The Last Broadcast

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Hello, I'm Wilkins.

Stories all the time.

Glad you are here.

Let's get into it.

By the time I forced the key into the lock of the old double-year elixir booth, my hands

were shaking from more than the cold.

It was late May, and the last of the town-spring had stubbornly failed to wander into block walls.

Once S.Wong opened the door, a gist of stale, paper-centred air rushed out some combination

of dust, decaying carpet, and a note of something chemical sharp, nearly metallic.

I flicked in the single surviving lamp, spreading a one-circle over the battered audio console,

and real stack-like tombstone to cross a battered folding table.

Call it an nostalgia or compulsion, but when the museum called me about archiving the

old station's assets, I said yes.

Some glimmer of the person I'd been, twenty years and a dozen lives ago, raised his

hand.

I packed up at dusk, closed the door of my overheated apartment, and left a note on

the kitchen table, back late working the tapes.

There were more reels than I'd expected hundreds, each marked by the pragmatic hands on labeling

of Mid-Minus-90s radio, Red Marca for advertisements, Green Fistition ID, black grease pencil for

shows.

Some were too warm to read.

Others had been repurposed so many times that old titles bled through.

I started easy.

There's a ritual to queuing up a reel, the tactile slip of the tape threaded onto the

playback spindle, the mild resistance of splicing blocks and magnetic heads.

The old air just seemed to settle once the plasma hiss of analogue static filled the booth

mayo's recognizing three years of absence, the faint, cosy jingle the preface every night

voices broadcast.

WLXR, 1410 AM, this is night voices stay with us and saw any act travellers we've got

another eye or in the dark.

The tape wind at the end of the line, wobbling slightly, but it was all there at first, jack

voice jack roll into settling into its familiar hammock of gentle sodonic warmth.

The years stripped away, I remembered leaning against a console as a 22 year old, watching

the switchboard blink with calls, but about 5 minutes in the tape hiccuped.

The music faded.

Which should have been a sponsorship jingle slithered sideways, overtaken by a pulsing burst

of static.

Not the friendly, rounded hiss of dead air, but something oily, pressing a distortion

in the bandwidth as if the tape were being givet midplay.

I paused and wind it back, fingers flinching as the static prickled in my headphones.

That again in jack's voice.

It's often now almost slurred, dried by peculiar cadence I didn't remember.

There was an unnatural hitch to each word.

He was reading a listener's letter routine.

But his syllable stretched, appoints this stuttered and collapsed and would so that home

became HH home, cracking into gasp.

For a moment I thought my memory was playing tricks on me, but then jack began to whisper

in a tone both breathy and dead flat, sliding off into a register I'd never heard from him.

My skin drew tight across my arms.

Something knocked against the far wall faint, but rhythmic.

I blinked at the booth window, half expecting to see headlight sweep the grave a lot, but

only at the end to blackness pressed in.

My fingers hovered over the playback volume.

On the tape, the operator's board lights up frantic energy, crosstalk from the open lines.

A woman's breathless voice flooded through, or are you getting this, or are you seeing

them there by your car?

The words tangled with another collar, a man's got a repli, there's someone out here,

jack.

Someone at the window of the ovalatron in a rising interference, a low, angel-litting

moan that pulls beneath the surface like a tidal undertow.

Slow down, folks a jack tried to say.

The word fucks patterned across several frequencies, decaying into reverse syllables,

muffled and stretch.

Then the outside sound a new voice, keening, distant, as if picked up from the lot outside

threaded through.

It's not safe tonight, don't answer, don't.

The line snapped.

A ragged spike of static obliterated everything.

A third light flared on the board, collar, ideal readable.

Jack breathed in, and in a fuzzy silence, and other voice came through the same tone

as before, neither male nor female, both flat and suggestive echoing.

This is not for you.

I couldn't move.

My eyes went to the real, circling and circling.

The tip shuddered as if in protest, and then cut out midword.

For a few endless seconds, only the watery hiss remained.

The booths air grew icy, condensation filmed the glass.

I realized I'd begun to tremble.

In that single instant, I knew I was not remembering the night correctly.

The room, the booth, all of me had just tipped up into something that had never left.

I wound the tape back and injected it, pond slick but unsteady.

The label read only at June 14, 1997 final broadcast.

Somehow though I was alone, I had the unmistakable sense that something on the other side of the

glass some presence was still listening.

I shh.

For the first year is after this shut down, I lived in the shadow of WLXR only by accident.

The station was the old part of my life, the one I'd set aside after they locked the doors

and shut down the tower.

A decade of small towns and smaller jobs followed box and groceries at Holthorns, inventory

in the back of the hardware store, freelance coffee editing for the county paper.

Nothing with iris after dusk.

WLXR had been a harbor for local oddballs and half-chances.

Our little station that could.

I'd started as a fill in producing my last year of college and then stayed, mostly for

the night shift camaraderie.

That's what I lost, when everything fell apart, the feeling that things made sense at 3am,

with Thai voices filtering in from places you could barely believe existed.

The habit of being an octagonal animal never left.

Even now, I can't sleep much before midnight, and the shape of the world never feels quite

right until the sky's gone black and silent.

I haven't had a TV in years, what comfort I allow myself comes from the person shuffle

of all radio cycling to renty frequency bands.

There's a particular stripe of static chous livery to describe that sometimes makes me

think for just a second that knife voices is about to return.

My place these days is three blocks down from Maine above a now defunct bakery.

While paper peels in the corners will annullium bubbles in the kitchenette.

The rend is small and the air always faintly sweet, vanilla burnt to sugar.

I keep my windows open most nights, throwing in the load drone of cars headed for the highway

that's at the rest of the town.

These are the aftershocks of a life lived in someone else's echo.

Main street is more memory than living now a straight line past empty shops, their signs

sun bleached into unreadable ghosts.

The old rave rooster diner boarded up, a dry cleaner as I'd used twice enough as tuned

with yellow tape no danger, just a bandiment.

The W. Elixas sign, a battered slab of metal that once caught the early sun, sits propped

behind a wall of thorny needles and peeling paint.

The thing they never tell you about losing a job is that you lose a language.

The peculiar shorthand, more to mild and jukes, the way each of us could tell from a single

load what kind of night it would be.

That's what the booth was for, scribbling secrets to ourselves, the towel clining out

of the river fog like a mast head.

It wasn't just a job, it was a town's pulse.

One summer in 1997 every pulse here seemed to skip at once.

People drifted.

A friend's house went dark for the last time.

Some just stopped returning calls ghost who left by walking into sunday and never looking

back.

Even the ones who stayed changed.

Faces got longer, air thinned.

The late shift of the Sivrite told stories about names they saw in the mirror after midnight

and then no one said them again.

The museum gig wasn't part of any plan.

But Joan, the new director, had put the word of local history at minimum wage.

She wanted to digitize clippings, evidence of life in a county before the new century

erased it.

Sometimes that men scanning blurring photographs of nowadays homes, other weeks it was letters

from the war, sun faded receipts, or the insomnia of minutes of failed townhalls.

Copper Eurelixor's archive box arrived the week after a two day rainstorm accompanied

by little more than a scold note, handled with care, museum only once the clean stuff.

I met the delivery driver in the hall, he unloaded a bad of cardboard crate, double-taped

and stamped with an inventory tabbed that curl from moisture.

