Short Story

Lee waited for the phone to ring. It had been hours and sweat emerged from his mop of brown hair, trickling down his forehead. It was silent in the phone box in which he was standing, the glassy walls appearing as if they were closing slowly in on him. The white glow from the fluorescent light shone down on him, the old phone at which his hands were clutching impatiently, smelt like old cigarettes.

Outside it was cold and the sun was soon to disappear beneath the silhouetted mountains in the distance. Lee looked around, there was a trickle of people walking down the road, walking into the huge shopping mall around the corner.

These people were chatting, happy, smiling. Lee remembered those days. The days he didn't have to force a smile to form upon his face. What had gone wrong?

Then he remembered. Those long legs, those delicate hands, those perfect lips, that silky hair. The face of the girl he had once loved formed in his imagination. Yet instantly, it was replaced with hate and accusations and lies and rejection.

It was replaced by the horrific scenes of his father flailing his arms as he fell off that cliff on that night in February, and the lonely days he spent sitting in the shadows of the playground, watching as the girl that used to be his and the people with her who he used to call friends, continued living as if nothing had ever happened.

He was ancient history to them. He wasn't even that. He had been swept under the carpet without a second thought. But why?

Those were the days when Lee became who he now was. The days when he no longer smiled, his face in a continuous frown. He left school immediately after the formal, the formal he so very much hated. He stayed outside most of the night, his expensive suit a ruin as he breathed in the tobacco smoke heavily. His hands were shaking from the cold so much that he had dropped his cigarette.

His hands shook now, in the small, cold phone box were he stood waiting. He wiped a single tear from his eye as he thought of the hate he had for the world. Nobody loved him, nobody would care what happened to him after these events.

This is how he had felt since those terrible days. He began to smoke, take drugs, got in with the wrong crowd, that is what had followed. Oh why had they rejected him so?

The phone rang. It cut the silence of the phone box like a knife through air. Lee picked it up. He did not speak, he merely listened. Listened to his instructions.

He nodded even though the person on the other end would not have seen this. Lee placed the phone down softly. He breathed in deeply, ran his hand over the stubble on his chin.

He strapped the bag onto his front, ran out of the small, glassy phone box that smelt like old cigarettes and glowed white from a fluorescent light.