Amalie…
Amalie!
Light returned in a concussion of noise, confused vision crackling to life behind tired eyelids. The wavering talk of people close by was muffled and made Amelie feel as though among friends. There was laughter; smells of lamp oil and frying fat intertwined with the humid air; a vague sweetness settled underneath her awakening and rested alongside memory.
Opening her eyes, the operator of Port long range transmitter noticed the unfamiliar room and slowly came to realise that she had fallen asleep in the tavern by the shore. She was not a drunkard; the weary operator had only visited the tavern to pilfer breakfast from an old sailor who spent too much time telling stories to properly sweep his floor.
The grey sun had risen, and Amalie guessed it was after noon.
Last night she had heard a voice speak out from the confusion of static in the transmission station, she had heard her name yelled as clear as a shout. Something broken inside of her had remembered hope.
Looking about the room, Amalie saw that the innkeeper, Lefa, had closed the heavy doors of the parlour so that she may sleep comfortably. From the next room she could hear the regular burble of workers enjoying their lunch, the laughter of people allowing themselves a moment of respite.
Folding the blanket, Amalie noticed a ragged chunk of bread that had been wrapped in wax paper, the odour of fresh bacon trickling out from the parcel with an allure that was amplified by her exhaustion. She saw a note next to the bread, almost scratched into the paper rather than marked with a pen.
You’ll find your rost, young one. But I pray that you keep one eye on land as you search.
Just some advice from an old sailor.
-Lefa
He always spoke in stories.
Lefa knew more tales of the world than Amalie could hope to learn but he believed too much in superstition. He had talked of a person’s last words trapped frozen in the air. He called it rost and she wondered for a selfish moment if the same could be true in the static.
Static, the ever-present danger of a life still reeling from its discovery. There was a salt plain to the west. A distant place that was said to have become so fractured that the distortion was clear and visible. White and black clouds of noise that consumed all that they touched, all but metal. To say that the static was simply a cloud obscured how impossible it truly was. It was as though the noise rode on a stormfront, one movement of force billowing across the land, stealing the dirt from the top of the barren earth. And then it was only a whisper, a single tendril no more threatening than a piece of fabric caught in a breeze.
Amalie had seen the static and remembered the eerie silence as it fell, almost as though leaking, from the receiving tower. All sound was muted as it expanded above her head and then drew closer to where she lay. She had heard one voice and then the pull of urgent movement. She was alone.
The radio operators existed to monitor the patterns of the static. Logs and records, every detail, every possible piece of information that could prevent another person lost to the static.
Amalie was in charge of a lone repeater station beside a frozen ocean. She often thought that her remote island wasn’t important enough to make any difference. But the hill, the ice sheets that stretched out beyond the horizon, it made her station perfect for a long-range signal.
She would gather the logs from the other local stations and send them to another repeater somewhere far off and alone. Weather from Ajax; static readings from Cloudbank; all these detailed reports being logged, checked, and sent.
It felt purposeless at times. In the inescapable night, Amalie would watch the red blink of her tower cast shadows across the treeline and would wonder if her transmissions were still being received. Surely there was someone trying to fix whatever had caused the static? Surely there were people out there who were close to knowing how to forecast its appearance?
Taking the bread from the table and leaving a few coins in its place, Amalie hopped through the window of the tavern’s parlour and began the trudge back to her station upon the hill.
She couldn’t remember where her habit of exiting from the window had begun. Doors, snow blocked and too difficult to open; the freedom of breaking an unwritten rule; obfuscated repurposing. Tearing apart the cooling bread and savouring its fragrance, Amalie looked toward the metal antenna of her station and attempted to remember a time when the world felt smaller.
It was quiet today. A meandering squall pushed the lightly falling snow in erratic patterns as they drifted, but upon the ground it was windless and calm.
Amalie felt refreshed, the familiar tiredness from her late nights had receded and the afternoon held a distinct clarity that felt so seldomly graced in Port. A snowflake grew from a space between the creases of the air and landed upon her nose which caused her to sneeze in agitation.
The snow had fallen like this in another memory. So many years ago, she had left the station and then lost the path to lead her way home. It was cold, ear-biting and impassive. The snowflakes hung in the air as if falling in slow motion. Amalie could remember the mist of her voice as she shouted out for her father. Weak puffs of quickly fading ice that hung in the air only to be snatched away as if by an invisible hand.
Was this the rost that Lefa was so sure existed? If she had died were those her final words to be kept in frozen permanence?
Amalie had decided that she was going to find the signal. There were no transmissions to send on a Sunday and the day was usually designated as a day of maintenance. You could sleep in; there was a feeling of ease to the day that Amalie always felt buoyed by as her weekdays had become so stuffy and formal. Reports from the logging office, a silencing of chatter, yes-sir-no-sir politeness that was mandated when transmitting on any official frequencies. Today she could tinker with her equipment and find the signal, she could dial into that weak heartbeat and not worry about paying attention to the morse receiver or any incoming transmissions. There was no interference.
Seeing no hope of opening her snow-banked door, the operator slipped in through her office window and filled her stove with kindling. Hers was station that was well built: thick wood panelling from the forest lined the walls and a pipework duct spread out across the ceiling and away from her fireplace. It was small, it was overcrowded with equipment, but the station didn’t need to be anything other than what it already was. It was home.
Amalie looked across her wire strewn office and frowned. In the panic of last night, she had not considered the repercussions of today. Every speaker she owned was plugged into the short wave, if an emergency signal had come in, if a ship had become stranded by the ice, she would have had nothing to hear it with. Placing a small wooden bookshelf speaker atop the patch-bay, Amalie took a marker and wrote “not to be unplugged” on the speaker’s front. Then, resetting the levels, she clicked the mute on and off a few times to see if the band was still active.
There was a number station on this channel a few years ago. Ben, an operator of the Ajax weather station, had made her re-loop it onto their open channel and it had almost broken her patch bay. It was strange converting the signals. A rectifier started to whistle at interterminal intervals, and she was sure that a capacitor had begun leaking somewhere inaccessible. But Ben was happy. He was listening in and trying to find sense in the repeating code, but the signal cut off after a day. Whatever had been transmitting finished its purpose or had simply run out of power.
Amalie often wondered about these obscure signals in the air. Words and waveforms bouncing around from tower to tower, never heard, never able to find their voice.
‘Rost.’ she said to the mess before her: a conjured fiction developing in the air.
There was a crackle from the bookshelf speaker that then wailed with sharp feedback from atop the patch console.
Something muffled spoke from the static. It was distant, muffled within the noise and Amalie thought of the voices that she had been woken by in the tavern. Unable to make sense of the words she slowly amplified the signal, a trigger sliding up the scale and static increasing at every increment.
From the speaker it appeared slowly. Silence gripped the room as a whisper of flickering fire much unlike anything that could be possible rolled from the speaker and coiled lightly in the air. Living static, so tangible and born from the noise. The tendril unfurled as if thrown linen, it crept into reality with a spider’s silence, flickering black and white granules alive with noise full in contrast of the life around it. The whisp pulled at the colour of speaker’s wooden cabinet and Amalie threw the volume dial to zero before it could grow any further; panic gripping her every nerve; a memory almost recalled into the station.
She had found it within the wires of her radio tower and that familiar voice spoke its final words, Amalie now knew the name of this rost trapped behind the static.
J. McCray
2022
Sunday Short Stories 