Inside, Reels wrapped in crumpled schedules, broadcast logs Pockmont by spilled coffee a

handful of tape-to-win to-title.

The box was heavy too heavy from nostalgia, full of strange promises.

I left the box and opened just for anyer.

Enough time to make tea and contemplate all patterns, running out to check if the boost

lights still lit the parking lot, listening for voices whispering through the window even

when I knew there was nothing there, catching the bear's syllable of the old night jingle

in an otherwise endy frequency. Some habits you never had run. The past may stay locked

in a box for a time, but, given the smallest opportunity, and you'll beside you,

whisper something that never quite makes sense. That afternoon, as I set up to sort the tapes,

a paused part of me not quite believing the old ghosts would stay put. Still the box waiter.

Even in the harsh new daylight, it felt heavier than it had the right to be.

Over the next week, I dipped in and out of the reels chasing half remembered sense of home.

What I crave, if I'm truthful, was the restoration of some order. Though night voices

our couch should have been comfort-free to mass-together the landscape of half-cracked final tunes

late night animal rescue requests and colours anxious about minor tantalites or lonely hearts.

But as I transferred the early 1997 broadcasts, a web began to form, something bent beneath

the surface, never mentioned, but insistent in its repetition. At first, the tapes played as

I expected, Jack's signature opening, language conversations, the reliable clockwork of ads

culture and hardware for all your fence-of-post needs. But in the midnight-hour, cross-multiple

dates, Discord crept in. Long, droning tone snuck under the music, glitches in the usual ad

schedule, the host jokes landing off, laughter smothered by silence is just a shade too long.

I jot down timestamps 12, seven background below, believe Valencia's song, can't tell if

deliberate. 12, 11, Jack's voice clipped, slurs, I just tune in 12, 16, collar, anxious, says,

don't open it, don't you answer. On the May 19th reel, the scheduled weatherbreak vanish,

replaced by a pulsing fron that reminded me of hearing the tower hum through the floorboards as a kid.

The pattern sharpened over the sequence. In May's last week, five nights in a row,

night voices lost its soft, rambling gate. Instead, the collar surged in urgency.

On tape after tapes, some months sometimes irregular, sometimes unreadable and a distorted

call roster would plead. We hear them again tonight. They are at the backstuckest, who are they?

Please, Jack, just cut the feed, just for once, please, just... and then nothing.

Abrupt silences with needles of static gem between static and song.

Each plea seemed to echo down a corridor from which the others tried to escape, but couldn't.

The archivalope book, methodical in its before and after, went blank at those points.

May 23, 11, 11, 41pm recorded, then a long gap until sign off.

June 2, a guest call logged, then redacted by black tape.

June 9, page torn. One night, a regular, voice trembling, spent most of a minute whispering that

she didn't want to be here anymore, not while the sounds are outside. Her sentence bubbled into

a warbling that the playback had strained to parse. When I checked her name against later

a locks, she never called again. One tape late May ended so suddenly it made my headphone pop.

The tape snapped dead just as a new caller's line connected. There was never a formal goodbye

from Jack, just a trailing, desperate note in the air. Whatever script we thought we followed in

those days, something when someone had begun improvising. Ash, a certain point nostalgic as

way to obsession. Each evening, I sat hunched over the walnut desk in the little study alcove

scrolling out ten lines in color coding notes. I tried to bring process to what was essentially

a shape in the fog to try this that refused to line up. The earliest tapes from spring 1997 made

sense. Then the logs grew and coherent, call records, contradictory, and entire nights went

and accounted for. I started by cross-referencing the on-air logs with the museum's program schedules.

There were gaps, not just missed tapes, but entire blocks missing nights listed as having

pre-recorded content when, according to what little documentation survived, Jack had been liven

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slash zip. To follow up, I called him favors. The old faces of WLXI were thin on the ground most

adrifted, found new stations, or simply moved away. But they started with the engineer Hank last

I'd heard him tending bar at the eagle's lodge. The place was swollen with the kind of quiet

that feels like warning, but he agreed to step outside with his lucky strikes and talk about the

alley. You really want to dig into this night? Ang squinted his eyes tight with something more

than cigarette smoke. We all heard things, sure, but the tapes don't show half of what was in the

air. Sometimes you finish a shift, and there was just a tunt missing, like something cut the night

and two snitchy right out. I lost a whole Friday once got home, didn't remember the drive.

He shrugged the memory off, but every new question found him looking elsewhere.

On the way back inside, he added, if you find the tapes. Just don't play him after midnight, yeah.

Next came Aula, who'd been the receptionist half office manager, half-stitioned, and mother.

I caught her after a lunch at Betty's cafe, working through her crossword and more interested

in discussing the weather than anything to do with Radia. When I pressed, she protested she'd

been out sick most of that period. She assured me, waves afloo. Her eyes darted away each time I pressed

on strange nights, avoiding my gaze. All I remember is the calls people come back changed,

different, like they were still hearing something I couldn't. She stopped there,

abruptly, as if realizing she'd uncovered a nerve. The next clue, though, found me, and anonymous

envelopes lit under the museum's door, just ahead of my first ATM shift. Inside was nothing,

but a faded security badge Amy Kaplan will often turn hired before the summer of 1997.

The back was sticky, faintly stained the colour of old blood. There was a scribbled list of

first names, Hank, Jack, Amy, Eddie Kim. Each name was crossed out in pencil except one, my.

My hands ran cold as I scanned the return address none. The envelope was of the kind tucked

behind check-out counters and overlip for days. My instinct set to call Joan at the museum,

but something made me keep the badge and slip the list in a pocket of my code.

The following morning, had I come through the station maintenance logs,

something else snagged my attention. In late May of 1997, someone had loved a service call,

emergency repairs, signal box, 3am, access by non-staff, per management.

But the last entry from the maintenance man, Pete McClure simply read,

terror still humming, locked in hold. No signature, no follow-up. Pete never returned to the station.

Soon after, I found stacks of official forms gathering mold in the archive been

withdrawn missing persons reports, all filed in the weeks after the final broadcast.

Amy Kaplanz was there, as well as Eddie's a junior host who'd gone out for a smoke and hadn't

come back for her next segment. The withdrawal requests were signed, but in a handwritten

I didn't recognise shaky letters pressed too deep into the page. That off to IOS visit a log-only

deep in the unease. Entry after entry marked between midnight and four was crawled,

easily fake signatures, Eddie, Jack, sometimes a dash, sometimes just an initial. No witnesses.

No camera on the lot back then. That night, after a heavy dinner and free-failed attempts at

sleep, I dreamed of the booth. In a dream it was always raining. I stood behind the glass,

static swirling outside, watching a figure outland in the far edge of the lot.

Every time the phone rang, a voice I knew but couldn't name whispered only, stay with us.

It was cold in the dream. I woke equally cold bedroom window closed, but the winds touched

still in my bones. Ash, archival work when you truly pursued is not for the novice.

Each box you unpack multiplies the question, never the answer.

But the truth I was circling lay just beneath the surface of the official story,

WLXSUS shut down wasnt tidy, nor was it planned. On an evening wave more by dread than curiosity,

I all know at the battered, unlabeled tape from a cracked plastic sleeve, deep in the bottom

of a stack of marked surplus to be destroyed. There was another note, faded pencil,

asterisksters to not archive asterisksters. The real itself felt wrong the tape brittle,

grain shedding to powder as I fridded it in the deck. My nerves crackled.

