Fiction · Digital book

Stay on the Line

By Sikho

The call comes in at 3:12 a.m. The caller is eighty-two, on her kitchen floor in Tamarack, Pennsylvania, and she has been holding since 1994. Joanna Brandt has answered the phone for Alder County for seventeen years. She has a voice people say sounds like their mother and one rule she has never broken: you never hang up first. Then a software migration turns a thirty-year secret into a red number on every screen. The night crew has quietly kept the Hold List, a private record of the calls the county failed and never closed. Sixty-two of them are now ringing, one at a time, to be answered. Stay on the Line is a ghost story for the overnight shift. It is also a workplace novel about the people who are the first voice on the worst night of a stranger's life, what the job costs them, and what it takes to hand a call to someone else. A storm is coming. A director has a button he is afraid to press. Somebody has to take the board. Dry, exact and warm, with the humor of a room that has seen everything and the kind of scares that come from rules, restraint and a single sound: a long note, a stutter, a short one, like a fistful of dimes dropped down a stairwell. For adult readers and older teens (16+). No gore. A note at the end separates what is invented from what is real.

415 minutes estimated reading

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