She hadn’t slept.
A grey light washed its way onto the frigid shores of port as the fragmented voice still lingered just beyond the edges of static. Every radio was alive with noise, twelve channels open, the switch unattended and scanning freely. Every patch bay was full, every speaker had been plugged in and was gained up to beyond stress. The room was inhabited by noise, a tinny burble crackling merry and left soundless beyond anything that could be intelligible.
She had been searching.
Flakes of snow drifted past the porch light, meek in the dawn. A single snowflake landed upon the back of Amalie’s hand, melting quickly, it departed into but a streak of cold memory at rest between her thumb and pointer finger.
In half-sleep she dreamed.
Snow, the tremble of the ground below her.
Silence, an utter silence that amplified worried breath and lay in the crannied nooks that compressed and closed in, drawn to the sense of fright. That old panic rose from a place that was surely buried, she turned and saw that there was no trail. She was a child again, her woolly hat pulled tight over aching ears. Cold, cold so pressing that every movement felt in friction against the air. Pine trees, uniform trunks, densely packed and obscuring any landmark. She could see so far but was lost in the sameness of the forest; the warmth of her father’s hand becoming all the more absent. She saw the light, the golden still shadow bend between the trees. It shone in strange angles, a lamp searching in the mist, cutting though the fir but never shining upon darkness.
Morning seemed to exhale its first inward breath and the world slackened along with it.
Her name was called from the mist.
‘Amalie.’
She had heard her name in the static. One simple word that was spoken with such a familiarity. It was urgent; clear as if it were a shout calling into the snow-covered mountains, its edge was still sharp with a bitter memory.
‘Port Station operator, come in Port Station operator.’
A merry voice clipped from among the tangled speakers, waking Amalie and shaking the still droplet of fallen snow to the weary timber floor of her station hut. She looked out at the rising dawn, powdered snow had covered the path into town, she knew that the port would soon freeze over, Norrie would be weeks before he returned.
Letting her headphones fall to the floor, Amalie stood and fought to close the station’s door against the fallen snow that had drifted inside. The night before was a blur. Had she even heard her name? It had only been a week since she had disconnected the pass-filter and allowed all the maddening false signals be picked up by the antenna. Ben told her about that, operators that had found forgotten noises of the static; the transmissions that never reach their destination, the loops of feedback that circle endlessly around repeater stations. He had said that he could hear shipping reports from twenty years ago some nights, morse signals from all the way out near the Salt plains and beyond the reach of his shortwave. How could you find any sense in this noise? Why her name?
‘Port Station operator, Amalie, Come in Port Station operator, this is Ajax.’
‘Ben, what? It’s seven a.m.’ Amalie barked into her transmitter, refusing to turn the static down and pushing a pang of feedback out onto the band wave. She liked Ben, he was harmless in his friendly kind of way. A little bit too into weather patterns and ghost stories, but harmless all the same.
There were only a handful of stations that she could contact from the isolated reaches of her transmission tower and Ben was the only operator that was always online, always chatting away, never leaving his station. Amalie had even asked if he wanted to travel out to Port a few times when the waters were calm. But he always had excuses, for now he was just a voice that was there when times were dull and who asked for wiring advice when things were broken.
‘Just checking in,’ he said timidly in his stuttering kind of way. Matters of conflict and personal nature unnatural to his conversation, he would speak in volumes of things that he knew and little of what he did not, ‘you called out for radio silence last night. I looked but the operator’s manual doesn’t actually specify when we can talk again.’ the wording of a manual gave Ben more direction in his life than north would do for a compass.
He means well, Amalie thought to herself. You could often forget that people cared about you when left alone for so long, so she had to remind herself to be a person sometimes.
‘You can speak again,’ she said, trying to sound kind, ‘I thought I heard someone call out, someone…familiar.’
All the operators must have known the stories of Amalie’s father and his disappearance. A person just doesn’t go missing while broadcasting and nothing be said. It had happened before but not out here, not out where the signal was weak, and the static was only a nuisance. From whatever noise that had laced outward from the radio waves last night no fragment could have summoned a voice such as that. There were no ghosts in the signal.
‘Well, there’s nothing in the log, I even checked with Freja.’ Ben said, the quality of his signal distorting slightly as another frequency was picked up and interference took over the line.
Oh good, Amalie frowned to herself, she’ll get to have a “polite” conversation with the head of log keeping and get to explain why she silenced all station-to-station transmissions during a snowstorm. “Thought I heard my dead father, Freja. Think I’m a bit overworked and should be stood down, Freja. Yes, I have been tampering with the equipment, why do you ask?” this would be painful.
‘Thank you, Ben, very kind. Over-out.’ Switching off the closed channel, Amalie now felt the chill of the snow blow hollowly through her station hut. She had turned off the coolant pump to the transformer in winters before so that the humming warmth would fill her radio room like a noisy blanket, but she wanted quiet at the moment. There was a drone to the world. A miniscule noise that was a part of every day and so easy to go unnoticed. Wind, distant footsteps, the ocean lapping against the shore. All of these sounds felt natural; the static was different, there was something indescribable about the hiss and click of the amplified noise. It felt to Amile as if it were the space between atoms, the sound of something more to existence than just blood and dirt.
Grabbing her father’s old coat, made in a time when the operators were proud enough to wear a uniform, Amalie hoped out through the station window and began the lonely trudge down to the port. Chimneys puffed rime-laden smoke from their frozen stacks, baking bread filled the frigid air with a comfort of the coming day. The morning felt like a return to normal to Amalie.
J. McCray
2022
Sunday Short Stories 