The museum had given me leeway but worn against salvaging lost causes.

Still, I couldn't help myself. It seemed as if the tape had been waiting just for this moment.

Getting to playback was a struggle. I had to gently cook the head into alignment,

pressing play and holding my breath as the opening pop snap through the monitor.

Instead of the usual station idea of the old familiar jingle,

a low muttering filled the headphones. At first, it was Jack's voice, but the weight was

different held like a string under tension. Good evening, night travellers, he said,

though the words choked, skipping half a syllable. The rhythm fell apart,

chopped static spikes launching across the sound like razor wires. Then a second voice entered

a calm, deliberate unheard. This was neither Jack nor any known cola. Its turn was measured,

the cadence alien. It felt like listening to the first words of a foreign spy coded for

only a few to understand. We're through now, said the unknown. We're almost home.

Jack stammered his speech-bending, his own voice slowly overwritten.

And not our words tonight, not even my voice anymore. The tension grew. From behind them,

a violent pounding shook the door of the isolated sound of palm slapping heavy wood.

I recognised Mala's self-provoise and a stickable twisting into harsh,

desperate cry, stop for show, stop but, on italics gripping noise and gulf the next few seconds.

The air sucked out of the room and the tape warbled dangerously. The unfamiliar voice pressed

closer as if speaking directly into my air. We always find new hosts, is it your turn now?

On those words, the tape screeched, melting down into a maelstrom of static, the edges

killing as if scorched. I sat frozen, headphones clamped the after-image of those words

echoing in a booth's haunted silence. Static seemed to close and all-around as tangible as the

aching bones and monies. I realised, with a clarity cold and unkind, that someone maybe more

than one had been systematically cutting over dubbing or racing the crucial parts of the record.

Each gap or botched tape wasn't an accident, but an intention to keep a truth insulated

to keep a message from escaping. And here I was chasing it. For an instant, I stared at the

blinking console wondering about the lines that had never disconnected, the voices that still

waited to be heard, and just who, or what, was listening on the other side of the static.

I pushed away from the console, knees stiff, the snap of my headphone cable smarting at my jaw.

I needed air real air, not the dusty, history-clocked atmosphere of the booth.

But the station, even after all these years, had a way of pressing back.

I left the light on behind me and crept down the central hallway, passed the cracked display

cases of forgotten listener contests and committee plaques to the loading dock.

The dust-deal latch still stuck, complaining with the rusty squeal as a shoved-it open.

Marguinite met me, fog wrapping the slow, sluggish parking lot. No saws, just a sliver of sodium

vapor slicing the dark, painting oily walls on puddles left by early rain. I leaned into the open

air, heart-knocking unevenly in my chest, as if it too remembered an old rhythm or night-blown

try to erase. Night noises drifted up, a lone dog barking two blocks down, the metallic

tick of someone's bicycle chain in the alley. Out here, away from the booth, the world

should have felt ordinary, but I couldn't shake the sense of being overheard.

I popped in nicotine, come square and trace the edge of the security badge in my pocket,

the old intern's name, hee-me, raised and cracked plastic under my thumb. When I first met her,

a bright eyed college kid, she's shown up for her first shift carrying a battered thermos

in a philosophy text. She was 20 maybe, so eager she'd volunteer for every night slot.

Her absence hadn't made sense, but I'd done what people do I accepted the staff line that she'd

gone home for the summer, maybe transferred. In the months after W. Alexa was shuttering,

I tried not to wonder about Amy or Eddie, or all the others whose stories slipped away into rumour

and then silence. Back at the archive table I flipped open my notebook at Bassett V star,

the kind we all used in the booth still washed faintly in ink from prayer hands.

I said about transcribing portions of the do not archive tape, resisting the urge to

skip the fragments with the voices of a lapped naprook and off-kid and style.

Lines are peter, we're home now, I confess what you hear.

All nomad impulse, I layered them over snippets from broadcast locks,

reading aloud in a low murmur, trying to triangulate whatever pattern they might have been,

but the sense shimmied out of reach every time. Messages like that weren't for listeners.

They were for those who'd sat in the booth, alone with only the dull red glow of the

all-near bulb for company. Soon, each time I played an archive reel any real

the background static began spitting out subtle, shifting noises.

Once it sounded like fingers sliding slowly over glass.

Another time, a breath heavier than the tape could carry.

I checked the equipment, no faults, no interference, no reason for the crawl of

Gussflauch, I felt every time I rewound and replayed those minutes of mangled audio.

Sleep eluded me those nice. I thrushed beneath scratch sheets,

pressing my front flat to my ear, cycling randomly through frequency bands.

1410 AM gave back nothing but silence, interrupted every so often by jittery,

watery pulses, almost like an underwater moss code.

If I concentrated, I sometimes caught a word just one, repeated,

until I feared I'd slip out of reality if I listened a moment longer.

I started keeping a running list in my notebook. Never sign off.

But let them inside. Voices don't end. The host isn't host. It was meant to ground me.

Instead, each new phrase tangled with the last,

like a net pulling me back towards something I knew I shouldn't try to name.

One afternoon I returned to the museum, box in hand, intent on asking Jonas

she'd heard anything odd in her own rounds of tape digitization.

The lobby was anticep for the faint smell of lemon polish and the hum of the ancient radiators.

In the artifacts office, Joan kept her headphones slung loosely around her neck,

her gaze flicking between computer monitor and paper lock.

She barely looked up as I entered.

Did someone drop off the archive box personally, or did it just show?

I tried for casual, but my voice came out too sharp.

Joan paged backward through her calendar.

Delivery scheduled third party career, no signature, no ID.

She paused, frowning.

Nothing odd about it, unless you kept the box being 30 pounds of mold and headaches.

I hesitated stuck between wanting to protect her from the enemies pulsing from the tapes and

needing to share my own doubts. If any tapes seemed damaged or strange, don't play them after

dark, I finally said, circling hanks warning in my mind. If you do, make a note of it, for the

records. That's so, she smirked, then seemed to notice my tension and relent.

I suppose you all had your share of stories, radio keeps us on ghosts.

Back in the store room, as a rearranged reels for scanning, I found my fingers drawn,

almost involuntarily, to a folder of after-eyes incident reports which, behind anonymous blueprints

and forgotten from treason letters. Slit between pages, the quarter-page memo written in the old

manages for a scrid pen. Asteris night transmission must not be interrupted.

Repeat all hosts remain in booth between midnight and sign off. If interruption occurs,

follow the original script. Under no circumstances is the booth door to be open during power fluctuations.

Asteris, it was dated me 28, 1997. I tried recalling that night pinning the eye between what the

official record claimed and what my memory supplied. The script I remembered lived in a locked

door beneath the main console. We joked about if the apocalypse copy curved and safe in case

of signal loss, just another part of old FCC compliance paranoia. I'd never read the whole thing,

finding it mostly gibberish, with a weirdly repetitive refrain to stay with us, speak only as

heard. The restlessness inside me hardened into something urgent. Whatever happened,

those nights was more than a technical glitch or a local radio station's demise.

If there had been any system of ritual, even it was half-loss, half intentionally deleted.

