Your Phone Rang

You were there for days. Weeks. Months. The hours started slipping and swirling together, just like the coffee you still brewed and mixed with milk every morning. There was no more work to be done, no more errands you needed to run out of the house for, and yet every morning without fail that cream would blossom like storm clouds in your green and yellow mug.

You were talking on the phone one night.

“No, Mom, I haven’t left the apartment in a week. How could I be sick?”

You were chewing on your fingernails. You hadn’t done that in a while. Not since the last time you read that book that left you curled up and crying on your bed at noon after you had finished it. Just like a babe woken up from a midday nap, not quite ready to face the afternoon heat or the friends that were heading to your apartment.

“What do you mean they won’t let you see her?”

It was pitch black outside but for some reason, you had decided to brew more coffee. You had seen the name of the caller light up your phone screen from across the room and you had sighed. You had picked it up then turned to your machine with a mumbled greeting. Who were you greeting then? Was it your mother? Or was it the acceptance that you wouldn’t be sleeping that night? Not with whose voice was cracking from the speakers of that phone.

“She can’t even hold a phone right now! How can they expect you to sit by and let her die alone?”

Your eyes were watering and brimming with anger and sadness. You had heard before that you wouldn’t be able to see your grandmother because of the pandemic, but you had expected that they would have a change of heart once a stroke had gripped her.

“When are you going to pick her up?”

Your voice had gotten quiet. Not even the corners of the room could hear your conversation anymore. You were staring at one of the corners like you wanted to be just like it. Oblivious to whatever news was ringing through that phone to you.

“Mom.”

You paused, like the next words were delicate. One breath and the dust might never settle on the floor in the same way again. Whatever fragile thing had stretched between you and your mother might never fit back together if you shattered it right now. Just say it. You knew you would regret it later if you didn’t bring it up now.

“Is it worth the risk? To bring her home?”

Your heartbeats were louder than your words at this point, like it was wanting to remind those deaf corners of the room that you were still alive.

“You have to go to work though. Your shifts are twenty-four hours long.”

It was a truth that your mother already knew, and you knew that. But even so. 

“You see sick people every day. Can you risk bringing that back to her? Especially now?”

As a firefighter, your Mom had worked long and hard your entire life, but that also meant that she was running out on EMS calls day and night. She was bound to have people calling and asking to be taken for the hospital because they thought they had caught the virus.

Once, you remembered her saying that she had been called out because someone had let a goose wander in through their back door, and they were too scared to make it leave the living room. She had said that the goose was just sitting there, flapping its wings every time Gordon Ramsey had yelled on the television. It had taken three of them to get the bird out, and one of her crew-mates had a nasty bruise on his ankle by the end of it.  

Now she was getting calls about women being knocked unconscious by husbands that were normally out of town for most of the week, now forced to remain indoors. Last week, she was treating cigarette burns on a woman’s arm and when the police had dragged the husband out, she could hear him asking the police how else he was supposed to deal with his anger.

After all, there was so much to be angry about right now.

“How can you even make this decision? I just wish…”

And there it was, the thing that you had held so close to your chest for these days. Weeks. Months. You wished. You wished that the virus was gone. You wished people would listen and stay inside. You wished that you could see your grandmother without being the reason she would die. You wished that you had not forgotten about illnesses outside of the virus while the world was in a panic. You wished that for a heartbeat when you had heard the news, you hadn’t been shocked to hear that strokes were still causing people to collapse and lose the use of their bodies. Their mouths. You just wished.

But wishing wouldn’t solve this.

If wishing worked half as well as they told you it would, then those falling stars you had been promised would have amounted to good grades and a kiss from that girl and a horse, if your memory was correct. But when push came to shove, all those nights you spent lying on your back in your back yard had been nothing more than you staring after rocks burning up in the atmosphere and hoping on their dust.

“I don’t know what to do, Mom.”

She probably felt the same way.

“No. Don’t worry. I wasn’t asleep.”

You stared at the untouched coffee cup on the table in front of you. All of the greens and yellows on the ceramic had turned to blues and purples in the shadows of the night. You blinked a few times and looked around the room. You had forgotten to turn on any of the lights. How long ago had the sun set? When was the last time you had turned on your overhead light?

