Below is the seventh segment of a new short story—’You Won’t Believe This’—never before published. As I say at its beginning, I’m telling you this incredible story to: “Test your core belief in the divine, or your firm conviction in reality and reason.” Enjoy the ride.
Suddenly, I felt a pull of unbearable sorrow deep inside me. It forced me to look back at the sea, still desperately searching for answers to my life’s big questions. I saw how the sun was kissing the sea goodnight, and concluded that everything streams into darkness, and every soldier must die alone, as we’d used to sing in the army. When darkness comes, I decided then and there, I would walk barefoot to the beach and enter my sea of sadness completely naked. I would swim deep and far, and plow the dark waters all the way to the “Voice of Peace” boat, or even deeper and farther than that, why not, in search of the dying sun, as I’d used to daydream as a child. I would go after her, yes I would: into the heart of darkness, into the depth of sea.
I stretched my hand to grab my lemonade glass, intending on giving it one more try, and that when the telephone rang. It shook me up all right, I tell you, since I didn’t expect anybody to remember I still existed. Hard to believe, but I didn’t have an answering machine back then, or a long enough cord in order to bring the intruding instrument out into the balcony. It could be my mother, I thought at first, inquiring whether I tasted her chicken already. Or maybe my father was calling, demanding to know when, if ever, I intend on coming back to the kibbutz. It was possible, also, that my son was the caller, eager to tell me about his new school. Even that semi-producer, what was his name, was perhaps calling me to ask if I did the rewrite already.
Either way, whoever was calling me was persistent enough to force me, after about three rings, to get up and finally stepped back into the living room, close by the sliding glass doors, and pick up the receiver.
“Hello…” I said.
The reply came from a different direction altogether. You won’t believe this, I know, but I heard a loud, strange noise coming from the balcony. And as I looked back, still holding the receiver to my mouth and ear, I saw a large cinderblock falling down from the ceiling above my balcony, landing heavily on my beach chair. It gave wings to a cloud of dust, and a fan of debris that was spreading around, shaking the lemonade in my glass.
Automatically, repetitively, I kept saying “Hello” into the mouthpiece. But here’s the kicker, my friends: no one answered back. Nor did I hear the hanging up of the phone on the other side. No static or heavy breathing could be heard, either, just dead silence. The kind—you know what I mean, don’t you? —that makes one certain that someone is actually there, on the other end of the line, listening to you very carefully.
Slowly, ever so slowly, I hung up the receiver and stepped back into the balcony. Dumbfounded, I stared at my beach chair, crashed to the floor under the weight of the cinderblock, right where I’d been sitting before the phone had rung and had called me away. I looked up at the ceiling, but saw no naked women there, just an empty hole, opening up into the darkening skies.
Hillel F. Damron @ hillelbridge.com 