The Old Woman and the Phone
The old woman sat in the dark waiting for her son to call. It had been some time since she had heard from him and she was tempted to call him herself. But it was the job of the son to call the mother, not for the mother to call the son. Anyway she didn’t know his number.
That wasn’t exactly true. His number was three. He had given her a little black phone with pictures and he told her all that she needed to do was press the three and it would dial him. What kind of phone number is three, she wondered but it didn’t matter. She had never figured out how to answer the damned thing when it rang, and all it had was pictures, no numbers, so she couldn’t press the three. At least she couldn’t find the three to press even though when her son had given her the phone he had shown her that indeed there was a three but she never found it again.
Now there weren’t even pictures. She pressed every button but nothing happened. Her son had told her she had to plug it in once in a while to charge the battery but the thing didn’t have a plug. She had the vague recollection of a little box with a wire coming out of it that he said was the charger but now she had no idea where it was and even if she did, she didn’t see how plugging in the little black box would charge her phone.
So baffled and frustrated and angry and sorry for herself, the old lady sat in the dark, waiting for her son to call.
