the childhood phone that surfaces mid-gunshot
By the time he was ten only his pinkie-finger would fit in the dialer’s holes of his mother’s old princess phone
Context
Shot and going into shock, Gately's mind reaches for his mother's old princess phone, the dialer whose holes his finger had outgrown by ten — the telephone surfacing as the emblem of a childhood home, a thin remembered thread to the mother the whole hospital arc will route his dying through. The dying man's associations run, unbidden, to an obsolete instrument of contact.