Phone Calls
Part 3: Spring
Disclaimer: The poem, "now i lay me down to dream of Spring" is by ee cummings. I do not own it. Or 24, or any of the actors.
Chloe told herself that she was not going to stay up and listen for the phone...It was midnight and she was exhausted. After a computer crash at CTU she had spent hours fixing the problem. She had gotten home, taken a shower and poured herself into bed.
But sleep would not come. It was crazy. All she could do was stare at the phone on her bedside table. He wasn't going to call—it had been two weeks since his last call—the one where she figured out that he was one calling. So why hadn't he called back? Was she wrong? Had she imagined his laugh? Was she actually missing him so much that she was hallucinating?
And what if it was him. He was gone—"dead." There was no acceptable reason that sh should be obsessing over a 45-second phone call that was nothing but dead air over the line.
That's it. She was done. She'd just unplug the phone. There. Done! Now she was going to sleep.
2am—She plugged the phone back in.
3am—she unplugged it.
4am—plugged.
4:30am—unplugged.
4:45 plugged
6am—She was up, showered and on her way to work. Sleep, just was not going to happen.
By the time she arrived home that night she was beyond exhaustion. All she wanted to do was sleep. But as she got her mail she realized that she had received a package. It was a plain brown envelope with no return address. Quickly she clutched it to her chest and moved toward her apartment.
When she finally got in she flung the door closed and ripped the package open. Inside was small glass prism. Chloe held it up to the light that still shined into her kitchen window and watched it refract. Watched as the splintered light bounced around the walls.
When she could finally break her gaze away from the prism she noticed that there was a small piece of paper on the floor. In her haste it must have slipped and fallen.
There was a single typed line, "now i lay me down to dream of Spring"
What the hell did that mean? Was she supposed to know? And why was it written weird. The punctuation was all off. Suddenly she remembered the one literature class she had been forced to take in college. It was part of a poem—that guy who never capitalized anything—she had found it so annoying.
She ran to the commuter and typed it in. As the entire poem came up she smiled again. Chloe O'Brian had just received a love note.