Gold Light, Dead Line

“The phone didn’t die all at once—it gave up the way people do. Quietly. Like it knew hope was too heavy.”

The light had gone gold.

That heavy, sideways kind of light that makes everything look beautiful and wrong at the same time. As if the world’s been dipped in honey—shimmering, slow, and too thick to breathe in. The dust floated through it like glitter, dancing in the beams that cut through the broken walls. But it didn’t look magical. Not really.

It looked like everything was sinking.

The cracks in the floor seemed longer now. Deeper. Like they’d opened just a little wider when we weren’t looking. As if they were waiting for the right moment to split all the way apart and swallow us whole. Even the corners of the room felt further away than they had this morning. Like the building was stretching, yawning, trying to reach something it couldn’t quite grasp. Shadow-fingers reaching for nothing. Grasping at the air.

We hadn’t spoken in a long time.

Words had become rare things. Like water. We were saving them—holding them back as if they might run out too, if we weren’t careful. The silence wasn’t peaceful. It was full of things left unsaid. Full of hunger and fear and waiting.

I’d tried drawing in the dust. I found a stick poking through a gap in the wall and scratched pictures into the dirt—crooked faces, spirals, a rabbit with one ear bigger than the other because I’d run out of space. But even that had stopped feeling like something fun. The pictures just looked sad. Lonely. Like they were waiting for someone who wasn’t coming back.

Everything here felt like that.

My stomach had twisted itself into a knot. Tight and mean. A hard little rope that kept pulling tighter every time I breathed. It whimpered at me, soft and miserable, and I tried not to listen.

Mack had offered me the last of the crackers earlier. Just a few crumbs pressed into the corner of a sandwich bag, holding it out to me in his palm like it was gold. I’d shaken my head. Not because I wasn’t hungry—I was—but because I couldn’t bear the look on his face if I cried again. Couldn’t bear to let him see me fall apart again. The salt would sting anyway, tear up my lips even more. Better to save it. For when things got really bad.

If they weren’t already.

He sat with his back against the wall, legs stretched out, arms slack on his knees. His shoelaces had come undone, but he hadn’t bothered to fix them. One of them dragged through the dust when he shifted his foot. The phone lay beside him, facedown at first, like it couldn’t bear to watch us anymore. Then face-up. Still blank. Still dead-looking. Like a fish you pull from a river and forget to throw back.

He’d checked it three times in the last hour. I knew because I’d counted.

I watched him from the corner of my eye, pretending I was still working on my drawings while my real attention was locked on him. The way his thumb hovered. The way he held his breath each time, like the tiniest flicker of hope was still clinging to him somewhere.

Every time, it was the same. Press the button. Wait. One blinking bar. Then nothing. Then one again.

The battery was doing that thing they do when they’re about to die. Flickering like a candle in the wind. Playing games. Pretending to still be alive even though you knew it wasn’t going to last.

Mack picked it up again.

This time he didn’t press the side button right away. He just held it, fingers curled around it gently, like it was something fragile. Like it might break if he wasn’t careful. Like it might give up altogether if he didn’t treat it like it mattered.

The golden light streamed in through the slats above, painting lines across his face. It made his cheekbones look too sharp, like someone had carved them out of wood and sanded them rough. There were shadows under his eyes that hadn’t been there yesterday. Purple smudges. Evidence of too much seeing and not enough sleeping.

He blinked slowly. His eyelashes cast tiny lines across his cheeks. Then, finally, he pressed the power button.

The screen came to life.

A dull green glow lit his face from below, giving him the look of someone telling ghost stories around a campfire. One bar. Still just one. It blinked once, like a tired heartbeat.

He scrolled through the contacts, slow and quiet, the little arrow clicking softly with each press.

Then—Mum Mobile.

His thumb hovered. Trembled.

He stared at it, weighing everything. The same silent argument we’d been having in our heads all afternoon: Call her, and risk everything. Don’t, and risk even more.

I watched from the mattress, curled up and wrapped tightly in my jumper. Ribbons sat in my lap, her soft head resting on my wrist. One of her arms was coming undone again, the thread barely holding. Her button eyes stared at the ceiling, seeing nothing. Not even me.

