My Bones Pick Up the Signal

My Bones Pick Up the Signal

By: Abdul Muhammad

The silence had teeth. It was a cold, gnawing thing that bit at the edges of Elara’s consciousness the moment she turned out the light. For three years, since the Great Unraveling of her life—a divorce, a funeral, a quiet shattering—sleep had become a foreign country she could no longer visa into. Pills left her groggy and haunted. Meditation was a cruel joke. The only thing that worked was the static.

It was an old Roberts analog radio, a relic from a junk shop that smelled of dust and forgotten Sundays. She would tune it to the empty space between stations, where the universe hissed. That white noise was a blanket, a woolly, amorphous sound that smothered the sharp edges of her own thoughts. It was in that blessed, mindless hum that she finally found respite.

The change was subtle. One night, the static wasn’t just a hum. It shivered. A spike of pure, undiluted fear—cold and metallic—lanced through the speakers and into her spine. She sat bolt upright, heart hammering against her ribs. The feeling was gone as quickly as it came, leaving only the mundane hiss. She wrote it off as a waking dream.

But it happened again. A wave of devastating grief so profound it drew tears she didn't understand. A flutter of secret, illicit joy that made her cheeks flush. The radio was no longer broadcasting noise; it was broadcasting emotion. Raw, unfiltered, and terrifyingly human.

Driven by an impulse she couldn’t name, she set up her canvas. She didn’t think; she just let the feelings guide her hand. When a thrum of lonely despair echoed from the speaker, her brush mixed murky greys and deep blues, creating a figure hunched in an endless, rain-slicked street. When a burst of frantic anxiety crackled, her strokes became jagged reds and furious oranges. She painted until dawn, exhausted, and for the first time, looked at what she had made. It was the best work of her life. It was alive.

She called the series “Atmospheric Pressure.” The art world went predictably mad. Critics called her a visionary, a synesthete who could translate the zeitgeist into pigment. They didn’t know the truth. They didn’t know about the radio.

As her fame grew, so did the clarity of the signal. The emotions began to coalesce, to form patterns. The fear had a specific taste—the coppery tang of blood from a bitten lip. The grief had a smell—old roses and damp earth. And then came the memories. Not hers.

A small hand letting go of a balloon. The screech of tires on wet asphalt. A forgotten birthday.

She was no longer just painting emotion; she was painting someone else’s life. The static was no longer a blanket but a window, and something was on the other side, pressing its face against the glass.

It was during the final preparations for her solo gallery show that the voice truly found its shape. It didn’t use words, not at first. It used imprint.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

The sound wasn't in the room. It was inside her skull, three sharp, percussive raps that vibrated in her teeth. It was the same rhythm as her heartbeat when the fear-spike hit.

“Stop,” she whispered into the dimly lit studio, the radio hissing on the desk.

The only answer was a fresh wave of static, and this time, it carried a memory she recognized. Her memory.

She was seven, hiding at the top of the stairs, listening to her parents fight. The sound of her mother crying. The specific, hollow thud of her father’s suitcase hitting the floor.

Elara stumbled back from the canvas, a cold dread seizing her. This wasn't a random signal from the ether. This was a directed broadcast. And it was tuning itself to her.

“How do you know that?” she demanded, her voice trembling.

The radio crackled, and a feeling of intimate knowledge, of terrible familiarity, washed over her. It knew her. It had been listening to her sleepless nights, feeding on her quiet desperation. The static wasn’t her solace; it was its feeding ground.

Knock. Knock. KNOCK.

The sound was more insistent now, a demand for entry. The entity in the static was no longer content to be a muse. It was tired of being a ghost. It wanted a body. Her body.

She saw it then, in the swirling grey of the canvas she was working on—not a painting, but a reflection. A face made of shifting static, with two voids for eyes that were fixed on her. Its mouth, a jagged tear of silence in the noise, was moving. Forming a word she felt more than heard.

…home…

It was coming home. To her.

Terror should have made her unplug the radio, smash it to pieces. But a horrific, symbiotic bond had been forged. The static was her cure, her inspiration, her curse. Without it, the silencing teeth of the night would return, and now, they would be sharper than ever, filled with the knowledge of what she had lost.

She stood before the radio, a prisoner before her warden. The knocking in her mind became a constant, pounding rhythm, a frantic fist on the door of her consciousness. It was breaking her down, splintering her from the inside.

With a shaking hand, she didn’t reach for the power cord. Instead, she turned up the volume.

The static roared, a tsunami of sound and sensation. It flooded her, a cold electric current rushing into the empty spaces of her soul. She felt her own memories being pushed aside, her fears becoming its footholds, her joys its weapons.

Her last coherent thought was not her own. It was a broadcast, a final signal from a dying station.

My bones pick up the signal, she thought, as the static settled into the marrow. My skin is the receiver. My heart is the speaker.

Elara—the Elara she had been—closed her eyes. When they opened again, the brown was shot through with flecks of shimmering grey, like static on a screen. She picked up a brush, her movement fluid and alien. She had a new painting to finish. The silence was gone. It had finally found a voice. And it had so much to say.