voicemails

by Rebecca Karas

Each day was an assault on my senses. The call center held a cacophony of voices echoing across barren white brick; a chorus my brain transformed into auditory hallucinations before I fell asleep. My team was situated in the basement of the building next to the arid furnace; even the thickest lotions left my face flaky, pulling taught each time I spoke. Someone would microwave fish every Tuesday, and the oily scent affixed itself to every plush surface in the vicinity: the shitty office chairs, the fabric cubicles, the stained couch in the break room. I worked in a fetid, hungry mouth, ready to swallow me whole.

There were no windows so my manager taped stock-photo beach scenes to the walls just above our desks. Each printout had long white horizontal lines splattered across the blue sky, gaps where the printer ran out of ink. Sometimes I imagined they were fading into the covetous walls, overcome by the white paint, absorbed into monotony.

I was paid on commission, so a successful sale meant food darkening my refrigerator, replacements for my torn bed sheets, new pants that weren’t as thin as tissue in the crotch. It was predatory and unsavory, but I had no choice. And since jobs like mine had ruined the unexpected phone call, I often left voicemails. I wondered how many recordings of my voice existed on stranger’s phones, hours of my breath immortalized, mostly to people who would never call me back. It wasn’t meaningful, but it comforted me.

I understood that my time was limited between those walls, that someday its appetite would transcend my senses. It began with an emptying of seats while my coworkers dissolved into white particles, digested instantaneously. In the end the mouth had something different for me, a prolonged suffering, a draining of life between its incisors. The walls lurched and shuddered, ravenous while they closed in on me. My consciousness barely registered the words spewing from my mouth before hanging up the phone, clicking the END button that had been rubbed shiny from my oily fingers. The fluorescent lights buzzed more fervently in a rhythm like a heartbeat. My mouth opened as the walls pushed against my body, and something fleshy bubbled up in my throat as my breath constricted. Each of my lungs had detached themselves, leaving my ribs empty, and were escaping through my mouth. They arched upward like a huge writhing maggot.

My voice rumbled through the room, the endless mirage of lights blinked with each syllable as I suffocated. I strained to understand what I was saying, how my voice was seeping through the walls when I couldn’t breathe. Eventually I heard the script and my callback number, something I’d remember until I was dead, which seemed imminent. The blood rushed to my head, pounding through my blood vessels as my lungs exploded between my teeth, preserving my voice forever on a dying digital plane. The miasmic mouth wished to be immortalized too.

Photo of Rebecca Karas

BIO: Rebecca lives in the midwest with her husband and two cats. She's an avid baker and library patron, although she's happiest reading Gothic Literature to the eldritch wildlife around her home. Her work has been published in Witch House Magazine, Cursed Morsels Press, and Dark Speculations later this year. You can find her rambling thoughts @rebeccakaras.bsky.social