The radio held two bands.
Dotted stations aligned just beyond sight that operated on the longwave. The voice of each station was clear, its equipment easy to replace. Operators chatted idly when traffic was low, they collected information, they researched. Theirs was a signal that darted across the sky in murmuration, a pattern of dialog, freely conversing and sharing the thoughts of a still connected people, their voice. Weather stations, logging stations, the looping antennas, all these small outposts were heartbeats within a fading network once so constant across the world. They were dying.
There were the long-range stations, the second band.
When asked of the shape of a radio station, many would sketch a long-range station. Log walls with sentinel-like tower standing proudly beside. The storied long-range stations could transmit across the remaining world and funnel messages from voices that would never meet. They were a vein of information able to transmit much faster and farther than human imagination could have perceived before its invention.
But from radio’s voice a harsh static had begun to underlie this connected network. A cloud of words, dressed in blacks and in whites. Swarming voices that cracked and burbled, a dense cluster of sounds unifying into the drone of a single note. The static was at first a curiosity, a by-product of the world expanding. But as more listened, as a deluge of voice brought further distortion onto the band-wave, the static grew alongside it.
It was irregular, unnatural in ways that refused to be defined. It consumed the natural, it dissolved colour as it moved, holding no reason, bearing no malice. It destroyed. The world fractured.
A quiet salt plain was lined with the remains of hundreds of radio towers, a snow covered port had become isolated by distance once again.
Amalie could almost see light behind the densely clouded sky.
The air was bitingly cold. Frost-touched wind laboured with fatigue as it passed across the town so near to Amalie’s home.
Pulling her father’s coat tight across her shoulders, the operator of Port Long Range Station watched the flickering lights of her town and thought of how peaceful the world could look from her home upon the hill. The snow glowed underfoot as if the moon slept joyfully beneath as the blue outline of buildings, forming the streets below, too lay in restful sleep.
The weather station had forecast a storm. The deep channel of sea between Amalie’s home and the mainland appeared whitecapped even in this darkness. It churned maleficently, it rocked the fragile ships of the harbour and tested the strength of their ropes and moorings. It was rare that Amalie could hear the ocean from her home, the forbodence of a still wind filled her with unease. A storm was coming.
~
‘Surely this stupid thing has candles.’
Balefully upending her station’s emergency response kit, Amalie kicked at a bag of gauze and began to sort through the useless things that hadn’t been reused for something else already. She wasn’t afraid of a blackout. There was food and wood to last, and she could turn the front panel of the isolation transformer into a shovel if the station became snowed in. She was more afraid of the darkness, the silence that a storm could cause.
She didn’t hate the dark, but to be isolated, to be so without escape that even the voice of her radio was silenced, to be trapped alone with the static, this could be known by nothing other than a nightmare.
A candle was found, and a small panic became calmed.
Amalie told herself that she was logical, she refused to believe in the phantoms of Lefa. She thought of dying words trapped in the tempest, of rost. Her home, her one refuge, had become so enwrapped by story. The Port bled its history upon storm-battled nights such as this and Amalie could hear the discordance of this in the air, the static.
‘Port Station to Ajax, come in Ajax.’
There was an eternity that passed as seconds as Amalie awaited a reply.
‘Ajax, come in.’
‘Am–…Tower dow–Storm…Go to–‘
Stuttered words and half meanings, Amalie tried again but Ben’s channel was silent. Every station crackled with interference, a sharp hiss rolled across her terminal and two channel monitors burst suddenly with a fading glow, their circuitry burning with an acrid worry and receding into dim silence. Good, Amalie thought facetiously in seeing that a channel was the link between her and Freya. At least she won’t have to be told that her station was breaking wrong at this rate.
A crack of lightning rolled across the heavens, a sheet of arching light set the sealine aglow beyond the station window, Amalie closed her eyes, not knowing what else could be done.
Wind arrived, like iron in raking wave. A titan’s breath buffeted the station and frightful gales sought their way into the office, wishing to tear, desperate to steal. Amalie ran to the door, struggling against it until it closed, then dropping a metal latch into place. She had never locked the station since her father had disappeared and now, she desperately hoped that the simple lock could last at least for this night alone.
The station had survived storms before. Amalie remembered cowering as her home’s antenna bent perilously in the wind, it had strained so far as if to be torn from its mountings, but it had never fallen, as if a tree of the forest the antenna remained standing, the link remained intact.
