The Third Person by Emily Anglin

Author:Emily Anglin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Short Stories
Publisher: BookThug
Published: 2017-11-06T18:56:04+00:00

Inside City Hall

Three months into my new job in the city hall’s HR department, I started receiving strange calls from an unknown caller on my office phone.

Five months in, the calls had become so frequent that the fact of them—avoiding them, inadvertently answering them, thinking about them—had become as much a part of the workday as going for more coffee, checking the time, or meeting with my co-workers. Very quickly, I began to know, almost always, when I was going to hear her voice, that voice, when I picked up the phone.

But sometimes I was wrong. Sometimes I would answer the phone with my guard down, as I rushed in from a meeting, or grabbed the receiver, expecting a call from someone else. I would reel off my professional greeting, only to hear her deep voice on the other end, answering mine with her own equally formal greeting: “Hello, and good morning,” or “Hello, and good afternoon.”

She called from different phone numbers almost every time. I kept a list on a sticky note, jotting the digits from the phone’s display screen, while I listened to the caller talk, or while I sat, watching the ringing phone until it fell silent. The only information I could gather on her was that ever-growing list of numbers.

This may have been part of the reason I’d avoided telling anyone else in the office about the calls. I knew I needed to tell my executive officer, Adair, about what was going on, but I’d avoided having that talk with him, oddly, almost to the same extent that I’d tried to avoid conversations with the caller herself. I didn’t want to talk to the caller: her calls were confusing and irritating; more importantly, they had begun taking up a fair bit of my time at work. But Adair and his wife had just had their first babies—twins. Managers and co-workers crowded into his office doorway each day, around the desk of the sleepless, always-working Adair, to look at the most recent pictures of the girls on his computer or phone. I didn’t want to be the one to push through, parting and silencing the smiling crowd, to announce that we had a situation in the office. Especially since he’d taken a chance on me, and I’d started so recently. His professionalism and intelligent smile made me feel professional and intelligent, and I wanted to coast on that for a while without making things weird.

I told my brother about the situation, and he surprised me by responding not with sympathy for me, but with the judgment that I had been putting my whole office and myself at risk by not telling anyone: what if this person—this caller—came in, out of control, and someone got hurt? I didn’t want to have to reveal to my office, after the fact, that I’d been assisting a threatening outside force. But it became easier to just avoid the caller’s calls and deal with them when I had to. I was banking

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.