Waiting for a Miracle

Written for the 6/28 Flash Fiction Contest
Theme: Someone waiting for an important phone call
Word Count: 300

Waiting for a Miracle
MysteryBox42

The phone looks out of place on the otherwise bare oak panel desk. Like a prop movie phone. The kind that you can just pick up and start talking to the president of the United States on. Lieutenant Kelly Rosner is watching it with attentive eyes, as if it was a deadly snake waiting to pounce. She does not expect it to pounce, however, as it was a landline handheld, not a snake, and Matthew Hibbler had raped and killed two ten-year-old boys. In a way, Kelly doesn’t really know what would be worse; if the phone rings or if it doesn’t. Her gaze charts an upward path to the small analog clock that looms over the desk. 11:50PM, it reads. If the age of miracles is upon us, Kelly thinks, God has ten minutes to announce it. God being, of course, the governor of Oklahoma.

Mr. Hibbler is having the last of the black straps pulled across his stomach. His head is craned uncomfortably back on the splintered wooden chair. His face registers an internal peace that looks monk-like.

Outside the viewing window, the Bradstreet family and the Curdy family are wiping their eyes with tissue. They look almost like statues, Kelly thinks, chiseled artfully into somber embraces.

11:57PM. Kelly can feel the ice water in her veins. Her feet feel like two lead dead-weights.

11:58PM. Any last words, the chaplain asks. Matthew Hibbler has none.

11:59PM. The phone, smug and mocking, gleaming black under the incandescent glow of the overhead lights.

12:00AM. Midnight. The witching hour. Unmasking hour. The hour of horror. Kelly braves the thirteen – exactly thirteen – steps to the impatient lever on the wall. She grips it tightly in the palms of her hands. It goes down heavy. Kelly Rosner never would forget her first execution.