The Dialer
1.
I found the Dialer
disguised as beach glass. I don't know who possessed who first. It's
like the chicken or the egg parable both happened. I became enchanted
with each dot on its surface. I heard a pulse from it which, seconds
later echoed in my body as if I'd inherited a second heart.
We began to sleep
together this Dialer and myself. I figured it needed rest when I did,
so I made a special pillow for it. I chose jade colored silk with threads
of gold stitched into its ribs from the south of India, where the artisans
practiced their craft in the ways of ancient people before them. This
ancestral link to a past felt significant for me and more so for the
Dialer.
Its pulse grew
stronger over the days, as if it knew the magic stitches woven into
its pillow. And I became more insomnia prone, which worried my doctor
at the Home". He gave me little white pills. I sunk into a deep
slumber, so deep for a time I no longer heard the Dialer's pulse.
I complained about it and the doctor said I showed worsening delusional
signs. Yes, I feared the pulse within me died, while the one without
a body still beat.
One night I rested my head
on the Dialer's pillow and noticed soft unintelligible murmurs, a woman's
voice caught in the glass. Days passed, lightness and darkness I saw
out my window, a mere wrinkle of existence, not more and still the woman
murmuring unintelligible words there beside me cloistered in the Dialer.
The doctor worried I wouldn't
leave my pillow to walk the grounds, but nothing could stop me from
resting by the Dialer's side. Trapped by her incantation within
the glass, I rested 'til the day I'd know her words.
2.
I traced the solar system
in my sleep...small planets, stars, roads to heaven and back. When I
awoke my room glowed. I drew the blinds and reached for the Dialer,
but my hand met empty air. No longer in its usual resting place on the
jade pillow next to mine, I tossed off the quilted blanket, the sheets,
even my clothes. Naked on the bare bed I stretched and reached my hand
underneath the pillow.
Jolts of electricity singed
the hairs on my hand. I coughed and backed away from the bed and stood
in front of the window needing air. The window creaked in protest. My
fingers touched the glass, "they touched the glass," I said the phrase
out loud, as if needing to prove to myself the vocal chords, mine, still
existed.
But no air came in from
the outside. And still I heard the creaking sound, though the window
never opened. My fists hit the glass, "knuckles red, this is real,"
I said as relief surged through me and still I heard the damned creaking
sound. I pressed on the window latch. It didn't budge. Wedged within
it was the Dialer. It glowed, a shade more yellow than before, as if
glass could smirk.
3.
Sparks flew from the window.
The glass ignited. With lips trembling, I said, "she moves, she moves."
The room grew golden and my knees bucked. I slumped to the floor
and envisioned flames devouring me. A smoldering ember I too would become.
Pins and needles, the dumbest
expression for the strangest sensation of temporarily imposed paralysis
filled my knees. I blinked and blinked and the rush of blood came forth
pulsating with much fist pounding on my legs. I reached for the
phone jolted by my self imposed pain and dialed 911 and reported a fire
or sorts; the most alive thing I'd done in days.
And yet, I heard the familiar
creaking coming from the window, so like the sound the wind makes in
a rainstorm when your umbrella folds in on itself. I covered my ears,
"Just whose fool do you think I am," and the creaking changed tune.
Higher and louder in pitch and if I didn't know better I'd say it moaned
or shall I say she moaned.
I glared at the window.
The Dialer wedged their last night of its own accord or so it seemed
before, now came crashing to the floor. I watched as it spun counter
clock wise and called for the doctor who gave me the little white pills.
One or both of us needed our head checked and soon I yelled at the spinning
glass now moving clockwise.
4.
Her spark dissolved when
the fireman entered my room last night. They called me "a crazy
loon."
"But, I'm not," I shouted
back at them. The doctor threatened sensory overload with offers of
movies and drama enactments in the Rec room, all in the hopes I'd stop
believing my dreams were real. I questioned, "What about her," and gestured
to the droplets of tears collecting in the windowsill.
"Just like the fire," he
said, "It's not there; you best take your pills."
The blue pills rolled around
my mouth. I gulped them down and could feel her tuning in and said to
the doctor, "Does a pulse not beat in you though I can't see your heart?
Does your stomach not churn with revulsion at the sight of me here telling
you what's dialed in?"
"All truisms," he said
and left the room. And I mopped up her tears with my shirt.
5.
Faint bells chimed. Sunlight
pelted my pillow. My cheeks felt flushed, like waking from a nap at
the beach. I squinted in the light and closed the blinds as a voice
said, "I prefer the sun, but suit your self."
