When the cat vanished for the third time, she found the phone booth, and all through the neighbourhood dogs were howling, baying and whimpering piteously from hidden corners and empty lots. The rain was coming down hard, now, Caroline's hospital gown plastered to her body like wet newspaper as she fumbled with the door and pushed herself into the cramped, lamplit enclosure. Gang signs and graffiti covered the glass on all sides. To her shivering, fevered mind, it felt like a cage.
She picked up the receiver and put it to her ear, double-taking as the silence reminded her these things cost actual money. She swore, ran the muzzle of the gun through her soaked hair and paced back outside, taking a shaking breath and leveling the weapon at the lock on the coin deposit. She fired twice, closing her eyes and flinching away from the thunderclap din as the cabinet fell open and a waterfall of quarters rang to the floor of the booth.
The money quickly rattled into the ransacked slot, dropping through and rolling back out onto the floor. Caroline's hands shook. This was the last thing she had ever wanted to do. But she had no choice.
Please have the same number.The candyfloss storm whipped around her like a bloated carousel as the dialtone sounded. A pair of bats fluttered through the downpour beneath a streetlight, clipped the phone booth heavily and impacted with an abandoned apartment building, biting and clawing at each other even as they fell to the cracked, wet pavement. From a broken window, someone began screaming in their sleep.
At the fifteenth ring, there was a click, and a tired, irritable, familiar voice on the other end of the line. Caroline closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
"Momma?" she braced herself against the glass, letting her head fall back,
"Momma, it's me."The line went dead.
Caroline stared at the phone, swore, punched the glass, crouched and scraped up another two quarters, slotting them into the machine and thumping redial, shivering and grinding her teeth. There was a click and a hard, tinny noise from the receiver.
"...I know, I know what you said, I..." Caroline swallowed, thickly,
"Momma, I'm sick. Okay? I need help and I don't know who else to--"Water dripped to the floor like a broken faucet from her saturated hospital gown.
"No, it's not--" Caroline's grip shifted on the plastic bottle,
"It's not drugs, I--" She screwed her eyes shut, little pinpricks beginning to stab at her tear ducts.
"...Please, okay, I'm in big trouble.""...No, I didn't get arrest--" she wiped her mouth on the back of her hand,
"...Okay, yeah, I got arrested, but they weren't...""...Holy shit, NO! ""...Well if I am then it's your fault!""...Mom I am not f***ing drunk--""Y--"She cut off, the receiver buzzing with half-heard recriminations. Caroline stared out into the street through rain-speckled glass and a maze of colored paint. Her heart pounded in her scrawny chest and her breath shook between her parted lips. Her mind churned like flaming molasses.
"You d--"She couldn't believe it was happening and yet she'd known it would end exactly like this.
"...I didn't WANT TO!""Then why did you leave me with--"She dug her nails into her hair, strangling her feelings, listening to the same self-righteous tirade she'd already heard a thousand times. She bore it. She bore it as long as she could.
It didn't take long.
"Why do you have to be like this?" she tore the handset from its cable with both hands, shrieking into the lifeless receiver,
"WHY CAN'T YOU JUST BE NORMAL??"The severed handset sailed through the air and smashed into halves against the side of the nearby building. Caroline staggered out of the booth and back out into the pouring rain, screaming in frustration and inarticulate rage. She picked the broken plastic back up and threw it back at the phone booth with a clatter and tinkle of cracking glass before the world tilted like a ship at sea and she collapsed, splashing to the sidewalk, shrieking and pounding her fist over and over into a freezing puddle as the street gaped beneath her like a bottomless pit.
The white noise of rainfall was abruptly drowned out by the low drone of a vehicle horn and the phone booth where Caroline had been standing a moment ago was obliterated by an out-of-service bus which mounted the curb at high speed, bulldozing it and a nearby fire hydrant before ploughing heavily into a convenience store window. The ground shook with the tumult, car alarms going off in every direction, water fountaining upward in a foaming jet beneath spinning tires. Another car swerved, skidding sideways and crashing into the intersection. The metal carriages mounted as one vehicle after another lost control. Caroline didn't even look up, only lay there, staring straight ahead, choking back tears and spitting up dirty rainwater. The cat paced around and sat in front of her, grinning and licking its paws in the red flicker of hazard lights.
"After this, the deluge." it proclaimed between licks, as the rain came down relentlessly.
"What the hell is happening to me?" Caroline hiccupped.
"The truth of the universe is not order, but chaos." "Oh that's real f***ing helpful, thanks a million" she slurred bitterly.
"If you cannot swallow your pride, perhaps you should swallow someone else's." The cat padded silently around in a half-circle, its grin now fixed on the plastic bottle still clutched in Caroline's white-knuckled hand.
"The medicine will help, until you have learned control. Shutter the pane, Caroline.""Shutter... the pain..?"She groped at the child lock with wet hands, shaking out one of the plastic tablets and placing it on her tongue, trying to protect the rest of the contents from the pouring rain. Another car careened noisily into the pile-up from further down the street as she cupped her hands, gathering enough oily rainwater to swallow.
The sensation was half like a swelling going down and half like wrestling a tiger wrapped in a blanket. The fever diminished, little by little, subsiding into a dull pink roar and she could
move again, in some unseen way, tightening her grip on the mental vortex and reining it in to within a few meters of her skull. Her temples throbbed with a grade-A stress headache as the street slowly righted itself, and she pushed back against a dumpster, shivering in the sparse white garment and trying to shelter from the downpour. The cat's smile shone down at her from the lid.
"When one seeks to build a tower to heaven, one should first be certain heaven is a place one truly wishes to see. The mind is a window, Caroline, your former captors, children with bricks. And the wind is blowing so very cold.""No k-kidding," the girl hugged herself tightly, gasping and soaked to the skin.
"You know it would be really f***ing swell to actually have something to actually wear.""There is a place, not far, where the well-to-do frequently slip into something less comfortable. If it is your wish, I will guide us, but the way is difficult, on foot."Caroline picked herself up, half-crouching in the bitter deluge. She looked up at the rear end of the bus, jutting out of the shattered convenience store, the red lights still blinking helplessly. The cat twined itself around her legs, twisting its head to smile up at her.
"...Have you ever piloted such a thing?" it enquired.
Babel stared at the enormous vehicle a moment, and shrugged.
"...Eh. How hard can it be?"
