Finding The Five || FNAF Movie

1 || Odd Job Offers

(Unedited, 2256 words)

The phone started ringing off the hook on a rainy Tuesday morning at about nine o'clock, sometime after I had woken up but not before I had gotten up. I let it ring once, assuming it was just another person with the wrong number. After all, I had just moved into the home a few days prior, and the renters before me left behind a note of all the things I needed to know about the home (how nice of them). One tip warned me that excessive calls were usually from people who thought that the number for this house belonged to the landlord. All that considered, I had a right to be skeptical. 

But by the second or third time it rang, I knew I had to get up off the couch and go check it. 

It wasn't a long walk from point A to point B, just a few steps across the small, carpeted living room, around the corner into the kitchen, and a little further across cold white tile. The walk only sucked because I didn't have socks to protect me from the frigid flooring. And while you might think it's a coincidence that I wasn't wearing socks in this moment, you'd be wrong. At the time this interaction took place, I did not own a pair of socks and had to trek across an unheated home's freezing tile floor to reach a phone for a call that probably wasn't even for me with no protection for my feet. 

A pretty pitiful life I was living at the time, so much so that I had barely been able to afford the rotting couch I had just climbed off of. Or out of, I guess. There were enough holes for it to be considered something I laid in not on. But at least I had a rented roof over my head, which was better than what could be said about me almost exactly a month before the call. 

I picked the phone up at nine o-eight, I remember making note of it in my head for some reason. In the bargain I had struck with the landlord when I applied to rent this home, I managed to get the first few months of electricity bills off my rent payment. This had been heaven for me, as I no longer had to sulk around in the dark and bump into everything in sight-- or rather out of sight since I... you know... since it was dark. Because of this miraculous markdown in my required payments, the digital clock on the oven (one of the ones with green numbers and a blinking colon) was, in fact, working. 

Along with the rest of the nice furniture I had the pleasure of seeing the day I toured the rental home, the renters before me had taken their cat-themed wall clock with them when they left. They didn't so much as leave spare batteries for the busted one the landlord provided for me, but then again, the landlord didn't give me any either, so I guess it wasn't that surprising. Regardless, if I couldn't afford socks, I sure couldn't afford batteries.

The phone line was quiet for a moment, not even the sound of breathing or static coming through. I almost assumed it was dead until a very hesitant voice said, "Hello, I'm looking for Josephine Sterling." 

The mention of my own name puzzled me for a moment in a way it probably shouldn't have. The only people who even knew I existed at that time were the landlord, my boss, my coworkers, and the woman on the bus I share a seat with every morning on the way to work. I doubted that the renters before me even remembered I existed. As such, hearing my name from someone so hesitant to say it was a bit weird.

"This is she. May I ask who's calling?" I replied, shivers suddenly running down my spine. Goosebumps formed on my arms, visible from how I was standing and the light of the sun pouring in through the dirty glass kitchen windows. Every time I breathed in it was like someone was pouring ice water down my throat. This had to have been the coldest Louisiana winter I had ever experienced, and it wasn't even freezing-- yet.

"Yes, thank you. Hi, my name is Michael Schmidt," he began, having much more confidence now that he knew who he was talking to. I didn't know if I could consider that I good thing. I still don't. "I was calling because I saw a flier with your name on it a few days ago. It was outside a grocery store in New Orleans, talking about um..." He paused then, and I heard some rustling papers. "Hold on, let me find it."