Echoes in the Air
The old radio crackled to life on a day it shouldn’t have. That was how all of this began: the quiet hum, the static, the voice that didn’t belong.
I started recording everything the day Mom brought home the antique radio. Ever since Dad left us last spring, she haunted thrift shops for pieces of the past, saying they made the house less hollow. I didn’t mind — she needed something, and I needed to see her busy — but the radio felt different when she set it up in the kitchen, smelling of dust and old wires, its face a dial and a single red knob with faded numbers impossible to read. I was eleven, and lost things appealed to me.
That first night, the house was so quiet I could hear the fridge rattling across the rooms. Then came the voice. I thought maybe I was dreaming, but sleep never stuck anymore. Static, like brittle paper, then a low, careful whisper.
“Someone’s there. Isn’t there?”
I sat up. The voice was thin and clear, like coming from another room. I pressed my hand against the wall. It sounded like someone asking the house a question — maybe Dad, coming home slow, though Mom never let herself hope that way.
The next morning, Mom found me asleep at the kitchen table, my head on a pile of notebooks. She asked why I’d left the radio on, but it hadn’t been. I asked to keep it in my room; she shrugged, said yes.
Every night after, the voice came back. It repeated its question, always addressed to the air, never naming me. I scribbled notes every time, flipping on my desk lamp, staying alert.
On the third night, the voice changed: “What did you lose, on a Tuesday afternoon?” Before I could answer, static swallowed the words.
I started answering aloud, whispering to the dark. My answer surprised me — Dad’s red baseball cap, the one he wore until it frayed. He left it on my bed when he packed, the last thing of his I kept.
The next day, I found the cap nestled on top of the radio, its shape wrong, like someone had pressed memories into it.
After a week, I learned its pattern. The voice returned at strange hours, never twice at the same time. Sometimes it asked questions about the past. Sometimes it named feelings I didn’t want, sadnesses and hopes I hid, or memories that only made sense to me. Once it asked, “Do you remember your first secret?” and I wrote in my notebook, in letters so small they looked like dots, “I stole Mom’s earring because it was blue and felt cold in my hand.”
I started to believe the voice was me, or the version of me that made sense out of grief. But its questions kept changing, growing stranger. “Who do you wish you were forgetting?” it asked, one thunderstorm night, and I shut the radio off.
Two days after, Mom announced she was selling the radio—I’d been falling behind at school, falling asleep at the table, distracted.
I didn’t let her. That night, after she went to bed, I turned it on and whispered, “What do you want?”
The radio took time to respond. Then, softly, “Your voice. Your truth.”
“Why?”
“To finish something I began with someone else.”
I shivered. My notebook was filled now, dozens of entries charting not just questions, but every word, every crackle, every moment of silence between the transmissions. It started to read like a story not quite about me, but about someone else who’d lived here, alone with a radio full of their own secrets.
I began digging at the local history, visiting the old library on Maple. The house used to be owned by a radio operator, Mr. H. Corben, who disappeared during a nasty winter in 1956. His room had always been the one I slept in now. They never found his body, only the radio left behind, static echoing when the snow thawed.
After that, the questions took on a new urgency. “If you could rewrite goodbye, would you?” The question pounded in my head for days.
One afternoon, while Mom cooked, I put on Dad’s cap and sat with the radio in the closet, darkness thick around me. I answered, “Yes, I’d let him know it’s okay to go.”
The static almost sounded like sighing, or relief.
For the first time, the voice changed. It said, “Thank you for carrying me forward.” The dial glowed, flickered, then clicked off.
That night, I dreamt of the house as a transmitter, every silence humming with voices trying not to be forgotten, each room full of half-answered questions. When I woke, the radio was cold. The notebook was empty — I could swear I’d filled it, every page, but the ink had faded to nothing, as if what was carried had been released.
Mom sold the radio a week later. Dad’s cap slipped under my bed, and for the first time in a long while, I didn’t miss his leaving so keenly. There was something about loss, I realized, that carried us both: the living and the echoes left behind.
When the new owners moved in a year later, I slipped a note beneath the floorboard, where the radio used to sit: “If the air asks a question, listen. Every echo is someone waiting for a reply.”
###END###
