Stetson Ray lives in the hills of East Tennessee and spends most of his time writing.
Gone
by Stetson Ray
Todd Stewart checks his phone. He has no missed calls, no messages. It’s 3:31 in the afternoon. His gut knows something is wrong. He sends a message to his wife, Melanie:
Hey is everything ok?
He puts his phone down and tries to concentrate on his work, but it’s no use; his eyes dart between his computer screen and his phone. Minutes pass. The sounds around him—usually only background noise—grow louder and louder: phones ringing, people talking, keyboards clicking. Everyone at the office is trying to wrap up loose ends before quitting time, but all Todd can think about is his wife.
He snatches his phone off the desk.
I’m worried about u please text me back
He puts his phone aside. His brow furrowed, he types and clicks and does his best to stay busy, but the worry won’t leave him. His eyes wander to his phone again. No missed calls, no messages.
From the cubicle next to Todd’s comes a scream loud enough to shatter glass. Todd’s hands automatically cover his ears. The screaming continues, now the only sound inside the office. The source of the noise—a middle aged woman with short curly hair—is ushered toward the break room by two other women.
No one moves.
No one says a word.
A phone rings, and someone answers it.
Things in the office slowly return to normal. Todd cranes his neck and peers over the wall into his neighbor’s cubicle. The chair in front of the desk is empty save for a pair of khaki pants, a pair of boxer-briefs, and navy-blue polo shirt. Rob Sanford was Todd’s office neighbor for three years. He was forty-eight years old. He had a longtime girlfriend, but no children. He was a good man—was. Now he’s gone, nothing left of him but the clothes he put on earlier that morning.
Todd grabs his phone. Melanie still hasn’t texted him back. It’s nearly four p.m. He pushes a few buttons and holds the phone to his ear.
It rings and rings and rings.
Todd jumps up from his chair and hurries through the maze of desks to the other side of the office. He knocks on a door, but doesn’t wait for a reply before opening it. A manager with an outdated haircut looks at Todd from behind a large desk.
“Sorry to barge in, but I’m having trouble getting my wife on the phone. Is there any way I could knock off early and go home to make sure she’s okay?”
The manager watches Todd for a moment. He nods, and Todd turns to leave.
“Todd?” the man calls, and Todd freezes in the doorway, half in, half out. “Was that Colleen screaming?”
“Yes.”
“Who was it this time?”
“Rob Sanford. I guess Colleen was the first person to walk by his cubicle.”
“She’s got a knack for it, doesn’t she? Finding out first, I mean.”
“It seems that way. Believe that’s her fourth one this year.”
The two men stare at each other for a moment.
“Drive safely,” the manager says.
Todd marches through a chorus of ringing phones as he leaves the office.
*
Todd drives down a six-lane highway. There are only a few other vehicles on the road. He checks his phone. Still nothing from Melanie. It’s sixteen minutes past four. He holds the phone to his ear. An automated voice begins to speak. Todd groans and ends the call and drops the phone into the cup holder beside him.
Holding the steering wheel with both hands, he stares straight ahead. He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. He turns on the radio and keeps time with the music by tapping his hands on the steering wheel while muttering the lyrics to an old Statler Brothers song.
Something in the rear-view mirror catches his eye and he does a double take. He stops singing. He looks over his left shoulder and watches a car glide past him. There is no one inside the vehicle. The empty car veers into Todd’s lane ahead of him and keeps drifting until it slams into a concrete wall on the shoulder and explodes.
Todd flinches and sails past the flaming wreck. He stares forward, his eyes unfocused, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. He turns the radio off. The urge to call Melanie is irresistible. He grabs the phone.
“Come on…” he begs while eyeing a cloud of black smoke in the rear-view mirror.
Again, he gets her voicemail. He drops his phone and begins to hyperventilate. He kneads the steering wheel with both hands. His eyes shine like polished glass.
He punches the gas.
*
Todd bursts through the front door of his house.
“Mel!” He barely waits a moment for an answer. “Mel, where are you?”
