“You’re always in your room, any free moment you get” Debby complains.
“It’s not like you are ever going to receive a message from God or an extraterrestrial being.”
She goes back into the kitchen to prepare supper.
“You want eat your dinner in your room?” She shouts from the kitchen to a room across the hall.
“Yea, I’ll be in here.” Stan closes the door of his ’special’ room.
Debby enters the room holding a plate and a glass of milk. “Don’t know why I even asked.”
“You have been doing this ever since your retired 35 years ago, don’t you ever get tired of it?”
Stan takes the plate and glass of milk and puts it on his desk. “Thanks Deb.” ignoring her comment on his hobby.
Debby is lying in bed, she looks at the clock blinking far past ‘03:00′.
Stan finally came to bed, “So how did it go today?, any messages from the other dimension.”
She laughs as she did some many times before.
Stan flips off the light, their silence almost puts them right to sleep.
Stan breaks the silence “Deb, I’m going to die soon.” and flips on his bed light.
“Oh Stan, we all do eventually, and you wouldn’t want to leave me all alone now would you?” Debby replies with a gentle smile on her face.
“Off course not, I love you more than life itself.”
He takes a moment “I just.. wanted you to be prepared for it.”
“So you will spend your final days listening to radio static?! Instead of spending time with me?” Debby shouts into his ear.
“You just don’t get it, I haven’t accomplished anything in my life. I just want to discover something amazing and be remembered.” He tells her.
Stan flips off the light, and Debby leaves it at that for now.
The sound of birds singing in the early spring morning gets disrupted by the sound of static and tuning is coming from Stan’s radio room.
Debby walks into his radio room, “So are you going to tell me more about why you think you’re going to die so soon?”
Stan is turning some dials and his head is almost stuck to the speaker “Well, a while ago I went to the doctor, and after doing some tests he told me I only had two more months to live.”
“Yesterday it that was three months ago.” He says while he flips up some switch that didn’t seem to do what he wanted so he flips it back down.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner!” Debby says with a slight tremble in her voice.
She walks out of the room and slams the door behind her as hard as she could, a picture of them standing at Niagara falls fell of it’s nail and landed on the carpet without shattering.
The morning turned into afternoon and into evening.
Before she could do her everyday walk from the kitchen to the radio room, to call Stan to come get his dinner Stan was already standing in the kitchen’s door post, “Tomorrow we’ll go do whatever you want us to do.”
They both smile, “You want to eat in your room?”
Debby walks into the radio room and puts Stan’s dinner on his desk.
“Tomorrow we’ll eat together, on the patio.” Stan tells her.
Lying in bed Debby looks at the LED clock that’s blinking towards ‘01:00′.
Stan is sitting at the same spot he’s been in for the past 35 years. Debby did once try to persuade him to change things.
He is staring at the same kind of sheet he makes every week, sheets he archives each month in a file cabinet next to his desk.
Taking notes on things like which frequency he was on and for how long, and wavelengths and decibels.
He thinks back at this one time he thought he had made contact, he was listening to the static like he did every day and he heard a pattern of soft beeps that were getting louder.
Then he heard a loud beep coming from the kitchen, it turned out to be Debby was trying to program the microwave.
Thinking about this makes him laugh every time, but not to hard otherwise he couldn’t hear the static, he might miss out on something if he did.
Tuning his radio to the next frequency on his sheet, he notes down the time.
Stan is staring at his sheet, he grabs his coffee and takes a sip from it.
Suddenly there is a strange sound, out of the static he hears something that could be a voice.
It is hard to make out what it is trying to say but its a voice for sure.
Stan’s heart begins to beats faster and faster and he tunes and adjusts all the dials the best he can.
The voice becomes a slight more clearer and he writes down what it says.
“Have you been waiting for us?
We sure have been waiting on someone like you!
Are you a very patient person?”
Writing fast enough to keep up with the voice gave him a pain in his arm, it felt still but it did not stop him.
He jumps up from his chair and shouts at Debby from his room
“Deb Deb ! Voices on the radio! Their talking to me it’s not a fool..”
He hits the record button on his tape deck and feels a pain in his chest and falls to the ground.
For the first time in a very long time Debby could hear happiness in Stan’s voice.
She gets out of bed, puts on her evening gown and runs to Stan’s radio room.
Stan is lying on the ground, she knows its too late.
The voice becomes clear.
“Then we are looking for you to join our staring contest!
Call us now on…”
Debby turns off the radio, and notes down the rest of the commercials that passed by at around ‘01:44′
