True Enough Short Story
The phone stands half-sunk in gravel beside a shuttered gas station off Route 30, the kind of two-lane road that’s been mostly forgotten by everyone except the crows and the postal service. You could drive past it a hundred times and never see the booth—sun-bleached, leaning, one pane cracked and patched with yellowing tape. The keypad’s worn to blank steel. The receiver cord’s coiled in rust. It hasn’t been connected since 2009. That much, at least, is documented.
And yet. Every few weeks, it rings.
Only once.
Not at a set time. Not during storms or holidays or any pattern anyone’s tracked. Just one dry, tinny brrip, like a cough from the next room. If you’re standing there—why would you be?—and you pick it up, what you’ll hear is this: footsteps on gravel. Slow ones. No voice. No wind. Just crunch, crunch, like someone pacing outside a house they used to live in.
The locals say it used to work fine. Back in the eighties, it was the only phone for eight miles. There’s stories about teenagers calling their parents collect from that booth after parties at the old grain mill. About a woman who used it every Friday to talk to her brother in prison. About a trucker who always pulled over there to call his daughter, even though the diner had a phone inside.
Then the line went dead. Cell towers came in. The gas station shut. But the booth stayed. The owner tried to get it removed, but no one would claim responsibility. The phone company had no record of the number. The county said it wasn’t on their map. Eventually, he gave up and moved to Pensacola.
In 2011, a man from the historical society came to take a picture. He said it might be “worth preserving as a relic of pre-digital rural communication.” His name was Franklin Moss. That was his last known location. No credit card use after that. No forwarding address. His rental car turned up in a pond fifteen miles away with no signs of damage except the radio tuned to static and a single gum wrapper folded into a triangle on the passenger seat.
They say if you’re polite when you answer, it won’t call again.
They also say the footsteps sound faster when you don’t say anything.
Last spring, a line technician named Valerie tried to trace the call. She hooked up a signal sniffer, waited in her truck, drank cold gas station coffee for six straight hours. Nothing. Until she stepped out to stretch, and it rang. Once. She picked it up, listened. No voice. Just crunching gravel and what she later described as “a whistle, maybe? Like someone breathing through their teeth.” She unhooked everything, drove straight back to the city, and filed for early retirement six days later.
No one answers it now. Not twice.
The paint flakes more each year. Birds nest on the roof. And yet, someone swept the gravel last week. Just a little. Just a ring-shaped patch, right beneath the booth.
Like someone had been standing there. Waiting.
But I’m just telling you what I was told.