Managing to secure the last storm shutter, Amalie returned to her terminal room and looked out towards the approaching maelstrom. This window had no shutter, not since that night, not since she had been thrown into the clear and coiling air.
An ache crossed over the operator.
The storm arrived without prelude.
Rain pelted into the fallen snow, pocketing the field deeply and turning quickly to ice as the temperature then sharply fell. A sheet of rain baulked against the wind, crashing, colliding against the dense droplets, rain bursting into wayward patterns in the darkness. The light from Amalie’s office a lone lantern’s glow within a sunken cathedral. The town was gone now. As if alone on the head of a pin, Amalie felt that her world had receded, that every voice, every memory outside the walls of her station had been swept away and she was now once again alone.
Lighting and thunder crackled as one, harsh light and tremendous sound unified in an unbridled display of nature’s might. Amalie, half recoiling from the sound, had managed to turn away from the window as it shattered inwards, glass and rain flooding into the office with a terror, with a fear of thunder outside. Old scars, Amalie felt a sharp pain recoil in the biting cold, a trickle of blood, half-drowned, fell from beneath her father’s coat and then dripped to the ground from her knuckle. The coat was thick, she was still alive.
The station was cast into darkness, the flicker of extinguished cathodes filled the office with sickly green as the familiar hum of the radio transmitter was silenced. The rain was settled now, a steady percussion landing heavily on the roof of Amalie’s station, a sound from within the terminal began to click with an electrical-like static.
Outside there was light.
Low clouds whipped ferociously overhead as Amalie, now drenched and wounded by the storm looked outward and saw the world transformed.
Green light swathed across the ice-covered ground; lilac motes of electricity leapt from the sky as if gasps of flame. The antenna glowed with Elmo’s fire, wearing a crown of fire and light, and radiating stray whisps of energy into the nightmare.
‘Six, twelve, thirty-two, nineteen–‘
A familiar voice spoke from the lifeless receiver.
Staggering against the din towards the terminal, Amalie pushed its every level to their maximum, she opened every channel, she cleared every patch so that one frequency was looped in unity.
‘Eight, Fifty-four, Amalie, I miss–‘
‘Amalie.’
That voice, that distorted voice.
Amalie felt a bite of pain in her hand and pulled backward, static beginning to pull from the terminal. The station felt alive with it now. Every wire, every coil, buzzed with tendrils of black and white. Amalie had heard her father she felt as though she could almost pull him from the shadow.
She reached out and held the formless static.
‘Dad.’
So close, she could hear his voice. Life, noise, memory, rost.
A tremendous buffet of wind crashed against the station, shaking Amalie and wailing above the deafening static. Lightning had turned the world iridescent as all sound was overcome by a second concussion of thunder.
Before her the static faltered. A force, so sudden and punctuative had fallen across the station, the radio lapsed into silence.
It died, the static folded inward as if burning paper and the remaining ember then reddened, lifeless upon Amalie’s trembling palm.
But still the storm raged on.
As if woken from sleep, Amalie now heard the howl of her broken station, the crash of her home falling around her. Her scars felt alive with memory, memory that became sorrowful and closed.
A third bolt of lightning, its thunder delayed but still no more quiet than the last. Something deep within Amalie’s heart urged her forward and carried her beneath the desk of the operator’s terminal. The terminal that she had operated each day. The terminal that her father had built with such prideful care. No storm could destroy this station, no static would be able to shatter the unspoken rost that this place embodied.
Pulling her father’s coat tight to her shoulders, Amalie yelled in stout rejection of both storm and static.
‘I miss you.’
~
The wind was no more. No rain hammered; no static hissed.
Amalie tried to rise but a sharp pain held her in place. Wincing, she felt the itch of a rough bandage on her shoulder. The fog of morning was still receding, there was a calmness to the world. It felt as if something had ended.
‘We saw that the Antenna had fallen so thought you dead,’ A gruff voice spoke from Amalie’s side, ‘the station still stands but it will need a good broom young-one. You can borrow mine of course.’
Lefa stroked his beard thoughtfully as his friend turned over and pretended not to hear him. He had seen her father, Olaphur, come to the island as a child. He had seen them both grow and noted that they were now both the same in so many ways.
Father and daughter, Operators.
He would have spoken but knew that Amalie wouldn’t listen. She could still hear that voice in the air, her father’s rost, one final word, a thing more pure than a simple goodbye.
‘I miss you.’
J. McCray
2023
This series is dedicated to Daniel Bachman’s 2022 album Almanac Behind.
Sunday Short Stories 