United in Static -- fiction by Sydney Callahan

“The first thing I ever heard was static,” he tells her.

“Okay,” she says slowly. 

The birth had been bloody, visceral, like a slaughterhouse. Or a sacrifice—either one works. Their heart rate monitors as weaponry, their hospital beds as cutting boards, their scalpels laid out like neat little knives, the smell sterile. It was very red. Someone would need to be in to clean the sheets later, one of the nurses noted. It was frighteningly similar to a surgery, cutting out an infection, attacking the cancerous mass. 

It was quiet. 

He made no noise when he was born. He was clammy, and wrinkled, and he made no noise, a baby lying out like a butchered lamb. His mother hadn’t yet decided his name, held him like he was heavier than she expected. He could hear only crackling, faint and electric, existing in radio waves, transmissions, lightning inference. That was it. 

He didn’t talk to her about any of that. 

“I need you to tell me if I’m alone in the static,” he tells her instead.

“Okay,” she says slowly. 

He flicks through random channels on the radio until he finds one that’s more buzzing than words, without an echo. It’s one of the things he’s discovered, since his birth: static doesn’t echo. There’s nothing but decomposers, pine trees, and the two of them pulled over in his car when he turns to her. “Look,” he implores, placing his hand over the radio operating system like a lover’s jaw. “Watch.” 

He has no way to know if she’s actually watching as his eyes flutter closed, his breathing sinking scarce until it’s hardly there at all. It’s just his palm against the dashboard, the reverberating hum of the car engine, the crackling. Inside this crackling is the in-between. It’s nothing and it’s nowhere, and he’s something and he’s everywhere. It’s a lurker. It’s a neutral party. It doesn’t mean anything, and it’s the meaning in between everything. 

This is what the static is. 

It’s so easy to sink into, and it only gets easier every time he does it; the gentle hum of it all. The embrace, the cradling, like a spouse returned from war. The static curdles and sinks into the base of his skull, curling around his spine as if to say You’ve been missed. Where have you been? He whispers to it, I know I’ve been gone, yes, I know I’ve been gone. Welcome me back. 

And it does. It always does. 

It’s with his mind in the static’s embrace that his body draws it out from the radio system itself, pulling his hand back from the surface and taking the electricity with it. When he opens his eyes again, it’s to find a ball of it in his palm, fizzing. Not entirely black, and not entirely white, and in fact with no color at all, but tangible in a way nothing’s ever been before. If she gasps across from him, he doesn’t hear it. His hair is buffeted gently back from his forehead, standing on its end and quietly crackling with something akin to lightning. His veins feel like antenna wire. Everything becomes grainy, reduced to only its atoms, its electrons and its potential energy. Waiting to turn kinetic. 

“See?” he says, searching for her. “Can’t you see it?” 

She nods, her eyes wide. 

“Does it hurt?” she asks. 

He tells her, “Not anymore.”

The first time he reached into the static, he was thirteen years old and almost didn’t make it back out. 

The static had been ravenous, consuming his hand to the wrist and only traveling further. He’d been camping, the night air pulsating with the sounds of cicadas at twilight and his mother snoring softly on the other side of the tent—cleaner than she was at his birth, but still a stranger in more ways than one. He was clutching a handheld radio. He could see the static on the antennas, braided around the wire, the only bright thing. It looked like his mother’s hair, three strands intertwined into one, familiar in a way not many things were anymore. He’d touched it, expecting his mother’s split ends—instead, he got teeth. It ate. 

The sting faded away with time the more he reached for it. He didn’t talk to her about any of that. 

“So am I?” he asks her hungrily. “Am I alone in it?” 

The gray in his palm reflects in the sheen of her eyes, widened. “I don’t know,” she says quietly. 

He sits with their unknown for a moment, fighting tooth and nail from across the static to regrasp his sanity. Everything in his head feels numb, treading thickly through water. 

Only when their quiet has had time to settle does she disrupt it, asking him, “Can I hold it?”

“I don’t know what it would do to you,” he tells her. 

“Let me find out,” she says softly.

He regards her for a moment, the determined furrow of her eyebrow. In her pupils he sees the static’s reflection beginning to set in, and he thinks for a moment that this was always going to happen. 

She inhales sharply as the tips of their fingers touch, tendrils of static reaching for her curiously. They follow the curves of her palm lines like highways, the asphalt weather-worn and in need of new pavement. The static sinks into the cracks of her skin, binding her to him. When they try to pull apart, the static connects them, hanging suspended in the air between their hands like magnetic attraction, like polar north and south. In this, they are united; whatever’s primal in him reaches out to whatever’s primal in her, half-dormant beneath the haze and seizing its way futilely, weakly towards the surface. All of it is masked by the static. 

If it bites, she doesn’t show it. All around them, the crackling is amplified, the undecipherable snippets of language fading in and out through the radio, a forgotten dialect. All of it collapses into white noise, apocalyptic, like the silence after a lightning storm. The two of them are inside his car, yes, with the decomposers and the pine trees; yet, at the same time, they’re hurtling through space, both backwards and forwards until it essentially turns circular. They’ve been here before, and they’ll be here again. None of it even matters. 

