Signal Black

The screen goes black in your hand.

For half a second, there’s only the hum of the refrigerator and your own breathing. Then the kitchen speaker crackles anyway, a thin burst of static that makes you flinch hard enough to hit the counter with your elbow.

No power. No display. No problem, apparently.

The voice note is still in your head—your own voice, tomorrow-dry and strained.

Don’t answer the next call.

Too late for that, maybe. Or not. Maybe this is just what a bad joke sounds like when the punchline has a pulse.

Your phone—dead, dark, supposed to be dead—vibrates once against your palm.

Not a full ring. Just a blunt, intimate buzz, like something trapped trying to get out.

Then the landline in the hall starts up.

You don’t own a landline.

The sound is muffled by the wall, old-fashioned and wrong, a bell with no source and too much confidence. A second later, the apartment intercom spits static and a clipped fragment of what might be a voice.

Not words. Just enough to suggest they were almost words.

The call is moving.

That’s the only way to describe it. It isn’t coming from one device so much as testing them, touching each surface of your life to see where the signal will stick. Kitchen speaker. Phone. Hallway panel. Maybe the neighbor’s unit, if you let this go on long enough.

On the counter, your laptop wakes again by itself. The lid casts a blue wedge across the room, and for one absurd second you think of all the little permissions you’ve granted over the years without reading them. Contacts. Microphone. Location. Trust.

The screen shows a notification banner—half-seen, gone in an instant—but not before you catch a glimpse of an unfamiliar sender string and a time stamp that doesn’t belong to any clock in the room.

Then the landline stops.

Silence.

You almost believe it.

Your phone vibrates again in your hand, hard enough this time to buzz against your skin. When you glance down, the black screen has a pale line of text reflected in it from somewhere behind you—someone calling, or something pretending to.

Unknown number.

No, not unknown.

Your number.

It rings once through the apartment speaker, once through the hall panel, once from the dead device in your hand.

Three points. One caller.

And under the ringing, so faint you might be imagining it, your own voice again—recorded, future-shaky, as if it’s trying to reach you through more than time.

Avery. Don’t—

The rest is swallowed by static.

The line keeps coming back.

Somewhere outside, a car door shuts. Somewhere below you, a neighbor’s television mumbles through the floorboards. Normal life goes on with insulting confidence.

Then your phone lights up from black, even though you killed it.

Just for a moment.

Long enough to show there’s a new message waiting.

Long enough to make you feel, with terrible certainty, that whatever is on the other end already knows you’ve heard it.