Morning’s Reflection

Rain pelleted against the window as amber lights sketched the line of a city beyond the salt flats. One by one the lights dimmed, the horizon and solemn ground becoming endless in their opaque seam. Crackling, the receiving station’s radio scanned into a home channel, half-static cruelling whatever vinyl-scratched music the operator had chosen to whisper melancholy at the edges of night.
It was a news station once. Ghost broadcasts murmured below the buzzing melody, as a whisper of the past remained in the loop of broadcast towers, unmanned and unnamed. Flicking the overscan towards low balance, Miller filtered most of the noise away from the broadcast and let the monolog of past news talk over rhythmic drums of a recording long ago passed away.

Lora station one, today received signals from the long wave repeater band for the first time. ___ a delay of twenty-five___. Halmark___ motes of static considered negligible.

Pushing the window by his desk open, the warmth intermingled with the cold tumult outside and a swirling wind pulled past into the galley kitchen, extinguishing the burner of the stove top and slamming a door somewhere within the station.
Woken from revelry, Miller turned in fright at the sudden noise and knocked the scanner’s dial, the ever-present crackle of static becoming the only noise to partner the rain.
A mist clouded from the storm outside and softly settled on the receiving console, small beads of water tricking down the grey metal and disappearing into the slider housings.

The window was pulled closed and power cut to the desk.
‘No radio tonight then.’ Miller grumbled wiping some of the settled water from his desk and casting his eye across the mess of his office for a rag.
It had been 4 years since he had taken work for the broadcasting authority and all that he had been given in that time was a stained uniform. He caught sight of the scrawl from the previous station operators and regraded the graffitied list of names with something like pride. Old buggers could have at least left the manual, he thought, standing and walking over to kitchen for only the excuse to stretch his legs.
He had added his own name to the list on his first night. Something about the still absent end date seemed closer to Miller as he thought about the operators before him. He hoped in these quiet thoughts that it would be his hand that added the final date rather than that of his replacement.

Dreams come fretfully on the slat flats.
As if an island, Miller’s station sat panoptically alone on the flats, yet was still surrounded by the voice of noise within the frequency. Even with the receiving console switched off, Miller could still hear the faint crackle of static from the monitoring speakers. The image of a lighthouse came to his mind as he again switched on his range and the slow agitation of soon to boil water joined with the drumming percussion of the rain at the roof above.
Placed on the borders of sea, land and sky, they’re no less surrounded than a station. A single beacon, sending out light instead of sound. A voice of warning, the comfort of a nearby port.
Miller leaned against a counter and watched the ochre light of the station’s tower switch on against the blanket of night: rain dancing in the air as if imitating the swallows that chase the first flight of mayflies emerging from the ground below.  He was tired. The console needed time to dry before it could be used again.
Filling an old canister once used for oil with steaming water, Miller fastened the cap and set his rudimentary hot water bottle beneath the moth-stuck blankets of his bed just beyond the kitchen.
His home was small. An office, kitchen, and a nook that was generously described as a sleeping quarters, comprised his current world, the lower floor overrun by the circuitry of transformers and banks of capacitors that were to him as much of a mystery as the insides of his receiving console.
Operators this close to a city didn’t need to be engineers. Parts that were easy to swap and technicians that were never in a rush had managed to keep the city’s loop array working well enough that it seemed as though they operated with a masked form of reliability. “A problem for the tech guys”, was humourlessly drawn onto the front page of station operations guide. And Miller remembered feeling voiceless as the young technician had asked how everything was running last week. Did he even know?
Laying his head within these dreams, Miller closed his eyes and in stirring turn awaited the morning.       

–

Awake.
A line of light passed through the curtain of Millar’s quarters and the operator exhaled in the freshness of a new day.
There was a chill to the air inside his station that signalled the first approach of winter for another year. Gone was the radiance of summer and the dreary clouds of a muted season were soon to follow.
There was a pang of loneliness that had caught Miller as he lay. Still he imagined the lighthouse, and still he thought of his name below the operators before.
Turning from his bed, the weary operator made his way down the stairs, hoping to watch the distant city for a moment. To see the far away portrait of its people beyond.   

The risen sun shone brightly from the deep blue of the morning sky.
The storm’s bluster had departed within the early hours and now a pool of still water covered the salt flats, reflecting the sky in an infinite landscape of cerulean beauty.
Stepping from the rise of his station and into the water, Miller watched the slow ripples of his disturbance ebb outwards and blemish the otherwise perfect glass of the land around him. A dark strip of roadway wandered away from where he stood and connected him to the duplicated city to the south. He saw himself in the stirring water and imagined his reflection walking along that road, back to the city. He imagined each step of his reflected self causing more and more ripples as he walked. Each purposeful step stirring and pushing the water away from himself, pushing everything further away. The water at his feet would then become a tide, and that tide a wave. Within that wave the salt flats, the static, all would be washed away, the noise, the lost broadcasts of voices before, all washed away and only the dirt would remain. Grass to grow from the dirt, roots to spring forth into trees. Millar saw the world as it had been once before in the reflection and reached down to hold a sliver, a fragment, for only a moment. Touching the cool lake and then feeling the rough salt against the palm of his hand, the spell was broken and the shadow of a cloud covered the station as it passed lazily before the sun, dimming the world and drawing the station operator back into the present.
Miller closed his hand and withdrew from the water, clenching tightly, not wanting the memory to escape or wither in the shaded-morning’s light. He closed his eyes and the stone of salt warmed in his hand somewhat.               

---

J. McCray
2024