He charges through the first floor of the house shouting her name, then bounds up the stairs to the second floor. He flies through an empty bedroom, jerks a bathroom door open, and freezes in the doorway. The fear and anguish slowly leave his face. He drags his right hand down his face from his forehead to his chin, then crosses the room and sits down on the edge of a large bathtub.
There’s a woman lying in the tub, earbuds in her ears, cucumber slices over her eyes, some kind of goop covering her face. She is mumbling along with a song under her breath. Her singing is way off pitch; she’s so bad it’s funny.
Todd smiles as tears well in his eyes. He gently touches the woman’s leg.
Melanie shrieks, her whole body jerks, and water sloshes out of the tub. She quickly removes the cucumber slices and glares at Todd. She sighs and settles back into the water.
“You scared me to death. I didn’t hear you come in. What time is—”
Though he is smiling, a large tear spills from Todd’s left eye.
“Babe, what is it?” Melanie’s demeanor changes and she sits up and takes Todd’s hand and watches him closely. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” Todd wipes his face with his free hand. “It’s just…I thought you were gone, Mel. I really thought you were gone.”
Melanie slowly realizes what she has accidentally put her husband through. She speaks quickly: “Oh my God. I’m so sorry. I must’ve left my phone in the bedroom. I found my old iPod and I’ve been listening to—”
Todd tries to keep himself together, but his face scrunches into a knot and he cries. Spilling water all over the floor, Melanie climbs out of the bathtub and sits beside him and wraps her arms around him.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers. “I’m here. I didn’t go anywhere.”
They kiss. They cry. They hold each other. For a moment, Todd is more thankful for his wife than he has ever been before.
*
Todd and Melanie eat dinner at a small table in their kitchen. They fork food into their mouths. They glance up at each other periodically.
“Did you enjoy your day off?” Todd asks.
“I did. Oh, and I talked with my mother this morning. She’s fine.”
“Your sisters?”
“Fine.”
“Dad?”
“Still fighting with the city over those squatters next door, but fine.”
Silverware clatters against plates.
“Starting next week, they’re instituting mandatory overtime at the office,” Todd says.
Melanie stops eating. “They can’t do that.”
“I guess they can.” Todd shrugs. “We don’t have enough employees to fulfill our contracts, so what else is management supposed to do? At the beginning of the year, Inetec had nearly four hundred employees—and now we’re closer to three.”
Melanie sighs. “I don’t know how much longer we can keep this up.” She resumes eating.
“Who?”
“Us. Everyone. People. Society. What’s the point? What are we even doing?”
Todd stares at her absentmindedly as she chews. In his mind, he can hear Colleen screaming again.
“It’s getting close to a billion,” Melanie says.
“Huh?” Todd snaps out of his trance.
“I saw an article this morning. Nearly a billion people have disappeared since it started.”
Todd opens his mouth as though he is about to respond, but says nothing. He looks down at his plate and forces himself to take a bite.
“What would you do if I disappeared?” Melanie asks.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
She looks at him through the top of her eyes, her chin tilted down.
Todd leans back and puts his hands on the table. Melanie stares at him and waits for an answer. His thoughts wander to his parents. They were two of the first to vanish, three years prior, mere days apart. He misses them, but he’s grateful his father wasn’t alone for very long.
“I don’t know,” Todd finally says. “I have no idea what I’d do without you. I really don’t.”
“You could sleep with that woman from accounting who used to send you those salacious emails.” Melanie flashes Todd a devilish look.
He doesn’t have the heart to tell her that the woman from accounting she’s referring to doesn’t exist anymore.
“I wouldn’t do that,” he says.
“Why not? I’d be gone. You could do whatever you wanted.”
Todd shakes his head. “Yeah, but…”
“But what?”
He eyes her wine glass; she’s had more than usual.
“I love you too much to do something like that. I think I’d just retire from women if you… disappeared. At least for a while. Maybe a year or so.”
Melanie melts. “Babe, you’re so sweet.”
The meal goes on.
They eat in silence.
