Fictional Biography

Miranda Wilkins, aged forty three, childless, unwed, has a strong fear of answering the phone. A man has been calling her for four months now and though she's said little of it, she had mentioned it to her friend, Candace Roberts, aged thirty nine and feeling it heavy on her shoulders. Candace married a man Miranda had desired back in school, but had never felt the courage to approach.
Candace had gone to college, Miranda had not. She did not feel cut out for that sort of thing, and had taken up a job checking files at a meat processing plant. It was good work, and though the men were a little harsher in their words than she cared for, they were at least honest men and hard working. They were the sort of men who managed to scrub off almost all of the blood from their hands before they went home. She noticed they tended to forget the little areas outside their wrists, because it looked like a bracelet from far away. She never said anything about it.
The man who had been calling her was getting on her nerves, edging her to paranoia and terror. She had installed a caller's identification machine to the phone, and did not answer when it was a number she did not know now, but sometimes it skipped that, or she forgot all her numbers, and answered anyway. The calls made he thoughts fuzzy, and she did not like being called honey. She did not have money to send the man, and she did not want to talk to him. She had told him so, but he continued on.
When Candace was told, she had worried that her friend was perhaps too alone in her house. She offered Miranda a job to babysit her youngest, but the boy did not like her very much, so she had refused.
Miranda was very much starting to worry the calls were getting closer, so she would lock her doors and shut the windows tight. Who knew who else he was calling?
One day he called at work, and asked for her boss. Then he asked for her coworkers.
She had hung up in a fit of tears. She didn't know this man, but he knew her.
He knew her far, far too well to find any solace in it.

The following week, Miranda left the meat processing factory, the town, and her home behind on a white bus headed to a hospital.
She did not return for a very long time. There were no phones there.