This is what does: whether or not he’s still alone in the static, or whether or not he’s dragging her with him. 

She loosens her grip, the tension fading out of the tendril until it sags between them, relaxed and languid as a strip of silk. She then curls her wrist in, wrapping it around her hand to achieve a better hold, and tugs. The force takes him with it, pulling him towards her like a fish on a hook. 

Her eyes widen impossibly further, glassy and dilated. “It won’t let go.” 

“I can make it,” he reassures, steadying himself against the steering wheel. “Do you want me to make it?” 

She hesitates. 

It feels on the edge of a cataclysm, a balancing act. An exercise in atomic weight, in the proton versus the electron. Either equal or ionic. 

“I’m already numb—once it starts it can’t be stopped,” he tells her.

“Get rid of it,” she says softly. 

He feels the electricity in the tips of his fingers, the hairs on his arms standing on end, erect like little soldiers. It’s not the same as pulling the static from the radio, making it tangible—no, instead the static must become concrete, susceptible to gravity’s pull. It has to no longer exist between sounds, amongst interference, it has to make its nest burrowed in the concaves of his body. 

The tendril releases her hand, drawing into itself and coiling around his forearm, returning to what’s familiar. They both watch as it sinks into him like soundwaves, lining his gut with swaths of noise. The static fizzes through the cracks in his skin, entering his bloodstream through the veins on his wrist and traversing them like energy currents through antenna wires. He becomes the conduit, the vessel. A puppet for the static to pioneer, it’s hold on him deepening. 

His ears pop, filled with nothing but fizz, cloaking his heartbeat. He absorbs the static. He thinks maybe he should be worrying; if the surgeons sliced his chest in two, would they find any beat attached to his heart? Or does its silence say enough already? If they cut him open, would nothing but static seep out? 

He starts driving again with her eyes raking the side of his face, no answer to his question, and more alone than he was before. There’s no one but them for miles.

It’s just when he thinks they may have outrun the decomposers that the deer comes. 

He doesn’t even see it. She does. She cries out, “Wait!” but by then they’ve already made contact. 

The radio flares. Shavings of its fur sift through the headlight beams like dust motes through sunlight. He doesn’t remember any of the collision, just that it was bright, just the sounds of antlers skidding across asphalt, and suddenly they’re lurched into the aftermath. He hears her heavy breathing, senses his palms against the steering wheel, and still, even now, he feels outside his body. Still, he’s fighting against a haze he can’t control, blinded and stumbling around the battlefield, the ash thick in the air. Suddenly, this aftermath that they’ve found themselves in has taken on an apocalyptic edge, and still he isn’t present to bear witness. 

She wrenches open the passenger’s side door before he can even ask if she’s alright, fumbling with her seatbelt and tripping over herself in her haste. He watches from the driver’s seat as she runs around the front of the car, the headlights dappling across her body like electric eels through a current, slippery and maybe a little sentient in the crisp frost of a settling evening. It occurs to him that he should follow her as she falls to her knees over the deer’s body, her hands hovering above its torso, unsure of what to do. 

She looks up at him when he gets out of the car, her eyes frantic and her hair a curtain over the side of her face. “It’s alive,” she informs him, her syllables rushed and her fingers dancing from the wide breadth of the deer’s stomach to linger in front of its snout. “It’s still breathing.” 

He stands loosely, his limbs slack with uselessness. “What’re we supposed to do?” 

“I don’t know!” she frets, her voice teetering with panic. “I can’t just leave it here to die!” 

His brow furrows. “Most would.” 

“Would you?” she asks, eyes squinted at him through the slits in her hair, shielded from the sun setting at his back. 

His voice is quiet when he admits, “I don’t know.” 

“It doesn’t matter.” She looks away from him, back down to the life bleeding out of the body in front of her. He wonders if she can see it staining her hands. “I can’t leave it. I can’t do nothing.” Her knees scrape against the asphalt, reminiscent of childhood tumbles as she breathes heavy, lungs laboured. 

“There’s nothing you can do,” he tells her. 

“Heal it,” she says softly. 

He recoils as if hit. “What?”

“I said,” she repeats through gritted teeth, “heal it. There must be something you can do with—with your static.” Her voice rises in volume, clutching at shreds of confidence as she drones on, “Don’t let it die here, please, you can’t let it die here.” 

“I—I don’t—I can’t.” 

Her syllables shatter when she says, “I’m asking you to.”

He stills. He feels the presence of static all around them, always near, in the in-between. It lays dormant in the telephone poles snaking over their heads, in the radio waves radiating through earth’s atmosphere. In the faint hum of the car engine and the subtle crackling of the radio, holding back language like a cage containing a rabid animal. In the very air itself, kinetic and weighted with energy. 

He finds his resolve. A being can run on static—he’s living proof. 

