For the
A to Z Blogging Challenge, I'm cheating a little today for the letter T and presenting to you my very shot story
Telephone. It originally appeared in
Dark Recesses Magazine and can also be found in my collection
Fetal Position & Other Stories.
Telephone
By Joel Arnold
Jill Johnson inserted herself into the oval of six and seven-year olds
standing at the front of her class.
“You know how Telephone is played, don’t you?” she asked. She was met by nods of affirmation and a few
dumbfounded stares. “I whisper
something into someone’s ear, and that person whispers it into the next
person’s ear, and so on until it gets to the end. Then we’ll see how much the words have changed. Okay?”
She leaned over and whispered
into Benjamin Cale’s ruddy, wax-rich ear, “I like plums and apples.”
Benjamin
knit his brows, then leaned over to Lydia Rathberger, cupping his hands over
her strawberry blond hair. It went like
that from person to person, around the entire class, until Bobby Blaisdell
whispered into Gail Dupree’s ear, and Gail, directly to Mrs. Johnson’s left,
nodded. Mrs. Johnson smiled at Gail, “Tell
the class what you heard.”
Gail
Dupree smiled back and said, “’They know you did it.’”
Johnson
squinted at Gail. They know you did
it? How did ‘I like plums and
apples’ mutate into ‘They know you did it’?
But that was the fun of the game, wasn’t it? So Mrs. Johnson told the class the original phrase, the ‘I like
plums and apples’ phrase, and the kids laughed, and begged her to do it again.
Mrs.
Johnson leaned over to Benjamin again, this time whispering a simpler, rhyming
phrase, one not so easy to confuse.
“Candy is dandy,” she whispered.
Benjamin
nodded and whispered to Lydia, who in turn whispered to Craig Masters, and so
on and so on, until once again, Gail Dupree nodded as Bobby whispered into her
ear. She smiled. Mrs. Johnson said, “And what was it you
heard, Ms. Dupree?”
And
Gail said, “They found her where you drowned her.”
Mrs.
Johnson stared at Gail. “Is that what
you heard?” she asked. Gail nodded.
Mrs.
Johnson looked at Bobby. “Is that what
you heard?” Bobby nodded.
Johnson
scanned her students. She no longer
smiled. “What I said was ‘Candy is
dandy.’”
“It
still rhymed,” noted Gail.
Mrs.
Johnson said, “We’ll do this once more, but we’ll go the other way around this
time.” She bent down to Gail, and whispered, “I loved her.”
Gail
looked at her as if she hadn’t heard correctly, but Mrs. Johnson nodded, and so
Gail stood on tiptoe to whisper into Bobby’s ear, and he shrugged and passed
the message along. When it got back to
Benjamin Cale, Mrs. Johnson hesitated a moment before asking him, “Okay, Benji
– what did you hear?”
Benjamin
Cale smirked. “’They’re coming to
arrest you.’ That’s what I heard.”
Mrs.
Johnson blinked slowly. She heard a
sound rising in the distance, a sound outside of the classroom, outside of the
school building, a sound racing up the streets, getting closer and closer; the
sound of sirens. “Is that what you
heard, Benji,” she asked, the words causing her tongue to feel heavy and thick
against the roof of her mouth.
Benjamin
nodded.
“Well,”
Mrs. Johnson said. “Okay.” Her eyes followed the three police cars as
they slowed outside the building.
Officers emerged. She dropped
her hands to her sides, and plopped down into one of the small student desks as
the rest of the students ran to the windows to see what the commotion was
about. Her fingers briefly felt once
more the memory of soft flesh going from warm to cold as she held it beneath
the swift flowing Zumbro River.
Gail Dupree turned from the window and asked, “Mrs.
Johnson? Can we play again?”
Available for the Kindle, Nook, iReader, and other devices.
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