The Tell-Tale Cell Phone
by Albert Forrest Hyne 

TRUE! I am shitting bricks like some kind of gigantic house-building robot, but does that make me crazy? Fuck you if you say I’m crazy! Fuck you and all of your crazy-saying friends! Fuck you right in the antelope! Yeah, I’m crazy like the bionic man was crazy. I can see through walls, motherfucker! You come and get some of this, I’ll hear your eyelashes rub together when you reach for the car door! I’ll drop a safe on your ass, and I’m not talking about some little file folder box with a lock on it, I mean one of those huge goddamned gun safes you could fit a Samoan in! Still think I’m crazy? Step a little to the left, motherfucker!

I don’t know why I did it, okay? People do some fucked-up shit after snorting a pound of coke. I knew a guy once who tried to paint a house with his dick, I’m just sayin’ it gives you some strange ideas. It’s true, I never had a problem with Ernesto. He was always okay by me. But tonight he showed up and he had the ringer on his goddamned cell phone playing “Somewhere Out There” and that thing was ringing like every two SECONDS. At first I figured people would eventually stop calling him but then his bitch of a girlfriend kept calling every two minutes to see if he loved her yet and that thing drove me out of my mind like in a Ferrari.

Finally I got pissed and asked him why he didn’t put the thing on vibrate before I had to club him to death with a jack handle, but he said he couldn’t because he had a can of Red Bull in his pocket and he didn’t want the thing to get shook up and jizz all over his new pants. This seemed fair enough, but still that phone was DRIVING ME FUCKING CRAZY and I asked him if he could change the ringer to something else, like something by the Baha Boys or Shaggy or whatever, anything really. But he was a prick and wouldn’t change it so I had to club him to death with a jack handle.

Would you still think me crazy if I told you how cunningly I disposed of the body? If you looked in the dictionary to check and make sure cunningly was really a word, and it turned out it was, what would you think then? A madman would have attempted to dispose of the body in some crazy way, like shooting it out of a cannon or trying to inflate it with helium so it would float away. Or putting fake cardboard ears on the head and saying “My dog got hit by a car!” But not I, who is not mad. I buried that novelty-ringing fucker in the bathroom. And if anyone questions the uneven tile floor in there, I will tell them I have moles. The animal kind.

Just then there came a knock at the door, and it was Terrance and his brother Marcus. At first I told them to fuck off, because Marcus is the dick who never returned my Shirelles tape, but then I realized how that might look so I invited them in. We hung out for a while talking about thong underwears and that was cool, but Marcus was going on so long my ears started to ring. Then after a while I realized it wasn’t my ears at all, there was a faint ringing sound in the air, impossible to locate or ignore. That’s when it hit me. THE PHONE!

Terrance scrunched up his nose when he heard it too.

“Hey man, is Ernesto here? That sounds like his goddamned phone. I hate that fuckin’ thing.”

“No!” I told him. “And why are you asking such stupid fucking questions? Damn is you stupid. If Ernesto was here, why wouldn’t he be out here with us? What, you think he’s hiding in the bathroom or something? Shit. If Ernesto was here, I’d beat his ass to death with a jack handle, that’s how not here he is.”

I had covered my tracks deftly but still, the phone rang on. Again and AGAIN. That stupid bitch girlfriend! Couldn’t she take a hint that he was dead? By now it was becoming impossible to ignore or deny it, Ernesto’s annoying goddamn phone was in my apartment somewhere! At first I had Terrence and Marcus convinced that it was just me humming “Somewhere Out There,” but then Marcus asked how come I could hum and drink beer at the same time, was I some kind of ventriloqueer or something?

SHIT!! They KNEW! My eyes darted around the room for something else to blame the ringing on as it grew louder and louder. In an instant it was deafening! My head was pounding as Terrence and Marcus laughed and talked about Barbershop. Were they fucking with me?? They had to know, and now they were fucking with me! Those pricks!

“Alright you cocksuckers!” I shouted. “I confess!”

The both looked at me with genuine puzzlement. Hmm.

“I, uh… haven’t seen Barbershop yet.”

“Well, shit dog,” smiled Terrence. “Get your coat man, we goin’.”

For more of this great story, buy Albert Forrest Hyne’s novel
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