Oh The Heart Of It

• Matilda Mcburney, Grade 9
• Short Story
• 2017

The phone rang on its stand breaking the saturated silence causing the sleeping child to wake with a start, pulling the sheets around her slight body as if the threadbare material would offer protection against a threat.

Shaking sleep from her drowsy mind the girl slid from her bed recognizing the sound of a telephone calling her. The room she stepped from was velvety in its darkness while the corridor she moved towards was full of sharp white light.

Two people rushed past the little figure standing in the doorway, half in the light half in the dark, talking hurriedly in murmurs.

The child did not shrink back into the shadows, although she was scared of the adults in their powder blue clothes,still she stepped forward so she stood fully in the light which illuminated her waxen skin. The ringing became overpowered by beeping and distant wailing, still she walked with purpose, she knew her path.

The faint sound of the telephone lead her past open doors, a large family tightly crowded around a bed their bodies stopping any outsiders from looking in, yet the old man emitting dry racking sobs in the next room was all alone.

Each occupant of each room seemed to move so slowly to the girl, certainly none of them noticed as she darted past.

The building held an artificial stench, one the speeding child found suffocating, she reached the big front doors her breaths ragged, she pushed with all the might her little body could muster and the doors flew open slamming against the sides of the building.

The girl stumbled forward her feet leaving the cool, perfectly smooth surface of the linoleum floor and onto the uneven earth, still warm although the day's heat had faded. The sun shone on the child's upturned face, girl’s skin seemed to become rosy in the dusk light and she began to run, to run towards the still insistent ringing of a distant telephone.

It was that way for a while, the evening was quiet and as the girl ran she only heard the pounding of her bare feet against the earth and her sharp breaths, she ran until she couldn’t run any further then she ran some more the ringing growing ever closer, closer, closer.

She was running on the side of a deserted road when she fell to her knees in front of an ancient oak, the tree had deflated balloons tied to its branches and bunches of flowers taped somewhat brutally to its trunk.

Toys, flowers and photographs littered the base of the tree, they showed a man and a woman and a child, a child who now pulled a toy telephone out of the mess and lifted the receiver to her ear. The ringing stopped and the girl waited for her caller to greet her, for a mother to speak, a father to call to her. But, of course, the past can not speak and a toy telephone is only a toy.