Incoming

This story is about isolation—and what it quietly does to a person over time. Not the loud, obvious kind, but the softer version that settles in after loss, when the calls stop coming and the world keeps moving without asking if you’re ready to follow.

I was thinking about how, in that kind of silence, your sense of self can begin to thin. Without other people to reflect you back to yourself, to interrupt your thoughts or anchor you in the present, everything starts to loop inward. Your voice becomes the loudest one in the room. Your memories take on more weight than what’s actually in front of you. And eventually, the line between what’s external and what’s internal doesn’t feel as solid as it once did.

The phone became a natural way to explore that—something we rely on to connect us, but that can just as easily isolate us when it becomes our only point of contact. In this story, it doesn’t introduce something new. It simply amplifies what’s already there. The calls aren’t really coming from somewhere else—they’re coming from a version of the self that has been left alone for too long, echoing back through whatever channel it can find.

The voice of the mother isn’t meant to be purely supernatural, either. It’s memory, grief, longing—all shaped into something that feels real enough to answer. And that’s the danger I was interested in: not that something might reach out to you, but that in the absence of connection, you might begin answering something that was never separate from you in the first place.

That’s what this story is really about. The slow, almost invisible shift that happens when you’re alone long enough… and the unsettling realization that the voice calling your name might still be yours—but no longer entirely under your control.