“Want to know what I’d do?” Melanie asks.
“I guess.”
“Go on a spree. I’d sleep with every guy I know. The day after you disappeared, I’d be doing the splits all over town.” She finishes the last of her wine in one big gulp.
“Thanks for that mental image,” Todd says flatly, his expression forlorn.
Melanie coughs and nearly spits out her wine. She swallows and laughs and looks at him, a huge smile on her face. “I was kidding.”
“I hope so.”
Looking at her, Todd can feel another wave of emotion coming on. He’s still shaken from earlier. He has to look away to keep from crying.
“Aw, honey.” Melanie leaves her chair and goes to him. Standing behind his chair, she leans over his shoulder and kisses the side of his face. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have joked around like that. I’d be devastated if I was stuck here without you.”
“I know.”
“And I want you to know that I would wait at least a month before hooking up with that trainer at my gym who looks like Harry Styles.” She bites her lip and makes a strange moaning sound.
Todd can’t help but laugh, and Melanie joins him.
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
*
Todd and Melanie sit on a couch and watch TV. She is nestled against him, her feet pulled half beneath her, her head on Todd’s shoulder. She yawns and stretches, then lies down and rests the back of her head on his lap.
“If I do disappear, I don’t want a funeral,” she says, looking up at him.
“Jesus.”
“I mean it. I think it’s silly—burying empty caskets. It’s a waste of money.”
He looks down at her. She looks up at him.
“Fine. No funeral. But I’m putting in your obituary that in lieu of flowers, you wanted people to send monetary donations to the Flat Earth Society.”
She laughs, the light from the TV shining in her eyes, then her expression grows solemn again.
“Where do you think they go?” she asks.
“Hoboken, New Jersey.”
“I mean it. Where do you think we go?”
Todd didn’t like how she used the word we.
“I have no idea, honey, I really don’t.”
“I’ve been reading about different theories on the internet.”
Todd doesn’t waste his time going down internet rabbit holes. His wife doesn’t either, or so he thought.
“Some people are saying—”
“I don’t want to hear about it,” Todd says, cutting her off. “I’m worried enough without knowing what some weirdo on the internet thinks. It kills me to even think about it.” A few different emotions cycle across her face as he speaks. “I just want to enjoy what time I have left with you. Whether we’re together another five minutes or another fifty years, I want to stay present. I don’t want to waste any time speculating.”
He runs his fingers through her hair as they look into one another’s eyes.
“Okay,” she says. “I want popcorn.”
She springs off the couch and disappears into the adjacent kitchen.
“Want me to pause it?” Todd asks.
“Let it play,” she calls.
Melanie’s footsteps echo from the kitchen. A cabinet thumps closed. Cellophane crackles. The microwave begins to buzz. Todd props his head up with one hand and stares at the TV. Now that it’s been brought up, he can’t help but wonder: where do they go? There are theories, but no one knows. Various religions claim rapture; they say the vanished are being taken to Heaven, or Hell. Other people have different ideas: alien kidnappers who want to experiment on us; time travelers who are trying to save the future; interdimensional beings who have the ability to reach through space and time and snatch us away, only to use us as food or keep us as pets or slaves. Thinking about it is a pointless and maddening endeavor, at least for Todd. It’s not like there’s anything he can do about it.
He escapes his mind by refocusing on the TV. It’s been a while since Melanie went into the kitchen. She’s usually pretty quick when it comes to fetching snacks.
Todd mutes the TV and listens.
All he can hear is popcorn popping.
“Mel?”
No answer.
After the microwave finishes beeping, the house is quiet.
“You alright in there?”
She doesn’t respond.
Todd listens.
He doesn’t hear a thing.
Never in his life has he experienced such profound silence. He wants to get up and go into the kitchen and check on her, but all he can imagine is her pajamas lying in a heap on the floor in front of the microwave. The image nearly guts him.
Tears gleaming in his eyes, he unmutes the TV and wonders how long he can sit there waiting for her to come back.
Copyright 2025 by Stetson Ray