‘Controller to station 32, come in 32’ Control repeated the radio call another time in hopes that 32 would pick up. He never did.
Sitting on the roof, and distantly staring at the lazy cloud mass drifting overhead, the operator of station 32 had heard the call but wasn’t planning on responding anytime soon.
It was another cloudy day, they always seemed to be cloudy, these days. Withdrawing a nail from his shirt pocket the operator scratched a tally check into the roof: the rusted chaff from his mark became caught by the breeze and was carried down the iron shingles, finally coming to rest in the gutter. He, for a moment of chasing direction, concidered adding all these tally marks up finding out how many days it had been cloudy since he had started. But laziness reclaimed the hippocampus and he wondered what he’d then do with the information. Why was he even recording cloudy days? Was that his job?
Securing the nail back in his pocket, the operator slid along the pitch of the roof and skittered down the drain pipe.
Dropping to the ground with a small billowment of dust, the operator walked back into the station, losing more and more interest in the prospect of the afternoon with each of his steps.
It had been a while since he’d looked at the date; at an estimate, he had been at this station from somewhere near to a bloody long while or close to stuffing ages. Sure, It would be easy to find out by looking at the log computer, but he had shoved that into the corner and he wasn’t really concerned enough to wrestle it back out and ruin his bench.
Afternoons like this seemed to drag on forever here on the salt planes. Quiet, near windless, afternoons that were often filled with the creeping boredom that left each object in the room in danger of being taken apart for no good reason. Eying the fridge with malicious intent the operator remembered an avocado that he was trying to distil in the salad crisper and put down his screwdriver dejectedly.
Everything moved so slowly.
He walked outside again, already giving up on whatever he had walked inside to do.
‘Controller to station 32, come in 32’
‘I wonder, nah maybe not…’
Staring out to the horizon, the operator lost himself for a moment in the twisting static that embered and coiled around the far off horizon. Rubbing some dirt in between his hands to dry them he stood and walked to the edge of the porch, taking care to step over the loose board by the front step.
He’d thought, in moments of flight and fancy, of using the nail within his top pocket to refix this floorboard, but even though he had originally stolen it from this very place, the nail just didn’t seem to really belong there.
He just didn’t seem to belong here.
The day was still, a stray spiral of static wisped overhead cutting a line of blue into the sky and drifted onwards, maybe to the south. ‘That seems like something I should report’, the operator said to himself as he clapped the last of the dirt from his hands and leant against a handrail. Closing his eyes and listening to the crackle of the morning he sighed and played with a small bit of leftover grit in his fingertips.
[—]
Sitting down at the radio for the first time in months, he returned the call, knowing as he spoke that the transmitter was still broken.
‘Go ahead controller, I’m here.’
…
‘Controller to station 32, come in 32’
J.McCray
2020
Sunday Short Stories 