All Comments on 'Phone Call'

Just for the record, if he is fucking this girl behind his wife's back he is not and cannot be "intensely loyal to his wife." Quit trying to play that up. He just a common cheater and this girl is just a homewrecker, period. No sugar coating.

He *is* a philanderer, he does NOT love his wife, and this woman is a gutter slut.

Both comments by 'Anonymous' can be considered fair game, though not the whole of the story.

The story as written takes into consideration the 'shadow side' that each of us carries within us. "The good that I want to do, I don't do. What I don't want to do, I do." It carries the reality that each of us has things we absolutely hold and believe about ourselves, and yet act against. And we somehow hold those two contradictory elements within ourselves.

We do that within our relationships with each other, and with our approaches to money, etc. (As a simple example, I offer you two statements I have heard from the same person: "No one should get money unless they worked for it." vs "There should be no taxation on death benefits." In short, in the latter insists that the recipient gets money for something that recipient hasn't worked for, which goes completely against what was stated in the first sentence. And somehow the speaker holds both within himself.)

I'm not saying I did a great job of holding those two in tension. I'm saying that tension exists in all of us, even if we try to wear masks to hide it. My story strips away the mask for the reader, perhaps leaving the reader feeling uncomfortable with what is revealed. I can live with that.