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"Hellooo...?"
A soft-spoken query lets itself known as you casually put the receiver up to your ear. Pressing it gently against your hearing, you paused to process the odd voice from across the receiver of the telephone.
"Hi?", was the word that finally decided to come out of you. Quick and casual, much like your small hopes towards whatever this conversation ought to be leading to.
"Do you want to hear a joke?", the voice responds. The stranger melodiously allowing their slow smooth speech to radiate through your hearing.
"What joke?", curious, you went on to humor the odd caller.
"What do you call a body with no nose?"
Oh great, how unique. You knew the answer to that question, and you're not a stranger to that overly used punchline. Your patience starting to stretch thin urged you to drop the call then and there but you figured this poor stranger sounded too innocent to be all too familiar with these kinds of prank calls. It's almost as if you're the first person they've ever gladly decided to tell this joke to.
"I don't know...", much to your dismay, you answered back allowing the conversation to drag on much further as you hear a soft sound of seemingly cheerful gasp from across the line.
"Nobody nose!", they piped up, ecstatic sounding even. As if you were really the first person they told the joke to and hey— you even humored them too!
"Pfft. Is that all this call is for?"
"Ha! Ha! Ha!", hindered delicate laughter started to echo through the receiver. "Did you like the joke?"
You didn't like the joke. It was corny and overused, many of the people you know online and offline often bombarded you with jokes like these and they frankly annoy you at this point.
But of course, you didn't dare be that blunt to a stranger that sounded so innocently sweet.
"Maybe.", you replied, allowing a soft smile to spread through your lips.
"I'm glad! Barnaby taught me that but I didn't really get it the first time.", their soft-spokenly slow speech made them sound all the more innocent.
"They sound like a funny friend.", you lied, yet again. How could you not when the equivalent of the caller on the other side of the line sounded so pure? You cursed your inability to be blunt in situations like these.
"He is! Ha! Ha! Ha!", they paused shortly, allowing your breathing to be the only sound to reach your own ears.
"Do you want to hear more?"
Alright, that's it. You can't be dealing with more lame jokes this afternoon when you could be doing something else with your precious time. You had allowed your spreading thin patience to snap through its stretch.
"I'd rather not. Besides, I don't even know you, maybe you got the wrong number?", you tried your best not to let a hiss escape from your poorly restrained tone. You may be losing your patience at this very moment, but you'd still appreciate keeping your composure above all.
"Hmmm..."
"I'm going to hang up now—"
They sweetly call out your name, your full name. What the hell? How does this person know your name, let alone the full extent of it... Now you really just want to drop the call.
But for some reason, you can't. Why can't you? It's just so so easy to put the receiver back to the patiently waiting switch hooks of the phone. Maybe it's the stranger's voice? An alluring lullaby of false comfort to render you defenseless from the eeriness creeping up to you, after all, they just shared out a personal information that you don't give out so easily to others both online and offline.
"H-how do you know my name?", your voice shook, droplets of worried sweat building up on the plane of your forehead.
"I'm Wally!", they admitted; an obvious attempt to dodge your nervous questioning.
"Wally. How do you know my name?"
"I know lots of things!", Wally pauses to think, "Do you know what a rat looks like?"
"Uhm... Yes?"
"Describe, please!"
What in god's name is this odd person trying to pull? Whatever, your time's practically wasted this afternoon anyway.
You hesitantly described the furry appearance of a rat, pricks of gray coating covering the rounded body attached to four thin legs with claws for feet, tapered to its back end with a long striped tail, whilst the head of it lifted a pair of round furry ears in accompaniment to the small beady eyes and long snout of a nose with extending whiskers to match.
You hope that answer pleased Wally, because you'd rather not know what other else kind of information he has about you waiting to be dispersed into the surface.
He laughed. His signature slow delicate giggle radiating through the receiver yet again. That's a good thing, right?
"You're weird. I like that."
"Weird? What do you mean? I just told you what a rat looked like because you asked for it!", an offended gasp escaped you, as if you never knew you were weird already but hearing it come from someone else who knew you without barely knowing you just made your defenses rise up higher than it already was.
"Rats aren't furry or gray, silly! They're blue, have scales, fish-like tails, antennas, and a top hat!"
What in the name of all hell is he talking about? Ah whatever, you didn't want to argue at this point. Perhaps this could be your way out of the call too.
"Sure, Wally. Anyway, I have to go do errands and stuff.", poor choices of words but whatever, anything to free you from this ever-changing sense of both comfort and the lack thereof.
Wally surprisingly let you go from the call, saying he'll talk to you soon enough once you're able to again. You didn't pay any mind to that last sentence, you were planning to change your telephone number before this conversation happened anyway.
Days pass by and you finally got around to changing your home number, something you thought Wally wouldn't expect.
