The echo of static, noise, light.
And so, it was as it had ever been. A quiet town that had forgotten that sun lay below as dark clouds coiled endlessly across the coastline.
A heavy grey seafoam lapped against the wood covered beach in languid pall as the grey rock of the harbour stood next to the sand as if punctuation to the unmoving land. This was a precipice, there was a finality to the ocean here.
Alone on the rain-slick grass, Amalie breathed with measure while the familiar rumble of the ground was felt below her. Brushing her hand slowly across the dew, the tired operator watched as the dreary droplets flicked skyward in a shimmer of movement, then wavering as they fell back toward the safety of the ground.
This was a cold place. Fog carried ice and rime in the air despite the permeating salt of the ocean. Lefa had taken to calling the floating crystal rost and believed that it carried the final words of long dead sailors. It was a honest thought but the old man had been at sea for too long, he had seen too many horizons and his stories had been lost in too much folklore.
The ice is soft here, it is much calmer than falling snow of the mountains and is quick to disappear when brushed away by hand. As a child Amalie thought that the ice was the fleece of young clouds born upon the fledgling dawn, ones not yet strong enough to float, ones pulled down to the port by whims of the weather.
You could hear the ice crack under the bow of ships, the crunch of Norrie as he walked to the station over the frigid gravel filled steps. It was still here, quiet.
Fir makes a different noise in the winter. It is heavy; the almost tired bending of the tree creaks with each moment as the wind pulls restricted through heavy bows and shakes morning’s frost onto the clearing’s floor.
A lone cuckoo called to no reply.
Amalie sighed and her breath called up a tale of ice. Rost was it? What were this sailor’s last words?
She sat on the hill of her station and watched the foam peaked port. A thermos was brought closer to her chest. Warmth and the fragrance of plastic tasting coffee rolled up to her chin as if it were an Esper; it felt to be a faint light upon the edge of the darkened winter sky, the blink of the radio tower when the generators were near-frozen over, it was something fragile.
Her station had resigned to inaction. No voices in the air tonight, too much static for short wave. The world was moving so quickly after the static had emerged. It was as if people had discovered a new magnetic pole and now the wind spoke change. Station after station had been built as the scraps of parts became towns; they became ports; they became cities. It came to be for Amalie that this station became a home.
She had been young when her family had been given a station permit. Serious men in grey suits oversaw its construction and left soon after it was finished. They ate in the tavern as visitors, never drinking, never laughing. Her father had told her to pay them no mind and clapped warmth into his hands as he worked without sleep. So much to learn, books and manuals to remember. Her father had never been a technical man, she remembered him as a fisherman before the station opened, he was simple, kind. But she knew that her memory was clouded, youth felt unfocused to her as the lens of static the burbled from the monitoring speaker. It was noise.
When she thought of the grey suited men Amalie could remember standing before the expanse of the Eastern forests without direction or map. She had been lost amongst the pine as a child and still felt a twist of fear each time she saw that silent titan move in the wind. There was an unflinching clarity to the forest, widely spaced trees and unchanging earth sprawling out in endless dizzying familiarity. The fir leaves no track, the moss points to no direction of sun, the forest is a living thing of silent malevolence. Amalie pushed these thoughts back away and returned to the station.
Her father was out of his depth, he folded pages, made countless notes, checked all the pointless things that she now knew were only a waste of good effort. It was a complex system of simple parts, there were no resets, no markers that the calibrations were off. In ten years, Amalie had finally managed to undo all the errors of her father’s tenure and still his ghost felt like it lived within the console, his rost. There were little things, notes drawn in shaky script on dials and marks where indicators should be left, dubious schematics stuffed into cabinets of equipment unplugged from the console and left to be rewired another day.
She had started to help by soldering, small jobs that her father was too clumsy to do accurately. He was a giant back then, two rough hands that were more suited to holding an axe than they were a pencil. But he cared, he wanted to do his part for the town and to be there for his daughter. Amalie remembered his hands, the dusty cotton of his shirt.
‘Busy day then?’ Norrie shouted as he approached, carrying whatever it was that a postman kept in their mailbag. Letters, parcels from another port. There were countless words hidden away by envelope and canvas and Amalie could almost hear the buzz of static that trailed behind it in a cloud.
‘It’s been a while, operator, the ice was finally broken through enough for travel from the mainland. I almost took to walking.’
He had always called her operator, even as a girl. She used to be so awed by the bestowed title but now it felt as much like her name than it was a job.
‘Oh?’ Amalie replied, still looking back to a memory of her father, ‘Almost is still only one step away from not. I’d miss seeing your ship putt its way into the port if you walked.’
She loved Norrie, he was a man of cheerful patience who was able to find conversation with a fencepost and still remember its name several years later. The stout pipe that felt as much of his face as his beard puffed away in the still air.
‘Got a new coat of paint on it in the downtime,’ he said, ‘it’s now redder than a vicar’s nose after an empty mass; came up such a treat’ reaching down into his mailbag, the old postman grimaced as his back seemed to spasm against having carried the weight of the bag for so long.
‘Not much mail for you though, dear, just some ink and a few coils of that metal which melts into the tea when you use it as a spoon.’
He knew it was called solder, but Amalie was unsure if he was fully joking. Norrie had an open honestness to his jokes that the truly good people of this world could only be born with.
Handing her friend a few letters, the two talked the thoughtless talk of neighbours for a time and then bid their goodbyes as the spit of rain began to grow into droplets. She would miss Norrie and she realised as the old man shuffled away that there would be a time when his steamboat would no longer putt into the harbour, when someone would replace him. She remembered her father.
Ajax port 19 and calm, slight eastern build rising by 1900, no countable static, frequency still on band.
The speaker crackled into life and gave a report from a station down the coast, a place that Amalie only knew of by name. She had taken apart an old phone panel–the radio had left it next to useless–and had repurposed it into a switch for the monitor speakers. With a length of hardy wire, Amalie had the phone wired up and dragged it through the window so she could sit outside, now able to hear the static and waves.
She had always lived with the static, that familiar buzz that felt as natural as the turning of day. She has listened to it for so long that it was felt missing when she was away from it. Her ears would ache for its remembrance and if she concentrated, she could almost hear it as an echo.
Returning to the console, Amalie switched back to the main speaker and adjusted the gain so that the room was filled with the static. There was a small voice, one too fragmented and lost in the band wave to be discerned. But it was familiar and warm. Every crackle bounced the dial of an indicator, the spectrograph hummed and sounded to be losing laminations again. Things felt at peace here, almost as if the noise spoke in words audible and clear.
‘Amalie…Amalie!’
What? Had she? Had she heard her name?
Looking at the window, Amalie pushed the rippled glass sideward and jumped out onto the wet grass. Her father hated when she would do this as a child, “protect your knees”, he always said. He wanted her to outlive the forest and the world around it, it seemed.
There was no one, in a dash Amalie had run around her station and could find no devil who called her name. No angel either; she must be tired, hearing voices where there could be none. Shaking her head, she returned to the warmth of her home and found a towel to dry. It was raining heavily now; Norrie would be out there, somewhere.
The reports rolled in when the static became clear that afternoon; jumbled strings of fanciful names and numbers that surely held more meaning than she could interpret. The next station would ask for reports too; a friendly voice always curious about weather readings, when checked against the local patterns of a pressure chart. There were the tide’s waxings and wainings, the phases of the moon, other fanciful things that barely felt like they mattered. It was cold here. The sky was grey.
For the first time since she was finally found in the forest, Amalie felt a relief that overflowed into something unsayable. She knew that voice lost in the static. She remembered who was calling her name.
J. McCray
2022
Sunday Short Stories 