By Niles Reddick
The cell vibrated on my desk, I glanced at the number from an area code I didn't recognize, and I figured it was a sales call, spammer, or maybe the Facebook hacker that cloned my account. After repeated reports were filed, I'd received an email from Facebook that the hackers cloned account didn't violate their policies.
I googled the number and discovered it was from a man who was a retired elementary teacher of my brother's who was reaching out from his Hospice bed to locate my brother who'd toppled over and died from a bad heart he didn't even know he had while mowing his yard, leaving a widow and two small children to grapple with life's most difficult questions and struggle to make ends meet on small government stipends.
Perhaps the dying teacher didn't know about googling a name in quotations to reveal my brother’s obituary in the first search attempt. The cell showed a new voice mail he left but didn’t indicate a reason for the call, and the lack of an explanation left me wondering why after all these years would a teacher who was an awkward fellow and who'd puttered around in a VW Bug like Ted Bundy would have wanted to spend time with a six-year-old boy, or conversely why our mother would have approved it. I smelled a rat, that the teacher had done something to my brother, wanted a clean conscience, and a free pass to heaven before the last shot of Morphine sent him into the tunnel.
I didn't call him back.
Niles Reddick is author of a novel, four short fiction collections, and two novellas. His work has appeared in over five hundred publications including The Saturday Evening Post (ranking him among the Top Ten Most Popular New Fiction of 2019), Cheap Pop, Flash Fiction Magazine, Citron Review, Hong Kong Review, and Vestal Review, the longest running flash fiction magazine in the world. He is an eight-time Pushcart nominee, a three-time Best of the Net nominee, and a three-time Best Micro nominee.
