Voice Mail

By Janet Dawson

Winner of the Macavity Award for Best Short Story. 

The way we communicate now – by e-mail, text messages, voice mail – all detached and at a distance, without the immediate feedback of a face-to-face conversation, or even the voice-to-voice exchange of a phone call. 

But sometimes there are reasons for that distance, as one woman discovers when she uses voice mail to communicate her hostility to her soon-to-be ex-husband. It seems he has an agenda of his own.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Janet Dawson
• Release date: Jan 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9781944153052

Book preview

Voice Mail

By Janet Dawson

©2002 Janet Dawson.

Voice Mail was originally published in the short story collection Scam and Eggs.

Cover by Julia Turner.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Friday, 6:42 p.m.

All right, asshole, where the hell are you?

You were supposed to pick up Brandon and Sara half an hour ago. No, make that forty-two minutes ago. You stood them up. Again.

That’s the fourth time in five months. You’d better believe I’m keeping score. I’m writing it down. I’ve got a little list, just like the Lord High Executioner in The Mikado. I write it down, every time you lie to them, every time you cheat them by promising you’ll spend time with them, and then just don’t show up.

You say you want joint custody of the kids, because you love them so much. You say you can’t