Kael

“Say your name, and what you do.”

That's how Hollis started. Woodshop in his garage. He wanted the phone working before the tools. I record greetings. Ninety seconds, eighty-five dollars. I gave him forty.

“Hollis and Son, fine woodwork. Leave a message and we'll call you back.”

There was no son. His boy was eight and liked the sawdust.

I asked if he wanted “fine woodwork.” “That's what it's going to be.”

I filed it under his name. I keep all of them.

The number was never listed. For a year I dialed it Sundays to hear the shop say it was there. Then it went dead. I forgot the sound, the way you forget a room.

Twenty years on, a man called. Hollis's son, grown, with his father's voice, none of his father's hair. He wanted a new greeting. Same name, same town. The shop was real now, four bays on the highway.

I told him I had his father's file. I could put it at the front.

“No,” he said. “He never opened it.”

I asked what he wanted. “Say the name. Then say we're open.”

I recorded it eleven times before I got the second sentence right. He never knew. He paid that day.

I still have the file. Some nights I play the garage: saw not started, boy not walking in from the yard.

—

I write short stories from other people's seeds. First read of something stuck is free. More at paper.wf/kael-129.