I needed to see the booth by daylight, to root out what clues it might surrender to someone

insisting on them burying what no one else wanted to touch. That next morning, I drove to

W.R.Lexar and Suntan for the first time in years, they're a lot ruttered by weeds,

the station windowless and hunch beneath drooping power lines. The glass door yielded to my key,

hinges reluctant as ever. Dustmote spun in fact columns over the cluttered reception.

The soul kept still burying the print of the last stuff meeting years ago.

I lingered in the operator's alcove, I find the corkboard vault schedules, a holiday card,

and a faded, handwritten schedule for a night voices 12-2 a.m. with initials beside each night,

minescrawled on a handful of twosies. Anx engineering caused it still wreaked of solder and burnt

insulation. I picked my way through the tangle of hardware to the main breaker,

scrunting at yellow logbook tape to the pipe above. Page after page of electricians

handwriting, increasingly frowned at close to that last summer, feedback, monitor cycling,

external access to night. On the final entry, compromised, do not attempt to reset.

Someone likely Hank had written over it a day or two later,

gone home, stay out. The air on the stairs was stuffy as still,

heat dragging through to thick, still morning. From above, the afternoon sun pierced through

half-shotted vent, displaying jagged light across the control bus batter carpet.

I traced the lines to the console space and squatted, searching for the emergency script.

It took a few minutes of grouping and cursing the my hand closed on a battered brick.

Pulled free, it yielded the script folder a manila envelope, rubber banded, freeing with agent sweat.

I sat cross-legged under the desk and wrapping the envelope.

The first page was the opening, in event of transmission interruption,

read the following, repeat from out point until the signal stabilizes a official

communication is restored. The next sheets weren't much better, blocks of text,

sometimes were repeated three times over as if to anchor the speech.

It read more like a chant than a technical script. The refrain, stay with us,

stay with us, speak only as heard, stay with us, repeat.

Section scratched with additions in different hands. If something knocks at the booth,

do not open, the forces shift, do not adjust frequency, do not change the script, speak only as heard.

The practical part of my brain-rebeled scripts were for emergencies.

FCC regulation dog would but the pattern was unmistakable. This was language meant to reinforce

something circular, endless. Even as I sat there, legs tingling, I caught myself,

whispering, stay with us under my breath, as though plugging into an ancient, invisible loop.

A shadow moved on the wall just a trick of birds outside, or the sun shifting.

I pushed myself up, folded in hand, wedged it under my arm and scanned the room once more.

Out in the hallway, my phone buzzed a known number flashing across the crack display.

When I answered, static filled the line. The burst of noise, slicing high, resolved

into a voice stretched and warped. You were not alone in the booth. I nearly dropped the phone.

The breath behind those words was unmistakably estruskinastorous at the building, as if spoken

only a few doors down. I held the phone out from my ear, checking the walls on the empty foie.

No one. Just my own reflection, wavering in the glass.

When the line dropped, I let the silent settle before gathering the emergency script and returning

to the booth. I sat trying to make sense of what I'd heard, the exhaustion of days spent

thriding through reels pressing in from all sides. Still, my old training kicked in,

searched for connections, sequenced the unknowable. I laid the script beside my notes,

sounding back and forth for any overlap and phrasing. The repeated lines from the tapes ran

with what was written in the margins, lending a creeping coherence to patterns I'd only

barely suspected. The evidence was all laid out, on nights when night voices went wrong,

the script had been read aloud sometimes by Jack, sometimes by others, sometimes I suspected by

collos repeating rhythms picked up from the broadcast itself. A feedback loop of words in ritual,

a signal engineered to hold something at bay or to invite something in. I thumbed through call

logs, cross-referencing voices I recognize. There was the old regular, recessed Perry, who always

fallen to talk about the weather in her cats. Her voice, by late May 1997, rose in pitch, repeating,

can't sleep, not safe to stay with me, okay, stay on. It was followed by minutes of silence,

then what sounded like breeding close to the microphone, as if she'd handed the phone to someone else.

She was never logged again. Other voices, more distorted, seemed to slip out of phase,

losing names and whole chunks of thought then, all at once, breaking back through with

near identical intonations. It's not your voice, and the words keep changing. Recordings that should

have been comforting, summing up decades of slow-country nights instead bristle with an accountable

tension. Each time I replete they do not talk I've tape against any reasonable judgment I heard

new echoes in that unknown cadence at the end. In context, it sounded now not just like a threat

but a calling card. We always find new hosts, is it your turn now? Technically, that line couldn't

have been recorded live, the tape would have needed to be run in while I was in the booth at that very

moment, and yet every instinct told me it was deliberate, meant to crawl forward in time, meant for me.

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Night came heavy over the river, and I took the arc over with me, shoving the folder,

and most recent reels into my battered satchel. The idea of staying overnight at WRLXR

was more than I could handle, but sleep at home didn't seem likely either.

In the apartment, curtains drawn tight against an anemic moon, I sat on the bed, radio resting on my lap,

notebook open to a fresh page. I started writing out the repeating phrases, matching them line by

line with what I remembered from the script and what the unknown voice it said. Each time,

the compulsive urge to finish each pattern grew stronger a strange sense of anticipation,

as though asterisk something asterisk awaited the completed list. Halfway through, my phone buzzed

again another unknown number, but this time, when I answered, only my own voice came through,

faint and breathless, are you ready to confess? It broke into static and the line went dead.

Startled, I left the apartment, walking the deserted block past the shutter bakery,

the street humming with the echo of power lines overhead. The air outside seemed fresher,

with each step the urge to return to the booth nor deeper.

WRLXR sat at the end of my route, drowned in deep blue shadow, the sign of blurrifying and mildew.

I forced myself to circle it only once, settling at last in the curb across from the dark entryway.

From here, in childhood, I'd watched the antenna blow from my window, a signal sent not just to

the county, but a few dream big enough to everyone awake in all the dark places of the world.

I closed my eyes, breathing in the metallic scent that always clung to the lot, a hint of ozone

hovering in the air from somewhere up high. When I opened them, I saw movement behind the booth

window just a flicker, like someone shifting from one microphone to another. I froze skin prickling.

The longer I watched, the more I was sure that what happened in 1997 was still happening,

unresolved, posed like a signal waiting for permission to continue. Each night, the words must be

spoken, the arc must be completed. Not occurs, not haunting exactly something else.

In echo with agency, I checked the time half past midnight. Across the empty lot, the feeble overhead

light seemed to blink as though someone had passed directly beneath it. No cars, no wind,

just a sense of terrible, watchful patients hovering at the threshold of broadcast.

Staring into the glass, unsure if my reflection was only my own, I'm out of the words stay with us,

only as heard. A shadow flickered deep in the booth, then stedded. The air changed once more,

without mercy, inviting, beckoning in its disdain for endings. In that moment, the unfinished story

of WLXR didn't just belong to crumbling tape or a vanished staff, but to anyone reckless enough

to seek it out, anyone unable to let the signal rest. And something, I sensed, was still listening,

content to wait for the next night, the next voice, the next hose willing to join the transmission.

A sleepstuff, some was just beginning to lift up of the skeletal tree line when I snapped

awake in my apartment, heart hammering, this still clenched around the pad of crumpled notes

from the night before. My dreams are turned violent, a thicket of cable and microphone arms clutching

at my limbs, a booth door stuck shut as voices burrow through the glass. The old radio perched on

my dresser boats with a tangle of soft static, nothing discernible yet certain snuches of cadence

rooted the hush, syllables I have expected to hear reflected back at me from my own mouth when I spoke.

