Station 60.
The road reaches [REDACTED]
.
..
…‘Well the raido’s dead.’
Knocking the input microphone against its transmitter, Mason frowned as his pugilistic methods of fault finding had failed to make good whatever problem was bricking the station radio. ‘What do you reckon R922 ERR is?’ he said, placing the microphone down and giving the isolation transformer a sharp kick.
‘Probably means it’s fucked Mase,’ Paul replied as the metal of the transformer reverberated and tried to decide which direction it should echo toward.
‘Helpful’.
‘What do you want, ya teapot? Technical jargon? Well the disponder unit has a central imbalance in the air gap capacitance, have you tried throwing it in the bin?’ said Paul, waving his arms at each word to underline the gravity of his sarcasm. ‘It’s been raining static for a week, everything is wet and if I see another tin of beans I’m going to start eating the wallpaper’. In an effort to settle his angst Paul began to chew his nails and hoped that this small moment of achieving something would counterbalance the, as yet, wasted day.
Looking up to the leak in the ceiling and the slowly dissolving bucket below, he grabbed a coil of knotted rope and moved over to the shuttered window.
Flicking the rope out into the static Paul kept his eyes closed, being careful not to stare too deeply into the blinding haze of flitting granules, counting to five he hoiked the rope back in again, not brave enough to wait the recommended ten seconds.
It was still embering when the charred remainder clattered back into the station with a solem thwump. ‘Hmm, six knots. Good clean burn, looks like there’s too much static in the air today for watering the gardenias.’ Paul sighed and recoiled the rope, dropping it back into its metal box and then sitting himself down upon the lid.
Lighting a cigarette he tossed a scrap of paper into the drip bucket where it immediately caught fire.
‘Maybe if we had the manual still,’ Mason muttered off-handedly, too engrossed in fixing his radio to notice what the log keeper was rambling about.
‘The manual? To fix that? Mason, we are going to die out here you do know that don’t you? Dead dead not like the flu on a summer’s day kind of dead,’ puffing at his cigarette Paul took two drags before remembering that he had to breathe out.
Gasping for air the log keeper coughed low and throaty, eyes watering as he swore in curses that were upsettingly articulate. Settling his breathing he sighed and flicked his cigarette out the window into the ether. ‘I have a *Cough* sad feeling that nothing is going to change for a long while yet. You me and a broken radio, that’s all that we’ll be.’
‘Working on it champ’ said Mason as he began resoldering a nest of wires buried in an important looking compartment of the radio. Pausing, as he felt death over his shoulder, watching him work with a great interest, Mason’s concentration turned into a flurry of panic which saw him throw open the switchboard to turn off the power. Slinking back to his seat and pretending that was all intentional he began soldering again. ‘I…I’ve got it totally under control’ he said with a quivering nonchalance. ‘Be fixed before we know it’.
:—:
‘Do you know what day it is Paul? I think the calendar is broken too.’ Mason wiped a veneer of settled dust from the LCD display of the log unit and double tapped on the screen. Ignoring his desire to try thumping the delicate piece of equipment against the desk, he flicked through a few of the menus and blinked in puzzlement. ‘The tracker says we’ve only been here a week but we’ve got like eight-ish days of log reports. You been doubling up mate?’
‘What? No, I haven’t done more than three logs, there hasn’t been enough data to bother.’
‘Oh!’
‘Oh!’
One million thoughts suddenly interlinked and made the station dense with worry. The two men looked into the other’s face as the crackle of their broken radio harmonised with the outside static, speaking a line from an unknown poem’
‘The sky appears to have fallen open’
‘Are we the apple or the tree?’
Twisted in coiling loops the path of memory does not unfurl as even the most knotted string might. Time, the turning clock, pushes onwards forever drawing a mark within in its wake. Good morning, good night, the width of a day doesn’t seem so far apart, does it?
J.McCray
2020
Sunday Short Stories 