The phone ringing in the night is a demon screaming.

As a kid, my parents drilled into me that people don’t call in the middle of the night unless its bad news. I don’t think that we ever had one of those calls when I was a kid—news of a death in the family, or a similar tragedy—but the tenet was still in effect.

So now when the phone rings at an odd hour I expect the worst. So far, it’s always been a night-owl friend calling to say hello or someone miscalculating the time difference. “Oh, it’s 3 am there? I thought it was 9…sorry!”

But this morning at 5:40 the phone rang and I didn’t get to it in time. Our current configuration of phones is such that our answering machine isn’t working anymore. So I don’t know who it was or what it was about.

My morbid imagination has played through all of the scenarios. But the demon’s still screaming in my head, taunting me. Posted by kuri at October 30, 2000 06:05 AM