Her face comes up on the screen and everything around me stops. My breath catches and the room goes silent if only in my consciousness, which has muted what had previously been an entertaining noise.

A cold sweat comes over me; not unlike the sudden panic of a doorbell; perhaps welcome sounds back in the olden days of neighborly caretaking. Perhaps not.

Even back then, the doorbell would send me into a panic. Stranger danger isn’t a new development; mothers everywhere warned their children away from answering doors when they were home alone, or at least from telling the door ringer, or even the phone caller that we were, in fact, home alone.

But when the house was full, we would trip over ourselves to get to a rigging phone. I’d stretched out........

© The Saratogian