“I need its heart,” he tells her. 

“Sorry?” she says, choking. 

He kneels on the deserted road next to her, takes off his jacket, and lays it out on the ground beside the deer carcass. Its chest is still heaving, choppy, like wave caps in a storm. “I need a—a blade of some kind. Something sharp.” 

“Wha…” she starts, then doesn’t know how to finish. “What are you going to do?” she asks when she finally finds her voice, producing a bright red swiss army knife from her pocket. She refrains from placing it in his outstretched palm, searching his face with wary eyes. 

“Do you want it to live?” he asks. 

Her voice is small and breathless when she says, “Yes.”

“Then give me the knife.” 

She gives him the knife.

It passes between them, oathlike, and gently he starts carving a circle into the fur just above the deer’s front legs. Sweet nothings filter through the static in his hearing as she sits, panicked, next to him, tracing the white spots in between the deer’s ears and picking dead leaves out of its coat. He can’t focus on what she’s saying for too long, for fear that if he does, reality will come crashing over him and suck all the resolution from his body. He’d lay, crumbled and sacrificial, like a lamb for slaughter. 

He doesn’t know why he’s saving the wild animal. He wonders if he can even call it that: saving. The deer will keep its life, but is a lifetime etched into static really a lifetime at all? Is that better than death? 

He shakes his head minutely to clear his thoughts away, and carves out its roadkill heart.

He holds it aloft once it’s free, the deer’s blood running down his wrists in rivulets that resemble his veins. It’s still beating. They both watch as it pulses faintly in and out of rhythm against the palms of his hands. 

“What’re you doing?” she asks, even more frantic, while he sets down the heart and wraps it up in his jacket, hoping the blood won’t soak through the fabric on the drive home and get all over the car. “How will this save it?” 

“I’m letting it live,” he snaps, his hands shaky. “You decide if that’s the same thing.” 

She falls silent, her teeth clicking as her mouth closes. 

Gathering up the tatters of his focus, letting the rest of the world dissolve into nothing but interference, he lets his eyes shut and his hands press into the deer’s fur, framing the hole the blade left in the flesh. Fueled by adrenaline, he reaches out his consciousness into the reservoirs of electricity that hang all around them, like stars in the mantle of a night sky. In the phone lines, the radio system. Traveling across time and space, emanating from radio towers as beams of nothing but sound. It’s present always, even in apocalypse. It will still be present when both of them are gone. 

The static is sentient, and it's more ancient than man can give it credit for. It’s an infection, a disease, a decomposer that eats away at the brain, infests it until corrosion. It’s fungus-like, it festers. It’s hungry. 

All around them, rivers of energy trickle across the asphalt, electrically charged and without color. What they do have is current—they all flow towards the deer, the roadkill, draining into the hole where the heart used to be until it’s overflowing. 

Every hair on every body stands on end, and next to him, she’s gasping for breath. He barely hears it. Oh, how the surgeons, the nurses, how they would envy him, weaving sinew back together and plugging the veins into the ball of fizz like a cord to an outlet. It sits suspended in the deer’s ribcage, no bigger than his fist, a concentration of energy packed dense like a neutron star. Here, he’s the gravity, the centripetal force, compressing the static until it forms a heart’s replacement. 

The deer will have no heartbeat. Walking roadkill. 

The blood mingles with the rivers of static until, by the time he sits back, one is indecipherable from the other, and the deer lifts its head. 

It blinks at them with bleary eyes, void of white but for the highlights. It looks from her to him, then back to her. The static rivers recede away, fading into white noise. For a moment, the decomposers cease in their pursuit, the pine trees still. For a moment, nothing moves. 

Then, the deer springs up, light on its feet, and bounds away. 

The both of them watch it disappear into the undergrowth, beyond the treeline. When he looks at her, her eyes reflect fear back at him. She slumps, her body losing its tension and cascading to the ground from where she was balancing on her heels, her fingers running through her hair. 

Nothing is left but for blood, matted fur, and the swiss army knife, its red not nearly as striking as before. 

Wearily, he pushes himself to his feet, and extends his hand to hers. Blood drips from his fingers. 

She hesitates before taking it, their skin a stark contrast as he helps her to her feet. In silent unison, they both turn back in the direction the deer vanished, its silhouette still outlined in the breaking of foliage. No one will know. The deer will keep living as it always has, through day and night and day again. Nothing will change but for the buzzing in its ears and the absence of its heartbeat.

“United in static,” he says under his breath. 

They both get in the car. They drive. They keep trying to outrun the decomposers. They fail. He returns to mundanity with another heart to add to his collection. 

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Sydney Callahan, currently a junior in high school living in Minnesota, likes to be thought of as a storyteller, though they're still not quite sure what exactly that could mean. They spend most of their time lost in their own head, enjoying the color brown, or bragging about their bookshelf. Some people would call them a dreamer, though they think that could mean a variety of different things, too. They have been writing for upwards of four years now (give or take), and this is their very first publication!