"Huh, who are?"
"The name's Tinkerbell.
I came in a meadow to paint and stumbled upon the glass vase there in
the reeds. They say it traveled the Nile."
"They who?"
"You should know. You have one of their shards. They're the wise ones,
who gave the vase its voice. Broken in pieces, its power, they hoped
would be reduced for it amplified the world revealing secrets."
"What kind of secrets?"
She giggled and said I must dream.
"Of what, my sweet paramour?"
But as I said those words, one word bopped into my barely conscious
brain,
"rendezvous."
The French on my American tongue came out "Rent a view," and that I
did and then some.
6.
A field of butterflies in bright orange danced on my eyelids. Ah...dreamland.
The image came in even breaths, not that the shrink wanted my mind to
fly away like that. He didn't visit me there, thank goodness. Ah, but
Tinkerbell did. She told me I found magic, if I discovered her.
"Hhmmph... Just my luck to find a self-possessed entity. Possessed,
is right! "Just whose dream is this?"
"Mine," she so distinctly fluttered. I asked why she strutted into my
subconscious. She said with her antenna all crisscrossed, "I can't intercept
anymore. I'm loosing their dreams."
"But you have mine."
"Only momentarily and with you it's simple, you have my frequency. You
think butterfly and I appear."
"Awfully confident, aren't you?"
"Awful is right. The truth is no other butterfly would come unless they
are
fairy dusted."
"Wait, I saw your entourage."
"Maybe you saw what you wanted and what I wanted. But the fairy dust
is drifting. Even now in your dream I hear the electronic whir. In pure
dream; the good old days your alarm sound would never bust through."
"And now..."
My alarm blared. I threw it against the wall. It crashed on the floor
and orange peels cascaded off the night stand. I wiped the rind and
noticed how bits clung to my fingers. I blew at my fingertips and the
rind scattered in the stream of light flowing in from the window. I
called out for Tinkerbell, but she said nothing.
I grabbed the alarm and mashed it on the Dialer. Blood squirted from
my
hand. I heard weeping and Tinkerbell's wings appeared, malformed and
batting at me. And the Dialer; the Dialer glowed and then
went black. I felt dizzy and collapsed on the bed.
7.
A scent of hay and daffodils greeted me. The sheet beside me moved.
I glanced at the Dialer, no color shone from its surface.
"But how can this be?"
Tinkerbell said, "I like daffodils. They're the best out of all flowers;
they hold the most sunlight."
"But the sunflower is even more so."
The curtains shook. I worried I'd offended her. But we relished in the
moment. Sheets became her. They gave her body shape where there was
nothing other than the hints of breasts of hips and shoulder blades
and thighs and she; she found all of me. A sheet billowed off the bed,
making waves and I swore we were levitating when I heard a thump on
the door. The nurses' barged in and grabbed hold of the sheet. They
tugged at it and it flopped onto the floor. I heard the flap of a blood
pressure strap. A nurse said my pulse ran high and wanted an explanation
for my behavior.
I simply said," It's her." The scent of daffodils and hay faded so fast
I wondered if it was ever there as I stared at the windowsill where
an orange peel contorted into wings. It began to vibrate, "Come join
me." I perched my arms on the sill and longed to fly away with her.
But the nurses held me back as my face pressed against the glass.
And Tinkerbell said, "I'll visit you in dreams, I promise."
Biography
Julie Ann Shapiro is a freelance writer, short story
author, Pushcart Nominee and novelist. She lives in the coastal community
of Encinitas, California. Her first novel, Jen-Zen & The One Shoe
Diaries will be published this fall by Synergebooks.com.
Published stories and essays have appeared in the San Diego Union Tribune,
North County Times, Los Angeles Journal, Pindeldyboz, Sacred Waters/Fire:
(Adams Media 2005), Story South, Word Riot, Opium Magazine, Insolent
Rudder, Cezzane's Carrots, Mad Hatters Review, Ghoti Magazine, Spoiled
Ink, Void, Elimae, Footsteps to Oxford, Salome, Skive, The 2nd Hand,
Millennium Shift, Mega Era Magazine, Science Fiction and Fantasy World,
Green Tricycle, Long Story Short, All Things Girl, Ultimate Hallucination,
The Glut, Somewhat, Uber, Moon Dance, The Quarterly Staple, Journal
of Modern Post, Rumble, Long Story Short, Cellar Door Magazine (Spring
and Summer Issues 2005), Edifice Wrecked, Espresso Fiction, Red, ISM
Quarterly and other magazines.
