ANONYMOUS
Warning: Mentions of blood.
There is a radio in the woods. You can hear it if you walk through the creek. It is always on the other side. You have to walk through the creek to find it. That’s important. Part of its plan. It wants you to be cold. That’s step one.
It’s soothing. An old, gravelly sound. Smoky voice but with a subtle sharp twang. A smoky meal with lime. That’s the voice on the radio. An orchestra, live, the kind that doesn’t accompany a singer like this anymore. The pitch ever so slightly warped by time. A cozy imperfection. It calls to you.
It feels warm. When you cross the creek you are met with bushes and brush and you push through them. Blood slips past your forearms but you hardly notice. The radio is so much louder now, swallowing you. You smell the sulfur of overturned wet shale.
And there it is. In a clearing surrounded by tall trees and dense thrush, you emerge. The singer has stopped. You hear the accompanying strings and it feels in tune with the late sunlight leaking through the woods, filling the moss at your feet.
It feels expectant. You know it is just a coincidence that the lyrics halted as soon as you emerged, and yet, it feels as if the radio is waiting for you. And sure enough, the strings continue on their own. Until they don’t. One by one, they slip out. It isn’t the right ending. No grand finish. It feels… well, it feels as if the radio has noticed you.
An obscene sound when compared to the radio, ripping tethers and the smell of dug-up soil. Another figure emerges into the clearing. This one from the ground itself. A person with decaying skin, covered in moss. Bits of it slough off as it approaches you. Its throat makes a hollow sound, and it repeats itself as though the act of making sound is an unpracticed art grown rusty with time. It says, “My radio.”
This isn’t right, you think. Your mind gives very little surprise to the shambling person who had been stuck to the ground, to the stages of a radio playing in the middle of the woods. No, the only wrongness you feel is in what the shambling man said. This radio does not belong to it. This is your radio. That is what you know. In that moment it feels as if you know nothing else.
There is a rock in your hands. You dug it out of the ground and your fingers are slick with mud, and then with blood when you dash it across the shambling things face. It falls with a dry thump.
And you are sitting by the stump with the radio. The music comes back. All warm strings and cozy radio waves. The singer comes back. And you sit and you sit and the moss keeps growing a blanket around you, and the sun winks in and out, and the wind makes you shiver, but you nestle your limbs into the moss, your mind into the sound, and you are at peace.
Time passes, the music washes over you like waves on a beach, exfoliating you, the tide removing a bit of you every day. Things become dark, quiet and cold. You nestle your mind to the warm, yellow sound of the radio.
Then, one day, the singing stops. The strings start to peter out one by one. You smell above the petrichor and decomposing life mass the smell of sweat and plastic and iron.
Someone is coming for your radio. Your jaw creaks open painfully. Your eyes focus and it takes effort but you begin to see. You feel trapped at first but somehow you manage to rise.
You send a signal to your jaw. It moves but no sound comes out. You remember your throat and engage it as well, a glottal creak leaks out of your air. Air, that’s it. That’s the missing piece. You locate your diaphragm and push. Sweet night air fills your lungs, stinging.
“My radio,” you say to the thing across from you. You send a signal down your spine and into your legs. You fall forward and catch yourself. Fall forward, catch, fall forward, catch. They are close now. They are raising something in their hand. It reaches your head and you are falling. You do not catch yourself.
There is a ringing in your ear. Something leaks from your temple. You feel cold. You shiver. There is an alarm ringing. It comes from the middle of your spine, the place that tells your hands to retreat from a hot surface. The signal is pushing into your head. Your spine does not comprehend language so there is no structure to it. But it is telling you to retreat. It is saying that, though you can’t feel it yet, you are being burned.
You glance up at the radio, and you remember how you used to think it was warm.
You crawl, under the bushes and over to the stream. The ringing in your ears starts to dim. You hear the edges of music climbing into your senses. You’ve reached the creek. In a desperate attempt to stop hearing the radio, you push your head under the water.
Fresh, freezing clarity.
You stand up, and your ears are clogged with water. You trudge through the creek. Music rings dimly out behind you, but your spine refuses to let you turn around.
Red and blue flashing lights. Someone shouts. You feel a blanket around your shoulders. You politely inform your spine that your body is in more capable hands now. And with that, you fall asleep.