by Rina Olsen
She was weak. That’s what everyone said after the phone call, after dinner, after the funeral. She’d been weak, was all. If she hadn’t been weak then she wouldn’t have let her own mind cave in on her like that. Her own thoughts. Her own moods. Whatever. The point remained: if she hadn’t been weak, then Uncle Ivo wouldn’t have had to spend an hour looking for the bottle of sleeping pills that were somehow no longer in the medicine cabinet.
She’d been weak. But she hadn’t sounded weak that night, the night the sleeping pills went missing. I knew because she called me. I need someone on the telephone, she’d said.
I was busy on my laptop while heating up dinner at the same time. A sigh flew from my nostrils. Fine. Awkward seconds ticked by. What do you need to talk about?
I didn’t say I needed to talk. I said I needed someone on the telephone.
She hadn’t sounded weak at all. She’d sounded just like she had at the last family reunion when she’d asked what kind of dressing was on the salad I had brought. She’d hovered against the screen door that time, as if wondering if she had any business to be in the kitchen. Her sunflower-printed sundress fluttered in the spring breeze. I thought her khaki sandals brought out her periwinkle-painted toenails nicely.
Thousand Island Dressing. Why?
It’s terribly unhealthy. You might get clogged arteries.
Oh, lighten up a little. It’s just salad dressing.
I gave the salad a few more tosses and looked up. The screen door gaped, empty. Beyond I could hear kids squealing and the sizzle of shish kebabs on the grill.
Tonight, I watch the telephone. It’s an old telephone, one of those landlines that have a spiral cord. Tonight, it refuses to ring. I reach over, pick it up, and press it against my ear the same way I did the night she called me, not listening for anything, just hearing my own breaths come back to me through the receiver and pretending that it’s her, still her, her rhythmic breathing that once told me she was still there wondering if I was waiting for her to say something.
Rina Olsen is a Korean-American teen writer living on Guam. Her work has either appeared in or is forthcoming in Jellyfish Review; Unfortunately, Literary Magazine; Mobius: A Journal of Social Change; and 101 Words, among other places. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Atmosphere Press in 2023.
Emerge Literary Journal 