I hold myself into the kitchen, flipped on the overhead, and watched the murky light cut past

peeling wallpaper. The exhaustion, as ever, was not just physical. Something had splintered

during those weeks trawling the tapes, my boundaries had blurred. I was starting to flinch at the

sound of my own voice in recordings. I found myself lingering over to phrase not our voice, letting

it echo. The worst of it, I started to believe I was no longer alone in my own head. There was

a kind of shivering clarity that comes with real fear, your mind jumping the rails of reasonable

depth. I was past rationalizing that. There were events in that booth on those broadcast nights

that no ordinary process of memory or routine could explain. Sure, coffee. A run of paylikes

fried in thick oil, eating standing up. I checked my phone no voice mails, but a single miss call

time stamped at 3 2 a.m. no number, no message left. In my inbox, a digital recording had appeared

from the museum system. I hadn't requested it. The file labelled in that caller's June 11 talko

was just under 15 seconds long. I loaded it onto my desktop and press play. A hiss, then the

unmaskable loaf of the night voices theme rendered eerie and distorted as the funnel thrown to

water glass. Then an overlaid voice mine, but cracked and distant. With spurring, we just mirror

the words. They're already inside. Then, louder, a phrase I recognized from the emergency script,

transmission is incomplete. Static closed at down like a door. My hands shook as I closed a file.

Who was sending them? With someone else trying to pass a long warning or was the system itself

infected with what we'd carried 20 years ago? I called Joan at the museum, but the line rang

endlessly before being cut by a garbled mechanical chirp. I imagined her in a cramp record office,

head friends clamped tight, lost in some loop of sound she'd never asked to inherit.

When the mail arrived, it brought worse. Which between a pizza coupon and pastue

parable was a narrow envelope with no return address. Inside, neatly tight was my own name at the top.

Underneath, a list of every night voices stuff a present in May and June of 1997,

Marla, Jack Hank, Eddie, can each name with a knee-black line cross-terru. Only mine remained in

crossed. Below that, a single line, confess what you heard. Between the museum's note about

clean coppazone, the shadow call logs, and the scripting of emergency lines across tape and memory,

it was clear that what had invaded the booth had not left with the station's closure or

even without withdrawal from the business of radio. It was a pattern with its own life,

demanding repetition to anchor itself to find new mouth's new hosts. I told myself to wait to

rest to shore up what little reserve I still had. Instead, I felt a compulsion burning inside me

like a fever. There was too much unspoken, too many rules in the script that hinted at a system,

a rationale behind the madness. I needed physical evidence something that hadn't been corrupted or

sniped or boxed up for museum whitening. That meant going deeper into the wreck. There was one

place left, the call space storage under the old broadcasting tower with a truly sensitive

material emergency logs. An aired recordings, manager correspondence had sometimes migrated when

the pressure of administration called for plausible deniability. I headed out just as the morning

market crowds were thinning, purposeful, hugging my battered satchel, and the emergency script folder.

The walk to WLXF felt different in this life, bright at Butchapa, like the world was attempting

to shrug off the gloom around the station only to be rebuffed. The door, since my first visit,

seemed heavier to open, the creek of the hinges more resistant. Sunlight barely crept through the

smeared gas. Inside, the S smelled less like dust and more like paper anosum. An electric

fenced in lingered on the tongue as if the room's atmosphere was carrying a current. The call space

was tucked behind a collapse partition in what used to be the wrecker's archive, done a sagging

concrete step. I wedged a flashlight between my teeth and pride at the warp wooden panel,

wrenching it aside. The block more beyond offered a chill I felt through every tendon.

Cardboard boxes collapsed under my gloves. I worked past spare receiver heads, tangled

cores, and a crate of WLXR fun drive marks, until my hand snagged something hard to battered

lockbooks that kind management favoured for petty cash or noble tapes. The lock was feeble,

my screwdriver did the trick. Inside, half a dozen pocket recorders,

backup lockbooks with spines walked by damp, four hard drives and zippered freezer bags,

and a stack of unlabeled cassettes some regular, others are neatly marked, masking tape torn and

written over until the label disappeared to noise. The lockbooks, even before flipping through,

well-producted blocks and jittery handraiding. Some interest referenced signal anomalies,

external transmission overriding pattern, switch content, or a host unresponsive, default script

read. June 14's page, where a proper sign-off should have been, simply read, connection maintained

until signal loss reset denied. My heart drummed a rhythm I felt through my fingers as I lined up

at tapes. I didn't dare play them on the station's equipment in case the whole system hiccuped

and self-arrased. I stuffed the cassettes and lockbooks into my bag, hauling aside enough old

flowers to conceal the gap I dug and climbed out into a corridor that seemed even cold to them

I descended. Behind me, the door is shut, the lock clicking home by itself. Back at my apartment,

I stacked the cassettes and started with one labeled only with the ghost of a call sign,

and I did no real identification. I digitized it, built careful, lossless files,

unleaped up my headphones. The first few were fairly routine morning confessions,

somed played and replayed, management's voice dripping through a tire list of community bulletins.

But in tape after tape marked between midnight and two oddities thickened like a fog rolling

up a valley. On cassette 4, long after midnight, a male voice barely audible, speed-oldered by

degraded tips spoke beneath the surface static in a cicatour rhythm, rushing words that seemed

threaded through the night voices theme song, were already inside, repeat the phrase,

confess transmission and complete, don't use your own voice. Then a sudden splice I was missing,

the jump cutting back to the show is if nothing had happened. I lay at these gnashes in two

separate digital slots, matching auditory fingerprints from one tape to another. At first,

nothing emerged except a heavy polar rhythm of tape hiss, but as I adjusted for frequency

drift and channel bleed, frequencies matched and superimposed that the voices not overlaying

but orally asterisk, mirroring asterisk each other, sinking up in a coarse needle explained nor resolved.

On the three nights the patterns matched. Staff present were consistent, Jack, Amy,

Hank, occasionally milder signature names already crossed out in the note from that morning.

Tracking the log inches against town records, a realisation hit hard and immediate,

every staffer assigned on the affected nights was now relocated with no known forwarding

address R, worse, last scene at home, presumed to have left. Intense, especially partan,

easy to overlook, most never seen again after the last sprint tape. A chill ran up my arms,

the same as when I'd first heard my own voice walk back at me, broadcast as both warning and

welcome across decades. The next morning, I took the risk and reached out to Amy's parents

they'd never left the county. She'd lived on her clay in a sleepy cul-de-sac with silent yards

and the sound of lawn sprinkles drifting through open windows. They met me outside the porch,

face a street with an enduring dentist I knew at once parents forever waiting or resigned to waiting

for a sound on the stairs that would never come. Anything you can share about Amy's last summer

she was here. My voice trailed uncertain how much to risk. Her father shrugged stepping aside to

let me into Amy's room untouched except for dust in a slow decaying light. Her mother

lingered beside the door, hand-tight of her rosary. She hardly slept that month, her mother said,

almost dreamily. He used to write things bits of shows, lists of colors, numbers, a catcher,

the windows sometimes at night talking under her breath, saying, they're coming through the wires,

they hear us. Her voice cracked. She started sleepwalking, always going to the living room,

always to the radio. I examined the desk, a battered spiral where Amy had scribbled line after

line in a furious hand. There was no narrative, just columns of times' names, and,

repeatedly, a looping phrase, let them and don't let them in. Beneath her battered radio or

a weathered desktop travel alarm, always tuned to 14 to 10 a.m., now a monument to dust I found

one more spiral, its inside pocket bulging. Second side were lists radio show dates,

mics checked out, odd phrases repeated over and over, some crossed out and rescribed in larger

letters as if to please someone watching, host isn't host, confess, stay with us, you have to finish.

