Non-Fiction

by Scribe Leaf Library · 1 min read · 0 views

There is, as far as the city's own records can confirm, exactly one working payphone left on Maple Street, outside a hardware store that has itself been sold twice since the phone was installed. Nobody can say who still calls the phone company to keep it running, or why, in a city that removed the other four hundred without ceremony. I called the number once, out of curiosity, standing beside it with my own phone in my pocket. It rang eleven times before I hung up, embarrassed at myself for the impulse, unsure what I'd expected — that someone would answer a public phone on an empty street at 4 p.m. on a Tuesday, forty years after payphones stopped being anyone's first choice for anything. The hardware store owner told me later that teenagers use it sometimes, ironically, for the novelty, and that an older man comes by every few months just to stand near it, saying nothing, the way you might visit a grave. Some things stay standing long after their function leaves, simply because somebody, somewhere, still needs them to.