My lips were cracked at the corners, stiff with dried salt and blood. Every time I opened my mouth, I felt it. Little shocks of pain like paper cuts. I licked them again—reflex—and instantly regretted it. The taste was awful. Dust. Salt. That faint tang of metal that made me think of coins and scabs.

“You’re calling her now?” I asked, quietly.

Mack didn’t look up. He didn’t blink. His eyes stayed on the screen like it might disappear if he looked away for even a second.

“Yeah,” he said. Barely more than a breath.

Then he pressed the button.

The phone froze.

Just for a moment. Half a second. But it was enough.

Enough to make the air tighten between us, stretching thin with hope and fear, like a balloon ready to pop. I felt my whole body go still, my breath held tight in my chest as if that tiny bit of oxygen might somehow help. Like maybe if I stayed very still, the signal wouldn’t spook and run away.

Then the screen flickered.

A green pulse—the call icon. Ghostly. Pale.

Just once.

Then black.

Dead.

No sound. No voice. No ring.

Gone.

Mack didn’t move straight away. He just sat there, the phone still in his hand, staring at it like it had just told him something awful in a language he didn’t quite understand. His mouth was slightly open, like the start of a question that would never get asked.

Like betrayal.

Like a friend who swore they’d be there and then vanished when you needed them most.

His expression didn’t change at first. He was frozen, like the part of him that believed had locked up completely. Then, slowly, his face shifted. Not into anger. Not into sadness.

Into something dull. Something quieter than defeat. Something that looked like acceptance but felt more like giving up.

I didn’t say anything. Neither did he.

The silence came back, thick as wet cement. The kind of silence that fills every gap, every breath, every corner of a room. A silence that sits on your chest and dares you to keep breathing under it.

I could hear my heartbeat again. A slow thump-thump inside my ears. Mack’s breathing—uneven, shallow—felt like it was happening miles away.

Then he let the phone slip from his fingers. It fell in a soft arc and hit the dusty floor with a plasticky little tap.

Just a sound. Barely more than a whisper. But it echoed, somehow. Like a punctuation mark at the end of a sentence neither of us wanted to finish reading.

He didn’t get angry. Didn’t throw it. Didn’t punch the wall or kick the mattress or scream at the sky the way Dad had once, when his car wouldn’t start and we were already late and everything felt too big.

He just stared at it a few seconds longer, then wiped his hands on his jeans.

Slow. Methodical.

Like he’d touched something sticky. Something that left a residue he couldn’t stand to feel anymore.

Like he was trying to rub the last bits of hope off his skin.

“It’s fine,” he said.

But he didn’t look at me when he said it. And his voice was too steady. Too smooth. Like reading lines off a piece of paper someone else had written.

It was the same voice Mum used when she came out of the bathroom with red eyes and said “Everything’s okay,” when it obviously wasn’t.

“They’ll come tomorrow,” Mack said. “They probably just thought we’d be alright for one night.”

Then he glanced at me—not quite meeting my eyes, but close. Close enough that I could see the lie sitting there. Flickering. Fever-bright.

I nodded.

Not because I believed him. But because I didn’t know what else to do. Because pretending is sometimes the only way to keep your chest from breaking open.

Because lies, when they’re soft enough, can be a kind of blanket.

Mack leaned back again, folding his arms behind his head like everything was normal. Like he was just tired. Just waiting. His eyelids drifted partway closed, and for a second, he looked like he might fall asleep.

Like he believed what he was saying.

Like he really thought someone was coming.

But I watched him. Really watched.

The way his foot tapped against the floor—quick, out of sync, restless. The way his jaw worked and unworked, clenched and unclenched, like something was moving under his skin that didn’t want to be there.

And his mouth—his mouth never fully closed. As if he was still waiting to speak. As if the dial tone might return at any second and he wanted to be ready.

He looked calm.

But he wasn’t. I knew. Because I wasn’t, either.

He didn’t believe what he’d said.

And neither did I.