Whispers in the Static: Part 5

Part 5 – The Father’s Voice

Arthur lived for the nights.
Every dusk was a countdown, every evening meal just a formality before the quiet hours when Helen returned. The days grew patterned around her absence: the tea poured into her mug, the pauses before her chair, the gentle care given to the old radio as though it were a shrine.

And when at last he lay down, the static would rise, the tide would turn, and her voice would find him again.

“…Arthur… my love…”

He breathed her in through sound alone, each fragment filling the hollow space of the house. Her laughter came to him one night — whole and bright — and it left him trembling, clutching the sheets as though she were beside him.

But then, on another night, the static bent in a way it never had before. A new rhythm. A weight pressing in.

Through the hiss, another voice cut. Deeper. Rougher.

“Arthur, boy.”

Arthur’s breath caught. The word was plain, but the sound of it filled his chest with old recognition. It was his father’s voice — the timbre unmistakable, the authority still buried in its tone.

He sat up in bed, staring at the radio as though it had betrayed him.

“Helen?” he whispered.

The static shivered. Helen’s soft murmur came back — broken, delayed — “…still here… Arthur…”

But the other voice pressed in again, clearer this time.

“It’s me. Your dad.”

Arthur’s eyes stung. He hadn’t heard that voice since the hospital, since those final rasping hours when the weight of years had crushed the strength out of the man he had once feared and admired. Now it came steady, alive, commanding as it had been when Arthur was a child.

His hands trembled on the sheets. “Dad?”

“…yes… proud of you…”

The words fractured, scattered by static, but they pierced him all the same. For years Arthur had carried questions that had never been answered, aches that had never healed. And here, through the radio, his father returned with the words he had always wanted.

Helen’s voice wove through, fragile, tender. His father’s was firmer, steady. Both voices carried him through the night until dawn crept pale across the floorboards.

Arthur lay awake in the soft gray light, his mind torn.
For the first time, the static had carried two voices.

And though his chest swelled with joy at hearing his father again, a quiet thread of unease wound its way through his thoughts.

The radio was no longer only Helen’s.

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(To be continued in Part 6 – The Chorus of the Lost)