Static

The phone rings: it’s 2:17 a.m. – if it was good news it could wait until morning, so the surprise and dread of the bell that pierces your sleep immediately pushes adrenaline into your confused mind. You pick up the receiver but there’s no one there – just some static – no, is it…wind? 

The line’s connection is tenuous – a crackle, a distant rushing…footsteps maybe…and…far off traffic, moving fast?

“Hello?” you say, then say it again…nothing, then the sound like someone trying to speak, but in a whisper -- too quiet and unintelligible against the rising and fading cadence of cars in the distance – it has to be. 

Another crackle or two, maybe feet in heavy boots walking through scrub brush, the sound of a car door, its heavy thud as it closes, then the fall of bits of glass, brittle as summer rain, and then just the wind again, then silence and the sudden blank tone as the call cuts out. 

You have no one to call, no recourse but to wait for a return call that never comes. It’s the eleventh of July, 1986 – there were no phones there then, not for miles. 

Later, you read in the notes: time of death 2:10 a.m., killed instantly three miles west of Ritzville, with only the dry remnants of wheat fields and the oblivious traffic hurrying down Interstate 90 past the two state police cruisers lighting the accident site with their red and blue circling lights, the Eastern Washington wind rushing by them as they took their required grim notes: looking for survivors that weren’t to be found – just the stars above in the blueblack sky, the traffic ebbing and fading, a search of a mangled car, a bleak night full of silence seemingly now out of the reach of any meaningful audience.