just look at the face: it's vacant, with a hint of sadness

So it was a few days ago. My mom and I are in our p.j.'s, waiting for my dad to come so we can start watching our Miss Marple movie. But my dad is all, "Just kidding, I have to make a phone call." SIGH. So we wait, and my dad picks up the phone, but before he can start dialing he notices that there is no dial tone.

"Somebody hang up the phone!" he says. "A phone is off the hook. I need to make a call."

There are like 50 phones in my house. We check all of them, but none are off the hook. The lady on the phone my dad has in his hand is saying impatiently, muffled, "Please hang up and try your call again." My dad hangs up, and tries his call again, but it is all for naught. Somewhere, there is a phone that is not resting in its place.

Suddenly, I have a thought. "Dad," I say. "Dad. What about the phone in the sunroom?"

If you've never been to my house, you will not understand why the utterance of this sentence filled me with doom. In my house are two floors. The bottom floor has this room that is made of mostly windows, so it gets stinking hot in the day and is superbly creepy at night. At night you can sit in that room and stare out the windows at black emptiness until you start imagining eyes staring back at you, and did that tree just move in an odd fashion foreign to trees that AREN'T possessed by evil spirits? Those are the things you start to think.

Since the room is uninhabitable for 99% of the day, nobody goes in there. So why would the PHONE be off the HOOK. (I know what you're thinking, but it wasn't the cats. The door is kept closed specifically to keep the cats out.)

"Okay, go - "

"I'm not going down there," I interrupt my father, clutching at my neck in a maneuver I learned from a friend.

"Why?" he asks.

"Zombies," I say.

There is a pause. If my life were a t.v. show, the cameras would cut to the aforementioned room. The phone is lying on the floor. Slow pan along the carpet, past the drying racks filled with damp clothes, past the treadmill, until you can't take it any more and it shows you what you knew was there all along. ZOMBIES.

My dad doesn't respond to my comment; neither does he say there are NOT zombies; nor does he go down to the sunroom. Probably because he is afraid of what's down there. I sit on the couch in my pajamas, as he tries to fix the phone, my mind filled with images of what the zombies are doing downstairs. When will they start to ascend the stairs? Are they slow zombies or fast zombies? How much time will we have to escape once we start hearing the slow or possibly fast thud of rotting footsteps? After I've grabbed my dog, will there be space in my arms for the filing cabinet I just bought for $30?

The attempts to fix the phone are abandoned, and my dad is waiting now to talk to someone from Telus to see what they can do. Obviously they can do nothing about the real problem downstairs.

"Dad," I say. "I really think it's the sunroom."

Humouring me, but not enough to bring a weapon such as a poker for the fire, he goes downstairs. I wait upstairs. There is no sound of a scuffle, but I'm not exactly sure what a scuffle with a zombie sounds like because I always plug my ears during those parts of the movies.

After several minutes, he comes back upstairs. He doesn't mention a word about zombies, and apparently the phone is fixed. We all carry on with our evenings, and I wonder how in the world I survived living a whole year by myself with my imagination.