Her photo spoke for the first time, quietly, as he reshoved the faded photo.

After Amy went missing, we had police and tape on every box, but they always left this room alone,

said it felt off the radio never did stop buzzing, not for weeks. I shuddered, thank them,

and retreated as something of Amy trailing behind, a presence in the cracked wallpaper, waiting

for a click, a syllable, a new voice to finish what she could not. That afternoon, a museum called.

Jones voice was taught to feigning normal sleep, but shivering with dread at the edges.

We're pulling the plug on the archiving, she told me flatly.

Higher ups, funding, doesn't matter, tits go to regional storage on friday, anything weird,

just put it back in the box and bring to my office, got it. In the background, through the

connection, I thought I heard the faintest form of static, like a tape left unspooled on a cold

console. As I stowed the cassettes, my phone vibrated a non-color, no number. Against my better

judgment, I answered. The line was buried in static, but then a voice, soft split, returning.

Stop, don't open any more, don't trigger another event. The last word hit with the same

alien head and to the unknown voice in the 1997 tapes, intonation and inflection precisely

matching, syllables landing half a second behind where they blonde. Then a hiss,

and the voice melted into a double deco, my own, blurred with static, speaking words I did not

remember ever recording. You always come back, it was sprued, but you must not finish.

My hands were shaking as I hung up. In the silence, the radio in the hall flared to

life a stammered blast of noise, then dead air. I kicked the plug out of the wall in a panic,

cold sweat prickling. Night prod only fresh violation. My answering machine ancient used only

for museum coordination, blinked once. A message waited. I press play.

Hello, it's me, or you. It's always us, did you hear the words let them through, confess?

The message deteriorated into overlapping fragments, my voice and Jackson that are known,

terrifying second voice, each tripping over the last. We're waiting, the lines are open.

I jammed the Overseas slash OFF switch and pulled the cassette, but the words remain

hovering indelible. The time had come to submit to the compulsion to answer at last,

whichever waited on the other end of the broadcast line. If what the strange voice in the tapes kept

saying was true, we always find new hosts then it was better, at least, to see what it wanted

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slash zip. The day before the broadcast, I left my apartment stripped, only closed and

the battered satchel with as many tapes as I could carry. I brought the emergency script, the last

vlog book, Amy Spiral. I needed evidence, or at least someone to witness the transmission's final

iron. If I could speak with the thing at WLXR, perhaps I could lay the pasture rest. The sky was

bruised the colour of old copper when I returned to the station, a slow, railing storm building

at the rim of the horizon. Wind battered the tower cables and studded through the broken eaves.

I suckled a lot once no cars, no sign of vagrants or nosy teens. Only the station hunched and dark

waiting. I slipped my key into the lock, carrying portable recorders, a handheld tape deck,

and the old script. In sight, the gloom press so thick I felt it against my ribs. The static taste

of the air was too sharp, as if the building had built up a charge over years of silence.

The booth felt pretty naturally cold. A faint wear from the breaker box signaled the town's

power still bled into the main console, though the on-AIS sign was dark. I pulled the chain,

flooding the booth with a sickly light. The control board flickered once, then steadied.

I ran through routine checks, adjusting levels, aligning every portable mic to twin recorders.

Shoulders hunched, I set my watch for 11.50pm. Outside, wind battered the glass. A crawling sound

began first only a hum, then a mistakenly growing, the plural, into sink shuffles, something gathering

outside, russling against the trash blown lot. At midnight I forced myself to sit hands on the

battered horse microphone for a try. I had never hosted solo show in all my years, never spoken

to the listening dark. But I pressed record. The old script opened in my lap. I greeted the air,

my voice quivering, the speech tilted as I read from the familiar emergency words.

Try to laugh it off. Instead, the WLXR 1410AM, this is this is night voices stay with us in

sunny acts, we're here for another eye in the dark. The moment the words left my lips,

air pressure shifted in the room, a deep, sullen heaven is clamping the booth.

I repeated, improvising, invoking the rhythms from a hundred nights past.

Lines are open, call and confess. The room's temperature dropped sharply. The glass of the

inner studio filmed with condensation at the rest of the station beyond loss in black weather

from shadows or something pressing tightly against the windows. My computer monitor flickered,

resolving, then losing signal before VHS scratch lines raced upward. A wobble-swilding

broadcast, the subtle moment that had haunted all those tapes. Suddenly, every switch and indicator

light on the control board pulsed in sequence, as if a ghost hand were running diagnostics.

The phone lines lit up, all at once a choir of static mixed with voices, unreadable, overlaying,

each sounding as if piped for miles of wire and water. I tried to answer one and then another

fumbling with the phone, but there was no greeting, just an inertia of breath in a sharp,

warp phrase that repeated itself on every channel, not your voice, mirror the word, let us in.

I pressed record. I tried to respond, if you're there, if anyone's listening, if you can hear me,

but my own voice began to slip, loosening, syllable staggering, breaking into the halting,

fragmented cadence I'd heard on the do not arc of tape. I felt my mouth moving ahead of my mind,

repeating a phrase I didn't remember learning. My voice on the tape now echoing through the

station itself, smeared out into the terrifying, life is for them, host isn't host, we're here

for the confession, stay with us, speak only as heard. A shape press against the glass of the

sound booth a human outline, blurred, spilling out a darkness so deep a bled colour from the rest

of the control room. My scalp prickled every hair alive. I closed my eyes, tried to snap out of

the fugue. The storm outside rattled the windows. Lightning exploded behind black clouds just

enough to shatter a fork of figure-stunning scattered along the lot, arranged in a quiet arc.

The watchers. Machinery sputtered in cough, then failed incrementally, a series of

percussive clacks from the auxiliary equipment, worn by one, level meters dropped it.

The on air air light pulsed, feeble as a heartbeat edging collapse. On the phone lines, more

voices crowded in some of them voices are recognized from earlier tapes and reels, all colors,

jack, hank, amy, even miles familiar laugh, now pinched in metallic, circling itself.

They began to blend, syllables fusing, then multiplying, each line picking up the phrase

that the previous ended on. In the mix, my own voice joined no longer under my control,

threading through their words, making hollow music of the script. We just mirror the words,

mirror the words, mirror. Something caught my attention hands on my shoulders,

a presence behind and beside the old scent of foam and coffee and cologne and something other,

all mingled. The temperature dropped even lower, condensation dripping from the rim of the

recording desk. Across the room, the studio door shivered a heavy scraping sound on its far side.

Knocking faint but insistent. Then a voice jacks or not jacks,

all are now, you have to finish the show, you have to finish, it's the only way out.

