Return to Sender

Clara let the phone ring.

It was muscle memory at this point, her fingers hovering over the screen until the call died on its own.

Probably a telemarketer or one of those charity lines that still had her old name on file. Mrs. Elias Hayes. As if she hadn’t legally dropped it three winters ago.

The ringing stopped. Silence settled over the living room and Clara let out the breath trapped in her lungs.

The library was closed for renovations, so she spent the day cataloging her books at home.

Sorting them by category, then author, then plot twist. Maybe she’d get around to reading her favorites for old time’s sake.

The phone rang again. Same number. No caller ID.

This time, Clara stopped. She held the phone in her hand, the vibrations traveling through her skin.

Charity numbers didn’t call twice…

She studied it. Then answered.

“Hello?”

A long pause. A few stray breaths. Then a voice she had memorized and buried a hundred times over.

“Clara? Jesus. I’ve been calling you for hours.”

She sat down slowly, forced by the hands of gravity.

“…Elias?”

He laughed. Confused. “Who else would it be?”

Clara didn’t answer right away. Her pulse drummed against her ribcage, fighting to escape the vessel that carried it for thirty-five years.

This didn’t make sense.

She stared out the window. Blinked a few times. Tried to decipher reality from an auditory hallucination.

“Clara?” His voice sharpened. “Are you okay? You sound weird.”

“You’re… Elias, you’re supposed to be—” She stopped. Her throat tightened around the word. Gone.

“What are you talking about?” he said. “I just left the hotel. I’ve been trying to get a signal for hours. You said to check in when I got to the trailhead. Why weren’t you picking up?”

She closed her eyes. All those missed calls.

The trailhead.

Five years ago. June. A remote patch of Andes mountains where the last message he sent was a photo of a lizard sunbathing on a rock. Miss you. Wish you were here.

She had that photo printed on the inside cover of a book she never lent out.

“This isn’t funny,” she whispered. “I don’t know who this is, but—”

“Clara.” He was serious now. A familiar sharpness. “This isn’t a joke. I made it to the trailhead.”

A long pause.

“What’s going on?” Elias asked. Frustration and concern bled through his tone.

She stood up too quickly. Her knee knocked into the coffee table, sending a stack of soggy poetry chapbooks to the floor. “What date is it?”

“Um. June 17th.”

“What year?”

He paused. “What? Clara, are you—”

“What year, Elias?”

“2020.”

The room shrank into the void of her inhales and exhales. Her legs gave out. She sat on the floor, the phone still to her ear.

He kept talking. “Are you sick? Should I come back? You’re freaking me out.”

She could hear wind behind him. The crunch of gravel. Birds.

And underneath it all, static. Soft, but building. Like the line wouldn’t last long. Stretched too thin.

“Listen,” Clara said, heart in her throat. “You’re not going to understand this, but you disappeared. On that trip. They never found your body. It’s 2025, Elias.”

He didn’t laugh.

He didn’t speak.

He just breathed. A fragile, disbelieving sound.

“I’ve—I’ve been calling,” he finally said. “All day.”

She stared at the screen.

Call duration: 00:03:46.

And then—just like that—the line went dead.

CALL #2

The phone stayed in Clara’s hands long after the call dropped. She held it so tight her knuckles turned pale.

She had imagined hearing his voice so many times.

In dreams. In old voicemails she couldn’t delete. In the videos of his old expeditions.

But this… this was different.

He was there.

Or somewhere.

She didn’t move. Tears soaked into her cheeks and pooled in the hollow above her lips. She didn’t even wipe the wetness away.

Just waited. Frozen. Breath shallow.

It rang again. Unknown Number.

She answered without breathing.

“Clara?” Elias again. Louder this time. More wind. “Thank God. Where the hell have you been? I’ve called like six times.”

Her vision tilted.

“You called earlier,” she said. “We talked. You said it was June 17th, 2020.”

A pause.

“I haven’t talked to you yet. I just got to the overlook. The signal’s crap. Hold on.”

Ruffling. Shuffling. The sound of him adjusting the phone, shielding it.

Clara’s stomach tied in so many knots it formed a withered rope.

He spoke again, lower. “I don’t know what’s going on, but you’re scaring me. You sound like you’ve been crying.”

“I have,” she whispered.

“I’m going to send you a picture, okay? Just so you know I’m really here.”

“No. Elias, wait—”

A ping. Her old phone vibrated in her hand, a picture blinking into her messages.

She opened it.

Elias. Standing on the narrow ridge she remembered from the search reports. Same shirt, same camera strap across his chest. But something was wrong.

