Pillow Talk
Story Time: A Short Fiction
This is an original work subject to all copyright laws. He keeps her last voicemail on his phone the way others keep a yellowed photograph in a threadbare drawer: not on display, but within reach. He can’t delete it.
On Fridays, when the sky is ocean floor blue and the breeze is icy, he lies on his bed. He replays the voicemail in the same way: lights dimmed, whiskey sweating into a coaster, the phone against his ear like a small comfort animal .
Her voice is thin with worry and impatience, like a key stuck in a lock, “Hey. Just checking in. Please. Call me when you get this.”
Her sigh was barely audible. For a moment, the phone is quiet, like she’d waited for him to pick up at the last second. Then, a click. This is a ritual that feels like relief and solace. It’s all that he has left her.
It’s Friday night again, but tonight the voicemail is different. First, a little laugh, then static—then, as if she’d leaned closer to his ear, she whispered, “It’ll be fine, I promise.” Another small soft chuckle followed. Then—click.
He sits up in his bed. He looks at his glass, still half full. He examines his phone. Had he kept another voicemail and forgot? He finds only one still saved. He presses replay and waits for the rest, for the sentence to unfold the way sentences do when people are alive. Nothing comes.
He slows the clip until the hiss recedes and the whisper comes through plain, as if she were sitting right beside him: “It’ll be fine, I promise.” For a long, ridiculous second, it isn’t memory at all but presence—small, certain, true. He knows it cannot be new, yet it is. He does not search for logic. At dawn, he tucks the phone under his pillow— not to hide it, but to keep the small, impossible promise where he can feel it all day.
This is an original work subject to all copyright laws. No subscribe button here.