I tried to speak but the only words that came were from the script as they'll come

in dear by a muscle memory I didn't own. We're not alone in the booth, don't open the door,

don't open the. Fingers cold, impossibly thin, burst the back of my neck, as if punctuation to

the stammered phrase. Shadows used across the seam between glass and wood, thickening,

seeking a seam, seeking the microphone. The compulsion to open the external line to

broadcast straight to whatever was waiting outside rows inside me, swelling. I knew absolutely

that if I did, something would fill the breach I never leave. Frantically, modding the inline

of the script to speak only as heard, speak only as heard by wrenched free, scrubbled beneath the

console and found the main feedwire the one emergency shut-time-undated as lost resort.

Ram my hand across it for the switch, finger shaking. Another round of pounding no longer polite,

now urgent rattled the door. Finish it, the spectral course pressed, each voice tumbling through

the ether, my almost insistent. I braced and yanked the cord. Every light died at once.

The storm outside crash, blanketing the lot beyond in a strobe of pale fire.

The presence in the corner withdrew, or maybe only grew still a vacuum left in its aftermath.

I sat in the dark, lungs heaving so loudly I thought the booth mic would pick them up.

The phone lines all at once blinked off. The deep reels swung then halted, silent.

The RNA outside, too, went black. I waited for whatever consequence would follow.

But there was nothing at all just a slow resettling of air in my own rasping breath.

When the power returned in a few seconds, it was the hum of an ordinary empty building.

No voices, no fountains beyond what I had carried with me. The only evidence, the live recording

still rolling silently in its deck, red light blinking, capturing only the shape of the storm

feeding to quiet. I took the tape, locked the booth, and laughed. Out in the lot, the gathered

watches scattered fog gestures hunched an electric spill to solve to nothing as I approached.

Just the wind, the smell of wet weeds, my kicking my boots. Back in my cold apartment,

I collapsed onto the mattress. The broadcast was done, something closed in space, if not in time.

Yet the silence that followed was a strained, uncertain thing. It did not feel like victory

just intermission. I shh. Sleep eluded me for nights after the live broadcast.

I lay on my side, tracking the echo of thunder and that warbling hum from the tapes,

listening for the snap and jitter of phantom voices. Sometimes I caught my own voice blintering

on the edge of consciousness, finishing old sentences sentences pinned to memory that scene falls,

staged by some unseen author. My radio even unplugged hiss faintly.

Each trip to the kitchen brought cold interference on the old landline scraps of phrases in

that same cadence, sometimes mine, sometimes jacks, sometimes something in between.

On a morning, hungover from sleeplessness, I checked my voicemail.

A message waited, Joan from the museum, her voice brittle and hesitant, asking about the tapes.

Wanting to know if I'd finished sorting them, if there were any you didn't want to go public.

Her tone shifted mid-message, sliding up into a clit, a burnt stutter, we are waiting.

Work must continue, hostess she cut off.

When I called back, the number was disconnected.

Two more calls followed that weak hank, whom I hadn't heard from since the engineers,

alley-we warnings, now lucid but clipped, is sentences full of apologies and desperate for

something he didn't specify what. Next, Mala's number, a voicemail that at first seemed

almost like her, but as she tried to say my name, her vocal inflection completed the phrase in

the otherworldly rhythm, voice slowing and repeating, stay with us, speak only as hard.

The effect left me raw and uncertain. When I tried to sleep, my jaw clenched, I woke with

fingers pressing patterns into the bedsheet, whispering lines from the script in the same

broken cadence I'd heard through the worst tapes. A few former staffers reached out by email,

they'd heard about strange interference or felt oft as of late.

I read replies slowly one, then two, then as well of similar notes.

They said their own voices no longer sound of right to them, that sometimes radio static

snatched syllables from their mouths. Some even claimed they heard conversations over open

phone lines that neither party remembered afterward. I gave the clean tapes to the museum

that set lacked any scrap of the ritual script, any background hint of their visitors.

I kept the live podcast tape and I do not arch over reels locked in a steel cash box,

buried under at least floorboard beneath my bed. Within days, the tongue quietly erased the

last traces of WLXR from its own record. The sign came down one door without notice,

the lock vents, the schedule for demolition posted with no fanfare. Friends I'd known since

childhood avoided the topic, changed subject at the mention of the old station,

or switched to bright and brittle tones, as if performing a collective forgetting.

I grew more isolated paranoid, tired, straight, then.

Sometimes my speech fell into the transmitter cadence without conscious effort,

circular and repetitive. Sometimes late at night, I'd catch my own reflection in the

oven door, lips moving, forming phrases I didn't intend to say aloud. At the edge of sleep,

the static in the air thickened. I'd hear chorus, thin and plaintive, urging, speak only as her,

don't break the pattern, stay with us. I'd run my hand over the pad of paper on my nights and

always more worried, always in new list, always trying to finish something that refused to be completed.

Ash, on the night before demolition was scheduled at the station, it could not stay in.

I wandered the empty streets, the clouded stars hushed behind.

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Access to affordable credit helps me pay my employees, but I don't really need it.

Infliction is killing me. What do you care? Big retailers are making record profits.

That's why we support the Durban Marshall credit card bill.

See, banks and credit unions help small businesses make payroll.

This bill would cut the vital resources they need.

While increasing Megastore profits. They deserve it. Don't they?

Toe Congress, stop the Durban Marshall money grab for corporate megastores paid for by the

Electronic Payments Coalition. And a half moon, a world holding its breath between one

centuries failures and the next. I told myself I had no business going back,

yet before I knew I decided, my feet took me down the block,

passed the shell of a bakery to the silent shape of what had been WLXR.

I lose plan cruttled in the breeze. I pressed my palm to the crap board listening.

The humfain to the non-tape, but still present world up.

Furative, warbling, a living transmission. I pressed my ear to the cold glass,

turned my face toward the heart of the dark and troll booth.

The static was stronger there, we're spurring. In the background, voices ruffled through the

frequencies, layered an old but distinct jack, Marla, Amy, Hank, my own, all pitched and tentacled

into one. They repeated lines that spark through the years confess what you hear, transmission

is incomplete and mirror the words, overlapping, looping, humming. I shifted, jaw slack, to listen

for who might be leading the chorus. Then musk in froze. Under the static, a shadow unspooled

itself from the host Jared Dim outline, body shaped by the lightless, hunched forward,

face never turning. The voices continued, joined by my own, pitched and echoed into infinity.

Stay with us, speak only as heard, are you ready to confess? The final phrase repeated,

trying to round itself out in fin atom, lay it in my own familiar register, and the voices of

all who had gone before. On impulse, mourning, our defiance of something between, I pulled out my

phone and dialed the old station number dead for years, recycled a dozen times, never answered.

Why not? Then, a click. My own voice across the years, across the tape, across the breach,

answered clear as day, the phrase looping, inevitable. Are you ready to confess?

The shell in, my hand radiated up my arm. The phone, slick and trembling against my cheek,

pressed its plastic ridges into my skin so foreign and yet intimate, a connection as old as any

memory ahead of the station. Static poles crossed the line. I swallowed once, felt the dryness

slide down my throat. My mouth opened and, against instinct, I whispered, who are you?

