Call Me Away

I sail by nebulae, thrust in reverse order across the oldest parts of the universe, moving toward the source of all things in the afterbirth of creation, where gravity teases constituent elements—those noble gasses not yet noble—gaming about until chaos is imbued with the order of fractal geometry, to empower nature into an orderly image by the hand of God while millenia pass by in seconds. This is where God decided to send me, to the nursery of creation.

What had I done to deserve this honor? I had again chosen the same $50 scratch-off ticket I picked every Friday, on payday, like so many Fridays before, to refresh my perspective on life when watching my hourly earnings creep up in increments of twenty five cents every six months as the years went by. And it was on that Friday that stands out from the others, when I went against instincts and bought a fifty dollar ticket once again. Instincts told me that being laid-off earlier that day was a good time to cease the tradition and save the $50 instead of donating it to the state once again only for the thrill of scratching the ticket, for the tradition of possibility, a brief imagining of what I would do with the $50,000 jackpot, of how complete my future would be if I could escape my fate as the occasional employee of the month at the shelter. How foolish I was to think a decadent vacation would bring me closer to making sense of my mortality, of my purpose in life. Handing out meals to the homeless had given me purpose all those years, so why did I seek more? I didn't. The lottery ticket was an appeasement of my dormant sense of adventure. It was someone, or something, which sought a greater truth for me. It was only when I realized my life had been wasted that I became compelled to seek this out.

I almost returned the ticket because of the unusual shimmering depth of the scratch- off coating, but I only wished to share the discovery. I returned inside to the convenience store checkout counter. Enthralled by the luster, the opaque depth of crystal, of diamond powder sprinkled over a sand-blasted undercoat of gold leaf and silver, I had to share this with the clerk. Angels paint God's toenails this color, plasmic discharge of the most divine of heavenly souls the undercoat. But as mesmerizing as it was, standing before him, I was inclined to ask for my money back over this defective ticket. But the moment I made eye contact with the clerk, a phone rang. The young man looked confused. He looked below him, dumbfounded from the sound emerging beneath him, and involved me, saying, "Uh, we don't have a phone in here, at least not one that's worked in like three decades."

I shrugged, about ready to mention the lotto ticket I'd like to return, then the phone stopped ringing. The ringing had dug itself into our ears by this point, the absence of it as confusing as the strange coloration of the scratch boxes. So we both found ourselves caught in the moment, staring at the cavity of countertop below the man's waistline as it ceased to sound the antique noise. The battered cabinet persisted with symbolism, in the silence.

"Okay, you witnessed that I'm not hearing things. That ring sounded like something out of some old movie from the 80's. Ah, the flippin' 80's! Don't you just love that stuff?"

"Yeah, uh, a little before both our times, especially yours, and yes, you're not hearing things. That was very strange. A phone like that would have been replaced a long time ago and we don't even have landlines anymore."

We both guffawed over it, then again, the ringing appeared. This time we were both spooked, leveled into this moment as human and human, not patron and customer. Instead of me reacting to him, we reacted to it. Fused together in this bizarre experience, feeling raw from having lost my job less than an hour ago, I threw up my hands. Awash in mania, I spoke to him like a brother. "Well, let's answer it!"

The man's face twisted about with uncertainty, but under the spell of my visceral outburst, he took a chance. He leaned down and procured an old phone caked in dust, the dust covering a gooey graveyard of this partially hydrogenated, sugary environment, like every saliva-soaked piece of candy that had been tossed beneath the counter across the decades, after ricocheting off the inside of all walls of the counter, always landed on the phone. Rings on a gumball tree. The clerk used two empty boxes to press the phone's sides, so as to lift it atop the counter without touching it, revolted by what little he could see of it in the dim light. "Man, I did not know this was here."

"Looks like nobody knew it was here."

"Should we touch it? They should just quarantine us now for even being near this thing. I didn't know gummy bears could mold over."

"Well they can, and they do. Answer it!"

"Shit, I ain't paid enough."

"A job's a job. At least you got one," I declare, pounding my fist on the counter, brother to brother. The guy raises his hands, imploring I may be less of a brother to him than I think, but the bad lotto ticket flashes in the fluorescent light as my fist hits the counter, causing a blinding effect for us both.

"Hey man, this is all getting real weird."

I scurry over to the meatless hotdogs and leap back, a wad of paperless napkins in my hand. "Here, cover the filth, and answer the phone. It's not gonna quit ringing until you answer it. That's how this works."

"Okay, okay, you're always so quiet when you come in here," he says, with a sense of pride, as he projects, "And it's good to see you take a stand."

"It's a special day. Answer the phone."

"Right, right, okay," he reasons, putting the wad of napkins over the putrid artifact as he picks up the receiver. The cord uncoils with a sound of crackling bursts of dislodged sugar.

"Hello," the man asks. The voice is quick to respond. Immediate confusion overwhelms the man, but he asks to confirm with me over the hundreds of times he's seen my name on the contactless card screen, "You're Simmons, right?"

"What, wh…," and fear is quick to wash over me, reminding me of how vulnerable I feel, how raw are my emotions from having lost my job so unjustly: something for which I had prided myself over the years, that my identity had been fused to. But it looks like it was only fused to a bureaucrat's whim and numbers on a spreadsheet because the revamped tax code had allowed for a megacorporation to buy-out our non-profit like it was a competing business, as if we didn't provide a valuable community service.

I took the phone, shedding the napkin, getting close to the grunge, pressing it right up against my check to feel decades of life's dirty secrets surging through my skin, exposed now to all that truth. 

I said nothing. I only listened, and all I heard was a wholesome, motherly voice telling me to, "Scratch the ticket."

So I did, and as a spray of bullets powdered the windows, I was free. We were free. The clerk had not suffered so much to earn his place in the stars. Where he went, I do not know. I cashed in on the ticket without ever handing it to him and the cops never found a phone.