Two men stared ponderously at the schematic of their broken radio.
Both, gravely unsure and too terrified to ask if the plans were upside down, scratched their heads and made considered hmm-like noises, while each hoping that the other may have a moment of epiphany so they could radio in for more milk.
The sky was a line of grey; thirty days of low hanging clouds were meandering across the sky, smearing themselves along the horizon in the way a bag of honey would slowly fall down a set of stairs. It was weather for a holiday, both men needed a holiday, but working this far out in the plains meant the chances of being granted leave were about the same as them fixing their broken radio.
‘Coffee?’ offered Dan, hoping that a small achievement, even one so miniscule as boiling a kettle, might make his day feel less like a failure: in so far as he’d managed to brick the centric-analyzer, fuse the long range radio, and, worst of all, bust the station’s dunny door, which was now clattering loosely against its frame whenever it got bored.
Everything seemed bored out on the salt planes.
A tumbleweed sighed as it became snagged by the weathered and splinter-laden station fence and then began to contemplate an unmoving existence. Would it still be a tumbleweed at rest? What was it before? A weed? Stirring in hopes of a sudden breeze whipping past to free it, the weed grew disappointed as the gale managed but only a weak lunged puff, then returning to stillness.
The radio buzzed, it usually buzzed, that was normal; but this an abnormal type of buzz, one that didn’t sound like a radio but instead sounded like a harsh grating of metallic worry twitching in angst. Whatever had caused an appliance with no moving parts to harness the violence of an unbalanced motor could only be worrisome and finding the only wiring diagram to be mouse touched* did little to lighten the mood.
The station’s lightbulb flickered with the whirling static of outside and continued to radiate a merry twenty-two lux against the overcast din of the day.
Pointing the tip of his screwdriver towards a blinking diode, Garth let his mind wander and briefly embraced the call of the void–to think without thinking is an art that furrows the brow and delays positive action into a redundant malaise.
A tangled mess of abstract lay in front of him.
Rivers of wires that broke away and disappeared behind globules of over-fluxed solder; capacitors, that were either dry or leaking verdigris, crumbled under his gaze as if their shyness was near terminal; a board, one he was certain that he hadn’t touched, was unplugged and hanging loosely inside what was possibly the transmitter housing.
Noticing he was slowly falling backward in petit mal, Garth snapped back into sharp focus and grumbled something about the radio not being fit enough to park his boat next to.
‘What do we do then?’ said Dan as he attempted to screw the broken handle back onto the kettle. ‘If we can’t raido into control anymore shouldn’t we just head back?’ The log keeper’s natural disposition to knocking off early was always quick to flare up at the suggestion of an incline in needed effort.
‘I can fix the radio mate, even if I have to change every bloody part, even if I have to climb into the housing and rewind the amps with my nose hair, I am going to fix this,’ Garth snapped, his gruff retort reverberating inside the metal cabinet and amplifying the weight of its anger.
‘Would it still be the same radio if you change every part though?’ muttered Dan, absentmindedly as he lit the woodstove and threw the damaged plans in as kindling, watching as they embered green in an alchemical reaction that was surely bad for the lungs.
‘Even if I’ve changed the handle of my hammer three times and its head twice, it’s still my hammer. And let me tell you right now, if I ask you to pass me a hammer in a second it’s not going to be for gentle purposes–’ The sound of a mechanical lurching had suddenly cut off the string of profanities that followed Garth’s re-energising a bypass circuit.
Click
The blink of an incandescent indicator lamp burnt to life and buzzed with a much more acceptable hum.
‘Ha, you’ve done it! You little ripper,’ laughed Dan as he attempted to drag the arc-flash addled Garth out from the radio and back onto the floorboards. ‘Mate, I’d kiss you if you weren’t covered in carbon fall-out.’
Moments of small victory often seem fleeting upon the vast expanse of the plain.
Step after step the world appears to be made of piling hours that double before one can be spent in earnest.
After time, there’s not much else left.
Somewhere nearby, a dunny door slammed in the wind.
[–]
*A slang term in station parlance denoting something that had been partly eaten by mice
J.McCray
2020
Sunday Short Stories 