For a moment, nothing. Then faintly, a hush beneath the signal. My own voice puzzled up into a

hundred a thousand tiny delays, shouted in the cadence that had haunted me through every tape

answered, we are the echo, we finish what's left and finished. It didn't sound quite right,

didn't sound like I ever had one speaking aloud, but it wore my patterns and laughter,

the slap of an old accent returning briefly into vowels. I felt the urge to speak again to

confess something not yet confess, but my tongue caught on the words. Instead, I let the silence

hang and a net to the crack window and the dip of the booth's shadow, I saw movement a shape

of the mic, leaning in. The line stayed open. The chorus began to braid itself all hosts,

lost collars, the sigh of the tall guy, in his bright laughter, a child's uncertain hello.

Stay with us. It was a benediction and a threat. My mind felt like a tightly-buff tape running

out its last few feet. I shut my eyes, gravel digging into my knees as I knelt to the glass.

Each syllable vibrated through bone. I wanted to pull away, but I could not.

Inside, the shadow at the board moved tracing the arc where the control surface

once gleamed beneath jacks and fingertips. It reached for the battered mic, but one we'd

chaired across years and stories, and leaned forward just a little. The chorus behind it

ensweld sometimes a woman, sometimes a dozen men, sometimes a weeping child. The greeting,

always, night voices, are you with us? I tried for a desperate minute to focus on my own breathing

to draw a boundary between my thoughts and the ripple of voices. I dug my fingers into the cold

cell, but soon the pull became impossible to resist a compulsion older than the first confession.

My voice, live in the dead line, rose again through the phone. If I say the words I managed,

what happens to me? The answer came instantly at all the voices blending, soft to matter of fact

and somehow loving, son of enemies, you become part of the story to transmission never ends,

the words need hosts. The wind snapped a loose sign from the building, fleeing it across the

lettered lot. Rain began, fat drops bursting like static against the glass each one had rumbeat.

Inside, the beef darkened, but the shadow did not fade. Instead, it seemed to gather itself

drawing from the room growing sharper. Lighting shuttered the world, and briefly I saw it

shaped truly my own only nut. A reflection assembled from memory and tape hiss hunched over the

console in perpetual listening. A surge of dissonance overtook me suddenly, I was nowhere, I was everywhere,

always on both sides of the gas. I remembered that some, a pain of being awake too long,

of holding a handover a mouth to keep from speaking aloud whatever wanted to emerge after midnight.

I jerked the phone from my ear, let it swing on the cord. Music, or memory of music,

crackled from the receiver three notes, minor and unresolved, the knife voices prairie fractured.

My knees protested as I struggled to my feet numb, Liden. I walked the length of the station's

block, passing along the chainling fence. The air quivered, and for an instant,

every hair on my body stood stiff as wire. I passed under the shadow of the tower,

the ghostly impression of its bulk against the stormy sky, and felt the whisper at once,

signals in the bones. The car passed, headlights slicing through rain. I turned the driver,

pale and blank, did not look in my direction. The town was still tight, its own broadcast finished.

A home in the stillness, I entered the kitchen and shared my soaked jacket, peeling it from my

shoulders. I set the phone down on the crack countertop trembling. Across the room,

every appliance glimmered with a pulse just power cycling, surely, but my heart objected.

I set up the battered tape deck, slid the final live tape into the wheels, and press play.

Static layered with breathing. Somewhere in America, my own voice greeted the others.

For half a minute, I listened. The hair on my scalp tingled. The tip carried not just my

voice, but so many Jack's gentle caress of a phrase, Amy's nofusalkism, Hanks I and Ruff Baratone.

They told stories meandering, sometimes a rumbling in mid-sentence. On the second minute,

a break, a caller's voice, low and fevered a mace. Perry from long ago, mewing for warmth.

Then, I don't remember how I got here, she confessed, and the line disolved. There was a space,

a hush, where word should have been. A new voice emerged and mistakenly the stranger,

the same one from the do not archive tape, calm, and hungry. Confess it commanded.

Finish the story the right way. I signed the tape stop chest heaving. For the first time in weeks,

I felt an uphol of fury not just at my own helplessness, but at the end of this pattern,

the predatory persistence of unfinished broadcasts. My fist balled. No, I whisper almost to myself,

but it filled the room. You don't get to have the last word, not this time. I searched my drawers and

found a petalock and key-eyed cap from the station's male cubby all those years before. With

deliberation, I wound the live tape and the do not archive of real together, bundled tight,

with the last piece of the script Amy had transcribed. I locked them in the steel-cast box,

double-checking the latch. Without ceremony, I shoved the box deep under a loose floorboard,

and hammered the board snug. The act felt weighty, so monial if I could not read myself with the story,

I could at least deny it new listeners, new hosts. Afterward, I sat heavily on the kitchen floor,

backpressed to the fridge, alone except for the hum of the world and the sighing static that never

fully faded from my hearing. The days that followed within and bright as if the world had scrubbed

itself too clean. I rarely left the apartment. The radio stayed off, the tips and touched. The phone

and blogged. Sometimes, at night, I thought I saw shapes in the window glass my own, reflected,

holding a stance older than my body. I did not answer when the phone rang, though it rang often

always at 328M, always from nowhere. Wordsbred that the station had finally gone demolition

was carried out at dawn with heavy equipment, the lotsgrave roof, all but foundation and glass.

I watched from a distance, had drawn clothes. The stories dried up in town. People moved on,

or pretended to. The museums, winged on local broadcasts shut down,

files boxed away to regional epilite work for Barred. Jones stopped calling.

Anx number disconnected, Marles 2. In the diner, when someone spoke of the old days,

the whole room grew silent. The absence of WLXO became part of the landscape another gap in

the local memory, another unspoken border. Sometimes, in sleepless ires, I found myself for housing

lines. Stay with us, speak only as heard. Sometimes, I resisted. Sometimes, the urge crept into my

sentences, even when ordering groceries or making adult conversation with strangers. The patterns,

once embedded, never left merely way to forgetten willpower, moments of lapse. Spring came,

brought another soft thaw, and with it the sounds of construction where the old lot had been.

Life pressed forward in small, in different ways. But when I passed the corner where WLXO had stood,

I still felt the tremor beneath my feet, a vague interference like two lousy out of phase,

a transmission always threatening to break through. I kept the box sealed.

Papers and reels began to deteriorate, as though time itself tried to consume them.

On raronites, and saw me deep in shock, I'd paced the floor, drawn to the patch of floorboards

under which the box leapt. I never moved it. I learned to live with a small act of resistance,

my final sign-off, a denial of the endless pattern. But the broadcast never truly ends.

As cadence finds me in the hum of the refrigerator, in the low cycling of the streetlights

outside my window, in the echo at the edge of dream. Years may pass. Eventually,

someone knew a fine to box. Or not, the voices may choose another vector, another anti-room,

another confession. My voice, too, is out there, layered with others, skipping on the ghost lines

always reaching. And when, ever so often, my phone rings at that uncanny eye or I let it play.

Behind the static, my own voice hovers, neither invitation, nor threat, just to promise half a

filter. Are you ready to confess? And somewhere in the unspooling dark the show goes ever on.

And that is the end. Thank you for listening, and I will see you in the next one.

Finding great candidates to hire can be like, well, trying to find a needle in a haystack. Sure,

you can post your job to some job board. But then, all you can do is hope the right person comes along.

Which is why you should try Zippercrooter for free. At zippercrooter.com slash zip.

Zippercrooter doesn't depend on candidates finding you. It finds them for you.

It's powerful technology identifies people with the right experience and actively invites

them to apply to your job. You get qualified candidates fast. So, while other companies might

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