Debt, A Parable.

Debt, A Parable

by james bezerra

Due to a childhood misunderstanding, the Anglican Scrabble Player believes all phones to somehow be payphones and that she has run up a terrible bill with some public utility somewhere on account of the weekly calls back to her mother back in East Anglia.

Her fear of this presumably massive debt keeps her from sleeping the night before the Scrabble championship. She asks her tax preparer if this debt needs to be declared in some way or if she sound contact someone about it. Curiously, he does not reply to her.

She begins to save obsessively, out of apprehension. She ceases buying the newest dictionaries and her Scrabble game suffers as a result. She has difficulty completing crosswords. She takes a job as a school teacher to earn extra money. She saves all of her changes and washes her clothes the deep sink in the kitchen. After years she has grown skinny and is accidentally virtually wealthy. She still can’t sleep. She has stopped calling her mother, who lives alone in an old cottage near Winterton-on-Sea.

Her mother wonders about her. Wonders what she did to drive her daughter away. Her mother sleeps always near the phone, which never rings anymore. Her mother shuffles into town each day to the single internet cafe, so she can keep up with the latest news from the competitive Scrabble circuit, but her daughter’s name no longer shows up in the updates.

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