone, and she slowly pulled out the phone from its prison of a decade. It was no longer functional, but that was true of it even twelve years ago. A shiver ran through her as she placed a finger onto the number 2 and pulled. A satisfying clang resounded as the dial twisted back to its position, and she quickly dialled in a zero, before dialing in the numbers 0-4/2-0-0.

Her husband had already called out for her several times, his muffled footsteps now making their way across the corridor. Finger hovering over the zero, she took a deep breath and pressed down, twisting it one last time and shutting her eyes for the impact of whatever was to come.

They opened to a dull light, the sense quickly overtaken by a soft spring breeze that brushed her arm, and the smell of her mother’s freshly baked bread. A sigh of relief toppled out of her without any realisation, and she mentally thanked her father for writing the date on the back of each photograph, and whatever deity had saved that last box of photographs from his wrath. Finally settled to the light, her eyes immediately caught the young child reaching for the phone on the pedestal, randomly punching in the numbers she could reach. Instinct set in as she rushed forward, plucking the child away from her toy, only to immediately incur the fury of a five year old. Sniffles led to loud sobbing, and Rue knew that any minute, the stranger frozen in time would be making her way down the stairs to discover the scene.

Shushing the still crying child, Rue put her other trembling hand over the dial, forcing herself to remember what numbers she had pressed on that fateful day. Despite the shrieking getting louder, she could hear the footsteps inching forward. In a moment of impulse, she put her finger onto the number 1 and pulled hard, the clang and the reverb happened, but she was still standing. The footsteps only got louder, and this time, her heartbeat decided to join the party. Blinking the tears out of her eyes, she put finger onto what she hoped would be the final number and twisted.

Rue did not know if the stranger had made her way down, but she got a sight of her anyway. Because on a table just metres away, stood several framed photographs, of smiling children and loving parents. The frame that caught her eyes was of a girl, the same age as the crying one, grinning despite the missing tooth. She had always assumed it was her, and why her mother would hug that frame when the child herself existed, begging her for a hug every night. Now, she knew. Sisters did in fact, look alike as children.

She could not afford to open her eyes. She could be decades in the future, or the ice age for all she knew. Choking back the sob that she built in 2000, Rue forced herself to do it anyway, and was immediately greeted by bright sunlight. Using her hand as a shield, she looked down and braced for impact, only to be completely thrown off balance by a strong slap to her shoulder. With a gasp, she glanced up to discover her brother staring down, perplexed and obviously unamused, and her father struggling to balance the several boxes in his hand. In an instant, she was shoved out of the way, allowing them to work out the best way to arrange everything in the boot.

Confused and dazed, she took a step back, heel catching a stone in the process. Luckily, a pair of hands steadied her, squeezing the part of her arm they could reach. Turning around, she witnessed the very first smile her mother had given her in over twenty-five years. Rue wondered if she needed to get glasses with how fuzzy her vision was turning, but everything cleared up when a second pair of hands grabbed her shoulders, frowned and wiped away the wetness on her cheeks.

Her sister. Standing beside her, laughing with their mother about the youngest being a baby despite being eighteen. Through sniffles, she witnessed her father, and then brother, leaning down for hugs, finally rounded out with a group hug, which her sister sensibly opted out of. The keys to the car were handed to Rue, but realisation dawned on the face of both the ladies as her brother tried to usher her away. Her mother stopped a waddling elder sister and ran into the house, coming back with an ornate box that took up the space of her entire arm. She slowly walked towards the car, handing the contents over to Rue. Sharing a look with the family waiting behind, she turned and whispered just one sentence.

‘You know the drill love. If there is ever a need - never hesitate to use the phone’