Marylyn murmured “good night” through the phone, and Hank fired back a curt “Night,” thumb smashing the end call button before her rejection could hit—just a silent void now, no echo of the old days when a handset’s clunk marked the end. Gone was the heft of plastic in hand, the small speaker and microphone perched on twin buttons you could slyly press to cut a call short, the weight of the receiver dropping with a final thud. In 2025, rejection didn’t clang or crash; it slipped in quiet as a shadow.
Hank stared at his screen, the timer locked at 15 minutes, 43 seconds, hovering above her profile picture. That day in San Diego—her head tipped back, hair spilling like molten gold, heavy with its own shine, and that mischievous smile teetering above a stubborn chin, holding it all in place. He swiped the image away, eyes flicking to the alert bar. Nothing. No fresh demands vying for his focus. He settled the phone into its charging stand, where it morphed into an amber night-light clock, second hand ticking tirelessly, hour and minute hands trailing in its wake.
The lamp snuffed out, and darkness swallowed him whole. Sleep pulled him under, where he wrestled demons in jagged nightmares, only to surface at 4 a.m.—his weekday ritual, and Sunday offered no reprieve. He reached for the phone, its glow a lifeline through the pitch-black trek to the bathroom. A message from Marylyn blinked on the screen. He didn’t tap it. Not yet.
Next came the Keurig button, pressed with practiced ease. The drip clanked against the bottom of his metal Yeti cup—a Christmas relic from his kids, five years old now—its empty chime softening as liquid pooled, shifting from the sharp, high notes of a piano’s upper 44 keys to the brooding lower 44. Hank snatched the cup and shuffled to the armchair, phone in one hand, coffee in the other, armed for the dawn and the ticking bomb he’d have to defuse. Bomb squad at 4:15 on a Sunday? A tall order for any soul still tethered to the night.
The message glared up at him: “I sent an ‘I love you’ moments after we hung up!? Why didn’t you answer?”
Hank flipped the phone face-down, cupping his coffee with both hands, leaching warmth from the steel.
He thought.
In his mind, a long fuse sputtered to life, tethered to a cartoonish black bomb stamped BOMB in bold white letters, straight out of Wile E. Coyote’s playbook. The spark danced closer.
He hadn’t seen the message—not because it wasn’t there, but because he hadn’t been looking. The past few years had worn them thin, but these last months? A collapse he couldn’t slow, didn’t know how to steer. Intimacy had slipped away—he couldn’t recall the brush of her fingertips, the yielding softness of her lips. Calls thinned out, soured when they happened, and were dodged more often than not, each one a spin of Russian roulette with a bullet Hank wasn’t keen to face any given day.
“I wasn’t looking for the message,” he muttered to himself, tasting the words.
Had he ever looked before? Or had it been so blatant, so stitched into the space between them, that missing it wasn’t possible? He toyed with the riddle, summoned a courtroom in his skull—lawyers for the defense and plaintiff squaring off—then kicked them all out before the gavel fell.
No. It’d just been there, he decided. Love’s like that—you know it when it blinds you, when it hums in your bones. He’d felt it once, so spotting it was child’s play. Now? Now it was gone, and picking it up meant hauling a mess of baggage with it—grimy, heavy shit he didn’t grab without a damn good reason.
He lingered there, draining the last bitter dregs from his cup, then rose to brew another. Back braced against the counter, the kitchen still cloaked in 4:20’s gloom, the Keurig sputtered to life, filling the Yeti with something he could sip and soldier through. The phone’s screen glow was his only beacon, a lighthouse in the murk, as he weighed his next move on this quiet battlefield.
Options ticked by. He sank back into the chair, thumbs—clumsy battering rams—hammering the tiny keyboard, covering three or four letters at a time. He deleted more than he typed, cursing the slog of saying what needed saying.
He lied.
Phone was on silent. Didn’t hear it. Sorry. Tacked on an “I love you” for good measure.
Pressed send.
And waited. The fuse burned shorter, the bomb maybe a step farther off. The clock on the wall ticked, powered by a double-A battery, relentless. Hank drank.
BB Grey--musings 
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