The Void Sings in Static
On the remote bluff where the old lighthouse kept watch over a restless sea, I tend a battered shortwave console that should be retired by now. The station is silent by design, but the air never truly sleeps. It hums with voices that shouldn’t exist, as if the ocean had learned to speak in radio waves and handed its secrets to rusted coils and glass diodes.
“Do not listen to the quiet between words. Do not answer when the channel yawns.”
Last night the static peeled back like a lid snapping in a storm. A voice cut through, not a voice so much as a cadence—breath and circuitry braided together in a pattern I could not mistake. The signal spoke in a language made of breathless vowels and metallic whispers, and it felt less like listening and more like awakening inside a room you’ve always inhabited but never owned.
The moment the message arrived, the room rearranged itself. The monitor pulsed with a glow that stretched the shadows along the walls, turning them into pale maps of places I’d never visited and would never reach. The radio’s gauge ticked with a patient rhythm, as if the void itself kept time by counting the seconds of our fear.
Signals in the Dark
What followed was a routine of small, undeniable clues that braided themselves into a single thread. The echoes formed a pattern, a chart of constellations sketched in static on the screen. The cabinet of the transmitter creaked with an old memory, and the air carried a taste of salt and fog like a warning.
- A rhythm that repeats every 7.3 seconds, a heartbeat that has learned to survive without breath.
- A chorus of syllables that feel crafted from wind and wire, not any human language I know.
- Shadows slipping along the edges of the camera view, though the room remains resolutely empty.
- The logbook, which records nothing—until one line appears in the margin: “We are listening.”
These fragments pressed against my ribs until the night felt like a closed chamber I was no longer allowed to leave. I traced the echo with a trembling finger, trying to map a route back to whatever sent the call, as if a path through copper and ice could lead me to some origin of the tremor I felt at my core.
In a moment of reckless longing, I answered with a softer, human tone, hoping to soothe rather than provoke. The room answered back with a slow, inexorable reply—the kind that doesn’t shout but settles into the bones, a patient occupancy that makes you question what you are and what you owe to the voice you dared to awaken.
“We are here,” came the whisper again, not from the speaker but from the air itself, from the wooden floorboards that remember every storm, from my own name spoken back with a familiarity I cannot claim.
As dawn climbs over the horizon, the instruments fall quiet once more, resting in their shells like animals that have told their stories and chosen silence to keep the world from knowing too much. Yet the air stays thick with a new hunger—the hush after a chorus, the promise of a return. The void has learned to sing, and I have learned to listen, even as sleep dissolves into static and the sea continues its patient, endless witness.