For his Writer’s Workshop this week, John Holton gives us six writing prompts and we are tasked with choosing one of the prompts (or as many as we want) and writing a post that addresses that prompt (or those prompts). I am responding to three of the prompts this week:

1. Write a post inspired by the word crisis.
2. Write a post in exactly 8 (eight) sentences.
3. Tell us about a “wrong number” phone call, either one where someone called you or where you called someone in error. (For this item, I wrote a piece of flash fiction about a man — not me — who dialed a wrong number and the result was a major crisis of conscience for the man.)

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The rain came down like it had a grudge, each drop tapping Morse code against my apartment window, the night I accidentally dialed the wrong number.

I was trying to get in touch with a client, a small-time grifter who owed me some answers, but the voice that answered wasn’t his — it was a woman’s, low and trembling, asking me if it was done.

I should’ve hung up right then and there and chalked it up to crossed wires in a city that feeds on mistakes.

Instead, I said yes.

There was a silence on the line, the kind that makes you aware of your own breathing, and then she thanked me for “taking care of him” and said she could finally be free of the bum.

She hung up and that was when I realized my stray “yes” had just confirmed a murder to someone who believed she’d ordered it and that was when my crisis of conscience took over.

I tried to call back, but the line was busy, as if fate itself had taken the receiver off the hook.

I sat in the dark, cigarette burning down to my fingers, wondering whether to go to the cops and untangle the lie, or to let a wrong number become the truest confession of the kind of man I really was.

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