Normally once night came, the only light came from your phone or your laptop or sometimes your lamp beside your bed. But only the lamp whenever you were feeling overwhelmed, and only a book that knew nothing about the world we were in today would calm you down again.

You always read when you were anxious. A dip into fantasy was all that you needed to take a fresh look at reality. Your mom used to scold you for reading like other mothers would scold children for sleeping in too late. You were going to waste your life rubbing the pad of your thumb over page corners and losing yourself in the inked words.

Your mother had stopped scolding you about reading since college, though. You didn’t really have time for reading in college, anyway.

“You want me to what?”

You were blinking again, confusion knitting your eyebrows together. What had she asked that made you look like Alice first stumbling into Wonderland?

“I’m not very good at telling stories, but I’ll try.”

You had never told a story before, not a real one. Not one like your mother used to whisper to you on stormy nights when the lightning and thunder would send you sprinting into her room and into her arms. 

What she was facing, what you were facing, it was a storm of a different kind, but a storm nonetheless.

“Once upon a time, there was a girl. A girl who lived on the edge of the world.

“She lived in a city of stone. Stone walls, stone houses, stone statues, and stone-hearted people.

“Even though the whole city was surrounded by the tallest of stone walls, higher than she could see, she knew that she was living at the very edge of the world.

You paused. Your mother asked a question from the other side of your phone.

“She knew she was on the edge of the world because when she would lay down and look up, the birds only came and went from one side of the city. They never passed over the wall of stone that hid where the sun would go down before night.

“She also knew because one time she had found a map. Now, this is where the story of our girl on the edge of the world gets interesting. You see, no one in her city of stone was supposed to have a map, but one day when she was on her way to buy fruit, she passed a piece of crumpled paper on the ground.

“It was no bigger than if she put her palms side by side, yet her palms held the world once she flattened the paper out.

“She looked at it right side up, then upside down, then sideways and sideways again. She wasn’t quite sure what it was, but on the right-hand side of it, down in the corner, was a small dot that had the name of her city of stone printed beside it.

“She thought back to one of the books that she had read, about a man who was on the hunt for a lost city and who had used a map to find it. Was this what he had meant by that? Was she holding a map just like the man who had seen and done so much?

“She could not help but smile, and yet she still folded the paper up and tucked it in her pocket, for she knew that the stone-hearted people of her stone city hated to be reminded of anything outside of their city. She knew that a map a reminder of everything outside of their city.

“Later, when she was alone, she pulled the paper out again and stared at that map. She wasn’t sure who had brought it into the city, or who had thrown it away, but she wasn’t sure that she really cared about that, anyway.

“She looked at the little dot and the name of her stone city again and saw that it was on the edge of the world, just like she had thought. The birds were not liars, after all.

“Then she looked again at the map. She looked left and then she looked up. Until she was staring at the whole world spread out before her. She had never even seen the names that were printed on the map before now.”

You grew quiet, the confidence you had gained while telling your story settling like coffee grounds at the bottom of your mug. Your mother didn’t say anything either. The corners had heard your story, but they were deaf once more.

Even as you whispered, “What do you think she felt when she looked at the world?”

What did you feel, when you saw the world through her eyes? Your eyes were misty, and you looked like you wanted to fall into the clouds of cream that were no longer blooming in your coffee cup.

“Do you think it is better for her to know the world and everything that she can never see? She is trapped within those stone walls, after all. 

“Or is it better that she was able to see the world, even if only from the crumpled lines of a map? All of it so untouchable, even with it right at her fingertips?”

You didn’t have an answer. Your mother didn’t either, and you knew that. You weren’t asking her for an answer, anyway.

You and your mom talked on the phone for a while after that and you never drank your coffee. It had gone cold by the time you had finished your story.

Then you hung up the phone, walked back to your room, plugged it in, and laid down in bed. You didn’t need to brush your teeth again. You hadn’t drunk the coffee.

You fell asleep.

Or you didn’t. And you thought about the edge of the world, and how you had been standing on the top of that Western wall for some time now. Days. Weeks. Months.

Even if you did fall asleep, you would wake up right on the precipice once more, wishing that you could grow wings of your own and be the first bird to fly over the edge and prove that the world was round.