Whispers Over the AM Dial
At 2:03 a.m., the apartment hummed with a tired stillness, the way an old house does after the last guest leaves. The transistor on the nightstand coughed alive, its static drawing a pale blue thread across the room. The AM dial, stubborn as a stubborn ghost, jittered through frequencies, each crackle a minute heartbeat. I listened not for music, but for a voice that might finally explain the echo in the walls, the way the radiator sighs when the clock strikes midnight, the way a memory arrives uninvited and refuses to leave.
Then came a voice, thin and frost-bitten, slicing through the hiss. It spoke my name as if the radio had learned it from a family photograph left in a drawer years ago. “This is WLN,” it announced, already half-forgotten and entirely too intimate. “We’re the town’s forgotten signal.” The words curled around the room, snagging on the fringe of my hair, the memory of a night I never had but always felt. The voice claimed to know the floorboards’ tempo, the creak in the hallway, the way my own breath fogs the glass when I count to three and pretend I’m alone.
We exist in the spaces between frequencies, and we are listening.
I resisted, of course. I tried to answer with feigned nonchalance, with the bravado of someone who didn’t own a story that began with a radio at three in the morning. The whisper spun a different tale, a breadcrumb trail of clues that tugged at the edges of memory.
- An address etched on the back of a photograph that wasn’t there last week.
- A name carved into the radiator with a stubborn nail, fading but indelible.
- A tangle of headlines about a fire that took a family in a winter that never fully thawed.
- A stopwatch that ticks backward when the dial lands on a certain number, as if time itself resists letting go.
- A night you swore you didn’t live, yet the rain remembers and the room remembers you.
The whispers urged me toward the stairwell, toward doors that shouldn’t have been left ajar, toward the corner where a coat hung in a forgotten closet like a sentinel. I followed, half in a trance, half on the edge of a dare. The radio’s voice rose with a fevered tenderness, promising that the past was not past but threaded through with static and possibility. Each step I took made the house lean closer, listening, waiting for the moment I would admit I was part of its broadcast too.
When I returned to the living room, the dial had settled on a new frequency, a quiet hum that did not promise answers but offered permission—to listen, to remember, to become part of a story larger than me. The room smelled of old rain and old paper, and the radiance of the screen painted the walls with a map of places I had never visited but could now almost recall. The voices were still there—patient, coaxing, persistent—but so was I, at last aware that the night never truly ends; it simply changes the channel and waits for someone to listen long enough to hear the right thing.