The clouds behind him blurred and smeared. And the trees? Their shadows weren’t correct. Not with the position of the sun in the photo.

“What’s around you?” she asked.

He sniffed. “A weird fog. Some type of storm building.”

She zoomed in. Tried to find any identifying feature.

“Clara, I feel like I’m losing time. I tried to record a message for you earlier but when I played it back, it was… it was you.”

She pressed the phone closer to her ear. “Elias, listen. You’re caught in something. A loop. Some kind of feedback between now and then. I don’t know how it’s happening, but the calls… they’re bleeding through.”

His breath caught.

“The formula, it wasn’t right.”

Clara’s eyebrows drew together.

“What? The formula? I don’t understand.”

He said something else, but the static to voice ratio became distorted. She couldn’t put the words together.

And then—

“Clara?”

A second voice. Softer. Echoed. Her own voice, from earlier.

“I’ve—I’ve been calling,” the echo said. “All day.”

She froze. On Elias’s end, silence.

And then the line dropped. Again.

THE BOX

Clara stood in the center of the living room, still holding the phone, her ears ringing with phantom static.

Then she moved.

Not quickly. Slowly. Like someone trudging through molasses.

She grabbed the step stool and climbed it to the top shelf of the hallway closet. Clara pulled out random board games and trinkets, throwing each one to the floor below.

In the very back, wedged between a collapsed gift bag and an old box fan, was a cardboard box sealed in duct tape.

RETURN TO SENDER

Written in Elias’s looping, distracted scrawl.

She had shoved it there after the funeral, which wasn’t really a funeral at all. Just pictures. Memories. An urn filled with ash that didn’t belong to him.

She didn’t remember the box’s contents. Not because she couldn't, but because she didn’t want to.

Clara lowered herself to the floor and set the box down, slicing the tape open with her library card.

Inside: a mess of Elias-shaped things.

- A half-filled journal with a broken spine. - A film camera that still smelled faintly of pine and metal. - A wrinkled envelope labeled POSSIBLE DATA FEEDBACK. - A flash drive in a plastic bag. - A waterlogged field notebook warped into a permanent grimace.

And at the very bottom, a printed spreadsheet marked with timestamps, dates, and… coordinates.

Clara’s stomach dropped. Some of the coordinates matched where the calls were showing up on her phone’s metadata.

One entry was circled in blue ink:

June 17, 2020 — 14:06:13 — SIGNAL SPIKE — SUNSPOT FLARE INTERFERENCE — EQUATION FAILING TO RESOLVE

Underneath that:

“Try the resonance formula instead. If the theory’s right, we won’t be able to control where the signal lands, but we might be able to reach it.”

“Note: Limit contact. Any conversation longer than 3 mins creates recursive risk.”

Her breath caught.

Her first call with Elias had lasted three minutes and forty-six seconds.

Her hands shook as she flipped open the journal. A page in the middle was dog-eared and brittle from time.

The ink had bled, but one line was still legible:

The signal can’t tell time the way we do. It just wants to finish the loop. It’s not just noise anymore. It’s choice.

Clara closed the journal. Shut her eyes tight. Tried to remember any equation or logic she could from a career she left behind.

Signal. Time loop. Interference.

All at once, she gasped and pulled her eyes wide open.

Something was trying to escape.

And it was using her voice to navigate.

THE OBSERVATORY

The drive to Pine Ridge Observatory took an hour.

Clara operated in a hypnotic state. The roads blurred. She stopped and accelerated at lights she didn’t remember.

It was common to drive without consciously driving, but this felt different.

The sky was low when she pulled into the gravel lot, heavy with clouds that threatened rain any second.

The telescope dome sat like a rusted eye, half-lidded and forgotten. Everything felt like it had been waiting. Idle.

Reina Cho met her at the side entrance. Lab coat over sweats. No makeup. The same tired eyes Clara remembered from a decade ago, sharp behind glasses that kept sliding down her nose.

“I thought you’d burned this bridge,” Reina said, arms crossed.

Clara held up the box.

“Elias didn’t die.”

That was enough.

****

Inside, Reina spread the documents across the cracked lab table, eyes darting.

“This is impossible. These files were sealed—confiscated after Elias vanished. And this—” She tapped the spreadsheet. “—isn’t our original formula. He modified it. Radically. What even is this variable? R-Tau delta?”

Clara didn’t answer.

She chewed her nails down to the bits, stopping only when the familiar sensation ricocheted in her jeans pocket.

She pulled out her phone and dropped it between them.

