A Murmur Beneath the Static

The old television hummed with a patient, imperfect glow, its screen dusted with the fingerprints of forgotten nights. When the power finally settled, the static settled into a quiet hiss, almost like a room breathing through a thin wall. It wasn’t a signal, not exactly; it was a listening, a patient murmur rippling through the airwaves and into the marrow of the house.

At first I heard it as a weight on my skull, a whisper pressed against the temple, a decimal point of fear that refused to die. Then the voices came, not as words but as careful, coded tremors: a name scraped from the wire, a date stitched into the night, a warning tucked inside a sigh. The murmur didn’t complain when I pressed my ear closer; it learned the shape of my breath and followed it, shaping itself around my syllables until I could hear my own name echoed back to me as a threat and a memory.

“We are listening where the light ends and the shadow learns to speak,” the static seemed to say, each syllable a cold news of a world that never stops listening.

Curiosity got the better of caution. I kept notes in a notebook whose pages smelled of old rain and resin. The entries grew stranger, more intimate, as if the TV had invited a stranger into the room and the stranger had started living there. The voices spoke in patterns—refrains that repeated like a pulse beneath the flicker of the screen:

Never turn away while the picture remains dark; to do so would borrow their patience and take your own.
Speak when you are asked. Silence is a door; it opens only to the weight of a whispered name.
Do not trust the first reflection you see in the glass between channels; it is a doorway, not a mirror.
Keep the volume steady, but never loud enough to drown the second voice that lingers after supper.

One night the house creaked in sympathy with the television, and the voices grew closer, no longer content to float behind static middlemen. A grandmother’s lullaby braided into the hiss, a father’s old boast threaded through the white noise, and a child’s sigh—empty of joy, full of warning—drifted past the edge of the screen. The room grew colder, and the screen’s glow shaped itself into a window, a second room where ghosts kept their own hours and never slept.

When the power finally failed for good, the murmur did not end. It settled into a companion, the quiet that follows a storm, a careful listener perched at the edge of consciousness. I learned to live with it, not as fear but as a map—lines drawn by voices who knew the house long before I did, tracing routes through the walls, teaching me what to listen for and what to fear when the static sighs settle into a stubborn, patient breath.

Some evenings, I catch a glint of movement on the screen’s dark surface, a flicker of faces pressed against another, thinner world. The murmur remains, a soft concordant chorus beneath the ordinary clatter of a life that goes on despite the unsaid, reminding me that listening can be a form of survival—and sometimes, a doorway you never fully walk away from.