Unfortunately...
Ring. Ring. Ring!
"Hello? Are you there?"
"...Wally?"
"That's me!"
"How did you get my new number?"
"I know all my friends' telephone numbers!"
"Friend?"
"Friend! You're my friend."
It appears that no matter how hard you tried, you couldn't escape Wally. Not that he's done or said anything bad to you. The only things that made you uncomfortable was the fact that he knew your entire name and your phone numbers, both new and old. Still, the fears you felt were all incredibly valid, and you know it.
But you wanted to just throw those fears away into oblivion; justify Wally's creepy behavior by passing it off as some nerdy kid who knew how to hack through the phone services database and took one look at your name and thought that you had a friendly enough name to bother you with corny jokes every once in a while with.
Your mental justification of your newfound telephone buddy worked as days to weeks have passed and with each call Wally took to your home line, you don't feel too deep into the thoughts of worry that once bombarded your senses every time you picked up the receiver only to be met by his consistently sing-song greetings.
He just sounded like a sweet fella, that's all. Save for the spine-chilling omniscience.
With time, it started to become routine. Every late afternoon, you come home from running your errands, and as you start to deeply relax yourself into your chair— the telephone would start to ring excitedly, seeking for your attention. And every time, you would always carefully raise the receiver up to your ear to hear the familiarly drawled voice, ever so dripping with amusement with each time you spent listening to their worn out jokes.
It doesn't really take that long to finish a conversation with Wally, all you need to simply do was listen, and sometimes he would courteously ask a joke from you but you often gave the most dry humored response that his sweetness wouldn't allow him to resonate. Even so, he laughs. He laughs because he appreciates you for sharing your own.
At the end of the day, Wally was a friend you didn't know you needed. You had friends, sure. But none of them ever bothered you both with pure innocence and extreme awareness in a span of less than ten minutes. None of them ever told you the lamest jokes you've ever heard but still kept that sense of excitement in letting someone be the first to know about the joke. None of them ever once asked you what's wrong even when you sounded cheerful, the tone being a facade to clad your struggles that Wally just seemed to see through so easily.
"What's wrong?", his voice cuts in between the laughter you were both sharing from the joke he just shared.
"What?", your trance of false joy rendered frozen from the spiral.
"You sound...sad."
"I'm not though."
A soft whimper disperses amidst the soft crackling static.
You groaned defeatedly to yourself. You've been talking to your new friend for weeks now, it would be alright to let him inside your guarded walls for a moment, right?
"I— Alright. I just had an awful day, that's all."
Wally doesn't respond, but you know he's listening intently, perhaps nodding along to your story.
"There were just these people and... Well...", you hesitantly started.
Not long after, your walls were struck, completely shattering down to the ground as you start to pour your worries and discomfort to the other end of the line.
Sniffles forming into sobs before blooming into hiccups of pained breathing from the tears. You shared, and you poured without restraint.
And Wally listened and stayed without complaints.
What felt like hours of uncontrollable venting slowly came into a halt with, "O-oh I'm sorry. I think I said too much, did I take too much of your time?"
"Not at all, friend. I don't mind your worries."
You would thank him if you could but you were still breathing a bit heavily from your sobs. You opted to just showing a nod, in hopes that Wally would somehow understand that gesture through your silence.
"Do you want to hear another joke, telephone friend?"
You giggled at the way he addressed you, "telephone friend."
"I haven't even told the joke yet, friend! Why are you already laughing?", you could hear the giddy smile forming across Wally's mouth, coupled with chuckles to match his amused curiousity.
"You called me 'telephone friend'. I thought it was funny."
"Ah but my actual joke will be much much better, telephone friend!"
"Pfft. Alright, let's hear it."
Wally pauses for a short moment. You hear a fake cough to clear his throat, as if he's building up momentum to tell you the best joke he's ever had up his sleeves his entire life.
"What do you call a special person?"
"What?"
"A telephone friend!"
You paused to register his words. Is he saying that he thinks you're special?
"H-how is that a joke?", endearing warmth begins to glow through your aura.
"Oh you're right! I asked Eddie about this one. He called it a 'pick-up line', whatever that meant."
You snickered at this new character that Wally mentioned.
For someone so inconspicuously hyper-aware, he's also so easily influenced. You thought it was kind of cute, in a way.
"Are you saying I'm special then, Wally?"
"The absolute most!", you hear a hummed soft tune trail after his words.
Your smile widened, heart filled with warmth and appreciation as the once worry-filled tears start to dry out on under your eyes as you sat there absorbing the tune.
You listened contentedly, grateful for your friend knowing that even after the earlier heavy conversation, more lighthearted corny jokes will come both your ways in the future. All of which will be shared through the same telephone line where you first met your telephone friend.