[ WP ] His cellphone starts playing her ringtone . That should be impossible , as he 'd just killed her .

He felt his heart miss a beat. Panic buzzed around his head like so many flies while his eyes darted madly around the room, searching vainly for whatever comes before reason and after emergency. 
 
 He did not breathe. 
 
 The gripping cold in his chest slowly gave way to a sickly warm tingling, flowing smoothly down his arms and legs until he felt as though he might vibrate apart. 
 
 As he remembered the feeling began to subside, fading until he was able to move again, a marooned sailor with a distant recollection of ever knowing sea legs. Drunkenly, he slouched his body in the vague direction of the sofa and was relieved to feel the stiff cushions materialize beneath him, ending his fall. 
 
 Wiping the sweat from his forehead with the back of an equally wet hand, he began to laugh. 
 
 He stayed like this for some time: head held in two shaking hands, elbows resting on wobbling knees, laughing. His laugh did not increase in intensity over this period; there was no building din, no ultimate crescendo. It ended the same as it had begun: quietly and calmly. 
 
 Finally lifting his gaze above the bloodstained floorboards, he took a moment to consider her face. It looked different removed from her head, as if it somehow lacked context. Her arms, now at opposite sides of the room, did n't strike him in any particular way. The head itself was still in the sink, and he could not see it from where he was sitting, though he imagined it looked the same as it had always looked: perfect. 
 
 Pulling himself to his feet he bent down to where the torso and legs remained motionless and bloodied, and turned the whole package over, not indelicately. 
 
 Reaching into the back pocket of her jeans, he found her phone, ending the call. 
 
 Later on, after the police had caught up with him, after the other Nine, after the media, after Brazil and the dogs and the broken watch, they would ask him:'When did you know this was going to be your life?' 
 
 His answer was always the same, and he was never unamused by it. 
 
'Pocket dial. Who would have thought?' 

