It's best to let it ring

 

    It didn’t matter that the house was dark and empty, the

 phone kept ringing anyway, like if it rang enough

 suddenly someone would pick it up and say, “Hello”.

  Magically a light would click on and there would be a

 person there.

    Back when there were telephone operators, they would

 have given up and told you there was no answer and to try

 again some other time.  Now, however, there were no

 such operators, only a series of electrical connections that

 didn’t know any better.  They simply did what they were

 told – ring the phone.

The house was long abandoned, but the phone still worked—sort of. Every night at 3:17 a.m., it rang. Not from a telemarketer, not from a wrong number, but from the past.

The voices left traveling through the line were always different. Sometimes it was a child asking if Grandma was home. Sometimes it was a man whispering coordinates. Once, it was a woman reciting a recipe for tomato spice soup.

The phone didn’t just ring—it remembered. It was a vessel for old conversations, a rotary oracle spinning its way through time. And if you answered just right— timing, mood—you could speak back. Not to the person, but to the moment. You could change something. Or maybe just nudge it.  As if it were a Twilight Zone episode.

But there was a danger: if you stayed on the line too long, you’d forget which year you belonged to. Your place and time would be altered forever.  You would no longer be you.  You'd become another conversation trapped in the lines. 

It was a good thing no one ever answered each time the phone broke the silence of the old house.  Anyone out late at night could hear the phone ringing from the sidewalk out front.  They would always stop and just look at the dark windows and sagging porch, but never did they approach.  

There was an information sheet on the kitchen counter, from back when realtors were attempting to sell the place.  All that was now lost to the past.  This was the one car on the lot that never sold.  It stood as a challenge to each new car salesman to find a buyer.  This house had been the same.  Unwanted, and a challenge to the next realtor in line.

Nobody knew why the city let it stand.  Any other town would have condemned it, torn it down.  Not here.  It was here, not because it had a future but because it had a past, and apparently an eerie connection to that past that no one dare interrupt.