Whispers in the Static

Whispers in the Static

The night shift is a patient, patient thing when you work the old transmitter perched on the hill. The building sighs with weathered metal and the faint scent of coffee that never quite cools. I keep the logbook open, a map of who slept where, who woke to the sound of waves, who never woke at all. And I listen, because listening is cheaper than sleep.

At first the static felt like a conversation in a crowded room, a murmur that brushed your ear and forgot to leave. Then the voices learned to pace themselves, to speak in measured breaths between the bursts of carrier waves. They didn’t demand attention so much as coax it, shaping the night into a corridor you’re afraid to walk alone.

Tonight, the channel opens with a soft, present-tense note—like someone clearing their throat to begin a bedtime story. A woman’s voice, clear and distant, lists a string of names you’ve never heard in the daylight: towns long erased by memory, dates that rhyme with storms, streets that end in the ocean. Another voice—a man, tired and careful—asks for your name, then corrects you with a grandmother’s certainty when you say it wrong. The radio becomes a gallery of echoes, each frame a fragment of someone else’s life, cut loose and hung behind the glass.

“We are listening to your breath between the frequencies,” the voices say, not with malice, but with the gravity of a hymn sung by a choir that forgot the words.

I keep a tape rolling, though I know it will never be heard by anyone but me. The evidence sits in 1s and 0s, a map of where the voices have traveled through time. They describe a night storm that drowned a seaside town and left a whispering vacancy in the air. They speak in cursive, curling around the edges of the static, pinpricking the quiet with reminders of promises never kept.

• The whisper cycles with the clock, landing on the hour with a sigh that sounds almost human.
• Names drift through the hiss, and each name corresponds to a memory you’re not sure you chose to keep.
• The same cadence repeats whenever the wind shifts, as if the world itself is leaning in to listen.

When I tune the dial toward silence, the room grows heavier, as if the walls remember the last time they heard another voice. It isn’t fear so much as revelation—an unraveling of threads you’d sewn to stay cozy in the dark. And then the whispers bend toward a single sentence, plain and intimate, spoken in the voice of someone you should have known long ago but never did: a lullaby you never learned to forget.

I don’t know if I’m listening to the radio or the radio listening to me. But I keep the logbook ready, the tape rolling, and the night listening back—softly, insistently—until dawn arrives with its ordinary light. The static recedes, but the tunnel remains, and somewhere beyond it, the voices count the hours that pass between one breath and the next.