Heart Themed Canvas [UsUk]

Chime [Ch.2]

"What's wrong with you?" I vaguely hear my brother ask at breakfast. I don't bother looking up and just continue to stare at my cold oatmeal with a bobbing head. Fuck, I'm tired of these virtually sleepless nights. "Alfred? Are you OK?"

"Hm? Oh, yeah, Matt. I'm good. Just a little . . . ," I feel my eyelids shutting, my thoughts drifting away from me for a moment as my mind goes blank. I nod back into reality and smile at Matt. He looks concerned.

"Just a little . . . ?"

"A little what?" I ask.

Matt simply sighs and shakes his head, removing his empty bowl of cereal and placing it in the sink. "You should stop staying up so late," he mutters as he exits the room. Well, duh. If I could, I would. It's just not that easy.

Figuring I'm not going to eat this morning anyway, I shuffle about the living room to get my school stuff. When I have everything together and move to leave the house, I feel my legs turning to jelly, my muscles feeling like they spontaneously calcified somehow into immobility, even though that's ridiculous and impossible.

I stare at my grandmother's old phone by the doorway.

Arthur hasn't called me in a few days, but I can't bring myself to care. The echoes of what I felt a few nights ago still linger around my thoughts. I haven't been able to sleep well since, and I take every excuse I can to avoid the foyer. Even I know after a few days of this that I can't keep it up. I don't have the stamina, and it's ridiculous to think I can avoid the main entrance to our house.

With a frown, I stick my chin up and puff my chest out, the epitome of forced confidence. When I pass the phone I don't even glance at it or the mirror above it.

It's sad how irrationally paranoid I've become.

It's Friday night, nearly a week later, when Arthur finally decides to contact me.

The chime of the phone almost makes me jump out of my skin. I don't expect it when I'm sitting quietly at the computer in the den. With a heaviness in my chest, I slowly ease out of the chair and creep my way to the open doorway. I peer down the hallway to the foyer, and sure enough that phone is ringing.

I let it ring itself out.

I continue to stare at it even after the house is silent, but then it starts up again. It's such a haunting noise. Sometimes I hear it in my sleep, when I manage it.

I swallow the emotion in my throat and take a step out onto the hardwood of our hallway, inching my way towards the phone. When I finally stand in front of it, my numb fingers curling around the handle, I already know who will be waiting on the other line.

Static.

"Hello? Jones' residence." I hold my breath when I don't hear anything immediately. For a minute I think it's a fluke call, but then I hear a quick sniff on the other end of the line.

"Alfred?"

My shoulders relax at the downtrodden tone of Arthur's voice. He sounds so pitiful that I forget, for now, why I was scared of him. I grasp the phone tighter to my ear.

"Hey, Art. How's it going?"

"I'm so very sorry, Alfred. I didn't mean to accuse you of – You see, I've been a bit ashamed of how juvenile I acted towards you that I couldn't bring myself to call sooner. I'm sorry, from the bottom of my heart."

And he does sound genuine. I feel the need to comfort a fellow human being whenever an opportunity presents itself, and Arthur is no different. I force myself to swallow a large spoonful of logic: that I couldn't have seen a face in the closet; that someone whispered in my ear; that Arthur is somehow involved with me feeling on edge nearly every second of every day in my own home.