Bereft
At night, and sometimes during the day, the phone rings and it's him, and his voice sounds so far away, but no longer in pain, and the people in her support group tell her these are ADCs (After-Death Communications), and that it's normal, or at least she's not crazy, but what she really wants to know is why, if he's going to bother to call at all, he doesn't say something more important, why, for example, he calls to tell her he hates her shoes, or that she doesn't really need another set of candlesticks; and these calls are particularly annoying when she hears, at her Wednesday night meeting, that other men are calling to report on the whereabouts of missing documents, or to confess to hidden bank accounts, and so lately, when she sees on the caller ID that it's him, she's tempted not to pick up.
©Stephanie Harrison, first appeared in Quarterly West