Echoes in the Voicemail

Echoes in the Voicemail

The first voicemail came on a Tuesday.

Daniel was rinsing dishes when his phone buzzed against the counter, skittering dangerously close to the sink. He caught it just in time. Unknown number. No caller ID. Just a single new voicemail.

He almost deleted it — spam calls had become his daily background noise — but something made him pause. Maybe it was the silence that followed, a kind of static that didn’t sound like static at all. It sounded like breathing.

He pressed play.

“Hi, Dan,” came a soft, trembling voice. “It’s me. Don’t panic, okay? Just… listen.”

The glass in his hand slipped, shattering in the sink.

It was her.

Emily.

Dead for eleven months, three weeks, and four days.

The voice was faint, like someone speaking from a tunnel lined with fog. But it was hers — the way she lingered on vowels, the slight laugh at the end of sentences she wasn’t sure about.

“I don’t have much time,” the message continued. “I just needed you to know… I’m okay. And you will be too. I’ll call again soon.”

Then — a beep. The line ended.

Daniel stood in the kitchen for what felt like an hour, phone pressed to his chest, waiting for it to make sense. He played it again, and again, until the words began to sound unreal, until her voice turned into an echo of itself.

When he checked the timestamp, the message was dated March 12, 2026. Almost five months in the future.

He didn’t sleep that night. Or the one after.

His friends would’ve called it grief delusion. He didn’t tell them. Not after what happened at the funeral — when he swore he’d felt her hand brush his sleeve during the eulogy.

Instead, he spent hours online, combing through theories: time glitches, posthumous voice cloning, deepfake pranks, phone carrier errors. But none of those explanations sounded like her laugh.

By Friday, he’d convinced himself it was a cruel hack. Maybe someone got hold of old voicemails she’d left before the accident — the car crash on Route 17, the fog, the truck that didn’t stop.

He was halfway through blocking unknown numbers when the second voicemail arrived.

Same number. Same voice.

This time, she sounded more certain.

“Hi, Dan. It’s getting harder to reach you. The static’s worse now. Listen — the tulips you planted in the backyard? They’ll bloom late this year. But don’t pull them out. They’re not dead. Neither am I.”

Daniel’s heart stuttered. Tulips. He’d planted them for her the week before the accident. They hadn’t bloomed once since.

He ran outside with a flashlight. The soil was cold and cracked, but he knelt anyway, digging with his bare hands until dirt filled the spaces beneath his nails. Beneath the top layer, he saw it — tiny green tips breaking through.

He sat there in the dark until the dawn found him.

By the time the third message came, Daniel had stopped pretending he was sane.

He’d started recording everything — the calls, the dates, the moon phase, even the weather. The pattern didn’t make sense. But grief rarely did.

“Dan,” Emily said in the third voicemail, her tone urgent now. “There’s something you need to do. In the attic, behind the blue trunk — you’ll find a box. You never opened it. Please, don’t be afraid.”

He didn’t hesitate.

The attic smelled of dust and cedar. He found the blue trunk easily; it had belonged to her grandmother. Behind it, half-buried in insulation, was a small cardboard box sealed with old masking tape.

Inside: a stack of cassette tapes.

Each labeled in Emily’s handwriting.

Each marked with a date — all of them from next year.

His hands shook so hard one of the tapes fell and rolled beneath a beam. When he tried to pick it up, he realized it wasn’t a cassette at all. It was a photograph.

Of the two of them, taken on the day before the accident.

She was pointing at something off-camera, smiling like she knew a secret. On the back, in her looping script, she’d written:

“If you’re reading this, I found a way to stay.”

He listened to the tapes one by one, though most were just static and fragments of her voice breaking through — “love you,” “miss you,” “still here.”

But one stood out. The final tape.

“Dan,” she whispered. “You always said time was just how we measured love — how long it lasted, how long it hurt. Maybe love measures time instead. Maybe when it’s strong enough, it leaves echoes that don’t care about clocks. When you hear this, promise me you’ll live again. Plant something new. Let it grow.”

Her voice cracked. “I’ll be there, in the sound the wind makes when it moves through the tulips.”

The tape clicked off.

Spring came slow that year.

When the tulips finally bloomed, they were nothing like he remembered. They were taller, brighter, faces turned toward the window where she used to stand.

Daniel started leaving his phone outside at night, in the garden. The messages never came again. But sometimes, just before dawn, he’d wake to the faint hum of a voicemail notification — no number, no recording.

Just an empty message box.

Still, he never deleted them.

He liked to think the echoes stayed — somewhere between signal and silence, between love and loss — repeating the only truth that mattered:

She never really left.