Unknown Number. Incoming Call.

Reina blinked. “You’re joking.”

“Answer it,” Clara said.

Reina hesitated, then answered.

“…Hello?”

This time, the static droned instantly. Louder. Not just a hum. A voice underneath it, too.

“Clara?”

But it wasn’t Elias. Not exactly.

The voice was deeper. Slower. Like Elias underwater, or dreaming. A corrupted version. A signal crushed into fragments.

“ClaraChoClaraChoClaraCho—”

Reina recoiled, held the phone away. “What is this?”

Clara took it back. “Let it keep talking.”

The voice shifted. In and out.

“Time is breaching. You shouldn’t be—”

Crackle. Pop.

“Three minutes. That’s the rule. After that, I begin to remember you.”

Clara’s blood ran cold. The voice shifted again. Closer to her own this time.

“I missed your voice, Clara.”

She stepped back.

Reina’s eyes widened. “It’s… it’s learning. From the calls.”

The signal distorted, then cleared, just for a second.

“If you keep answering,” the voice whispered, “I’ll find you again.”

Then: A sound far worse than fingernails on a chalkboard. Metal folding inside itself.

And the call dropped. The women looked between each other, chests rising and falling erratically.

“That,” Reina said, gripping the phone tight. “That was not Elias.”

“No.”

Clara shook her head.

“But it knows Elias.”

CLOSING THE LOOP

They spent the night running models.

Reina calculated the decaying orbit of the satellite. They had one shot left. One last spike in the magnetic field that could carry Elias’s voice across time, and then the window would close. Forever.

No more voice. No more Elias.

Clara didn’t sleep. She kept imagining losing him — again.

She sat in the observatory’s control room, fingers wrapped around a mug of cold coffee, staring at the timestamp in the spreadsheet Elias had circled.

14:06:13.

The last moment.

Reina looked over. “If we redirect the signal, we might be able to sever the loop. Scramble it. Stop the recursion.”

“But he won’t hear me again,” Clara said.

Reina nodded. “And you won’t hear him.”

Silence.

Then Clara shook her head. “No. We don’t break it.” She pulled the journal closer. “He wrote it himself: It’s not just noise anymore. It’s choice.”

She glanced up.

“If I talk to him, it means I was the voice he heard. I was the reason he kept trying. I don’t want to erase that.” Clara pointed to the notes again. “He can make it out.”

Reina looked at her for a long moment. “You’ll never get another call.”

“I know.”

THE FINAL CALL

2:06 PM.

The observatory trembled from solar interference. The screen turned the entire room blue. The satellite pinged once. A fleeting shrill.

Then, the line opened.

Clara answered.

No static this time. Just Elias, calm and even for the first time in twenty-four hours.

“You stayed,” he said.

She nodded. Even though he couldn’t see her. Maybe he could sense it.

“I think I’m out,” he said. “Or I will be. I’m not sure yet. Everything feels untethered.”

Pause.

“But I heard you. That day. I knew you were real.”

Her throat ached. “You were always real to me.”

A soft breath on the line.

Then he asked, gently: “What year is it?”

“2025.”

Another pause.

“That’s… good,” he said. “It means we made it.”

Their breaths danced in the space between.

“Are you happy, Clara? Did you get that Nobel Prize you worked so hard for?”

No. She quit astrophysics the day he died and spiraled into a world of safety. A world of fiction.

Clara smiled past the tears.

“Yes, I am, and yes, I did.”

A sigh of relief on the other end.

“Good, that’s good.” Elias laughed. “I love you Clara.”

Hearing that brought her back to reality. She clutched the phone tighter. Wished she could be there with him. Wished this call didn’t have to end.

“Will I ever see you again?”

“No,” Elias said. “But you’ll get something.”

Static surged. Almost warm now. Familiar.

“Don’t answer the next call,” he said. “Just… don’t.”

Click.

ONE WEEK LATER

Clara woke up to a ping on her laptop. An old, dormant email account she hadn’t used in years.

From: Elias Hayes Sent: June 18, 2020 Scheduled Delivery: May 21, 2025 Subject: It worked.

The message had no body. Only an attachment.

She opened it.

A photo. Elias, older. Smiling. His brown hair now peppered. Standing outside the Pine Ridge Observatory with a timestamp from two years in the future.

Below it:

Coordinates. And a note, handwritten and scanned:

Don’t answer the next call. Let it echo. Let it end. But know that I’m out there. I’m alive.

Clara stared at the screen until her eyes blurred.

Then she stood up. And for the first time in five years, she opened the window.