Romance Weekly - Short Stories of Love, Erotic and Paranormal Thrillers
Aug 16, 2026 · 13 min · 12 segments
The emergencies start sounding personal on the ninth night. A man alone in a cold building. Someone who hasn't eaten because the roads are closed. A car that won't start in the deep cold. He calls…
The emergencies started sounding personal on the ninth night, and it took me until the tenth to understand why.
A man alone in a cold building, the heat failing.
A guy who had not eaten because the roads were closed and the nearest open place was too far in the storm.
An older station wagon that would not start in the deep cold, stranding its driver somewhere with no relief coming.
He called them all in on other people's behalf, in the third person, in that flat, even voice, requesting I roll someone warm.
And on the tenth night, rolling a unit toward yet another cold and alone, that resolved, as they always did, into empty snow and no one.
I finally heard it.
The addresses were drifting.
Every call came in a little closer to the Hollis base than the last.
And the details were getting specific in the way details only get when a person knows them from the inside of his own skin.
There was no one else out past the Hollis Ridge.
There had never been anyone else.
Every emergency he had ever called in, every stranded and freezing and starving and alone soul I had spent almost two weeks rolling warm bodies toward, was him.
He had been reporting his own slow disaster in the third person for two weeks because he could pick up the line for a stranger a thousand times and could not, would not, not once, key up and say the one true sentence.
The person who needs help is me.
I knew it the instant I understood it, because it was my own wound wearing a different coat.
I have talked 10,000 people through the worst minute of their lives.
I have never once, not one time, let anyone talk me through mine.
The helper does not get helped.
The helper does not have a name, or a need, or a body, slowly freezing in a dark building.
The helper has a voice and a headset and the profound, airless safety of always being the one on the answering end.
We had found each other across 60 miles of dead copper because we were the same animal.
Two people who could only be close inside an emergency.
Two people who went mute and terrified at the very thought of being simply seen.
In the daylight, in the ordinary world, with nothing wrong to stand behind.
The emergencies started sounding personal on the ninth night, and it took me until the tenth to understand why.
A man alone in a cold building, the heat failing.
A guy who had not eaten because the roads were closed and the nearest open place was too far in the storm.
An older station wagon that would not start in the deep cold, stranding its driver somewhere with no relief coming.
He called them all in on other people's behalf, in the third person, in that flat, even voice, requesting I roll someone warm.
And on the tenth night, rolling a unit toward yet another cold and alone, that resolved, as they always did, into empty snow and no one.
I finally heard it.
The addresses were drifting.
Every call came in a little closer to the Hollis base than the last.
And the details were getting specific in the way details only get when a person knows them from the inside of his own skin.
There was no one else out past the Hollis Ridge.
There had never been anyone else.
Every emergency he had ever called in, every stranded and freezing and starving and alone soul I had spent almost two weeks rolling warm bodies toward, was him.
He had been reporting his own slow disaster in the third person for two weeks because he could pick up the line for a stranger a thousand times and could not, would not, not once, key up and say the one true sentence.
The person who needs help is me.
I knew it the instant I understood it, because it was my own wound wearing a different coat.
I have talked 10,000 people through the worst minute of their lives.
I have never once, not one time, let anyone talk me through mine.
The helper does not get helped.
The helper does not have a name, or a need, or a body, slowly freezing in a dark building.
The helper has a voice and a headset and the profound, airless safety of always being the one on the answering end.
We had found each other across 60 miles of dead copper because we were the same animal.
Two people who could only be close inside an emergency.
Two people who went mute and terrified at the very thought of being simply seen.
In the daylight, in the ordinary world, with nothing wrong to stand behind.
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