Morning Upon the Edges of a Town

I’d been listening to static for the last thirty minutes.

The distant stations, that echoed off the flat landscape around my car, crackled and threw their toneless noise across the scrubland, a cacophony of meaningless noise that could only mean one thing, the generator had tripped out again.
Not a problem, well not much of a problem, I’d thought as I put on my work boots at 21 hours into the day and then ambled out into the humid night air, a person’s enthusiasm had never been so low.
The highway stretched out before me and lay illuminated by the two headlights of my work ute.
The left light, slightly pushed askew after clipping a roo some years back, was gently rocking in its mounting as I winded through the bends of the highway, the damaged light casting a stray beam off into the night and occasionally outlining a Torin stump, a shock of white bark that looked to be a ghost when only half glanced.
In the far distance the light of the radio tower loomed ahead indifferently.

Blink on, blink off.

I had to replace the globe at the top once, it was night–just like tonight I guess–and someone in town had noticed that the radio was off.
Panic, tragedy! Aunt Beryl couldn’t listen to shipping reports.
The receiver was still transmitting though. It was a burnt out globe, one burnt out globe and the town assumed that the whole radio was broken; odd that no one tried to dial into a station.
It was winter that year, so it was just me and the wind that pulls the cold away from the steppes out here on that night, cutting through my bones as I clambered my way up the tower attempting to hold a torch, the ladder and a globe worth more than my yearly wage in my two shivering hands.

Closing my eyes I left the car to drive itself for a moment; an unbalanced steering wheel would mean that I was eventually going to drift into oncoming traffic, but who’d be out this late? What lonely soul would be headed so opposed to me at this hour? And anyway, a driver out here would probably be in the same situation.
I forgot the world for a moment and imagined myself passing another vehicle, both of us driving on the opposite side of the road, equally unaware of how close we were to crashing into each other. Two poles of a magnet calmly spiraling around an induction plate.

Opening my eyes I rolled my car back onto the right side of the highway. No looming headlights to greet me tonight, nothing ever to really worry about out here on the Torin. Rolling my window down I flicked the last gasps of a cigarette into the night air and watched the light explode into sparks as I left it in the distance.
Nothing out here on the Torin.

Blink on, blink off.

Pulling up to the station I closed my eyes for another moment. Such a long day aids the beckoning call of a bed and in looking at the wooden hut that sat underneath the radio antenna, thoughts of the lumpy mattress inside suddenly grew a fleeting sort of appeal.
People live in those huts, I mean way out on the plains they do, but people actually live in them…you’d have to be mad, or at least prepared to go mad.

Flicking a switch by the door shocked life back into the lights of the receiving station revealing a brick bunker ingrained with the reek of dry capacitors. Looking up I glanced to the matting of carbon that had bonded itself to the roof over the years and judging from the antique out of service tag by the main switch board, it had been some time since anything here had been serviced.
I glanced into the cap bin to see how many were left before dropping the circuit breaker back up, it was better to know; some technicians swear by it being bad luck, they say that you’re always bound to need just one more if you look first. You’ll be looking for them rather than at them, that was the calling cry of technicians in this part of the salt planes, always thinking of the worst.

Seven, a good number, I probably wouldn’t have to drive back into town with that many spare.
Exhaling a small thanks and closing my eyes again for a moment, I decided that the risk was still enough to warrant making a coffee first. The chance of something probably being okwas a thing that I should be a bit more awake for.

I threw some powder into a mug that I had once left for someone else to wash and looked across the plain toward town. Another night out here, an isolated nothing not underscored by the usual hum of the radio tower, a something that was almost peaceful.

Well…better throw the switch.

Blink on…

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J.McCray
2021