Rich Youmans

Wind Cell

You’d think there’d be better reception from heaven. Periodically my father’s voice echoes as if there were five of him, or it’s mangled by interference that I like to think of as stardust. Still, I recognize his gravelly timber, the slight lift at the end of a sentence that turns even a simple observation—”Your mother hasn’t stopped praying”—into a question. He didn’t pray, at least not during his time here. “Who’s listening?” he’d always ask. I assume he knows now. There are so many things I want to know. I ask if anything in the afterlife has surprised him. “I still hate lima beans,” he says, although the last two words are garbled and could be “lime in beers” or “lying beings.” I ask if he has any regrets, but his words become small and high-pitched like a convention of ants. It’s almost time for me to pass along the phone, and I have time for only one more question. “Will I see you again?” I ask, but my ears fill with silence.

his diary    all the blank pages

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Note: Itaru Sasaki, a garden designer in Otsuchi, Japan, set up an unconnected telephone booth in 2010 so he could continue talking with a cousin who had died of cancer. There are now “wind phones” around the world, and the concept has inspired two novels, The Phone Box at the Edge of the World by Laura Imai Messina and The Phone Booth in Mr. Hirohita’s Garden by Heather Smith, as well as a short film, The Wind Phone.

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About the Author

Rich Youmans lives on Cape Cod with his wife, Alice. His books include All the Windows Lit (Snapshot Press, 2017) and Head-On (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2018).