The Hollow’ed Call

by:Siddharth

I was aimlessly walking down a quite pleasant yet quiet road, about a kilometer away from my office to the car park to leave for home. There was almost no noise at all apart from the sound of people whispering onto their mobile phones while on-call or the sound of the odd vehicle that popped up every five minutes. In the midst of this relative silence, I could eavesdrop on the whisper of the man in front of me who was on a call on his mobile phone, and what he said shocked me. My brain and my ears had to reset themselves to even believe the words that man had uttered. 

I quietly scrambled to my car in the car park, as if I heard nothing at all, sat in, and calmly drove off to my house. On the way, I could still feel the echoes of that call and it truly sent shivers down my spine. I just wanted to reach home immediately and have a nap on my bed to just process this information, which I still could not because on the way home, I was nearly getting into crashes with almost every car on the road, almost using the car as a battering ram. With all this emotion, I somehow reach home and immediately pop into my bedroom and crash onto my bed (weird I did not crash on the road).

I tried sleeping for hours and hours by making my room as cold as possible, tightly wrapping myself into my thick rug. But I just could not fall asleep because my brain keeps harking back to the echoes of that phone call that I just heard. My mind was just playing that scene over and over and over again in my head as if it were like a nightmare but I still did not know how to react to it. But my body did now how to react because, with each passing second, my whole body started trembling, my heartbeat spiked to a level it previously had not and I also started palpitating a lot. The anxiety in me just started to spike up and after a point, I had, had enough of the situation and decided to just get up from bed and go into my hall. 

I sat on the couch in my hall with my legs stretched out on the table in front of me. I decided to play the moment in my head for one last time to end this misery within me because I knew I could not do anything to reverse whatsoever happened. 

The man on the phone whispers “Remember Robert from the debacle at Egypt…I couldn’t find him yesterday. But, I did find his wife and son at the address you gave me.” and the other side exclaimed, “So what did you…you even do?” To this, the man first looks around him to notice any suspicious people around him (does not notice Robert behind him) and then proceeds to whisper “So I….I killed them both instead and burnt their bodies to ash”. Meanwhile, the other side of the phone screams with excitement “Wow….that will make Robert lonely and hollow from within. This will finally make him come to us and apologize. Great work!!” and the call was cut. 

That man was right, I was lonely and hollow from within because my family was my everything to me and I just could not imagine a life without them. With no will to proceed and fight on, I just decided to call it quits and went back to sleep. That day felt like a nightmare but also like an opportunity to start a new life, one where I could live it out without any luxuries and comforts I did not need. It changed me as a person and my worldview towards everything.