Broken Radio

He creaked his old rocking chair back and forth as he watched stoically over the bleak expanse of beige grass and dirt. The tufts of golden blades hissed and rattled gently in the wind. Sweat dripped down the back of his neck and slithered uncomfortably under the rough fabric of his flannel until it was absorbed in the now damp cloth of his lower back. The covering of the porch did little to extinguish the heat. He tapped his finger anxiously against the arm of the wooden rocker. The fields in front of him were a patchwork of dead grass and mounds of dirt combed neatly in swirling rows, with a sparse sprinkle of vibrantly green young plants. He rose slowly, his chair aching and screaming for him to return, and went inside through the screen door. 

He lived in a small wood shack far down the road. It was at one point painted white on the outside, but all that remained were a few defiant flakes holding tightly to the rotting wood because that house was the only one for miles. All the windows except the one looking over the kitchen had long been shattered and replaced with screens, or in the case of the bathroom window, plywood. The inside of the shack, like the outside and the surrounding scenery, was lifeless and empty looking. When the man walked through the screened front door to the kitchen he passed a room with nothing but a bed and a table with a strange dust line over a particularly scuffed section of floor. The shack opened up to a kitchen with a wood burning stove, some pots and pans, and a bucket of water. To the right was a small table with a long since functioning radio next to a wooden chair with a colorful cloth padded seat. 

He lumbered over to the west facing window by the chair and considered the blinding and pixelated sun beyond the screen. It took him only a second to know the time, but he stood a moment to remorse about the shortening days. He turned back to the kitchen and made a ruckus searching under the lids of the pots until he had found the one he had put potatoes in earlier in the week. 

He chopped up the second half of the previous night’s potato and poured a quarter of the water in the bucket into a small pot, put the pot over the stove and dumped in the cubes of potatoes. After a few minutes the light dimmed and the only shadow cast in the room was by the entire west facing wall except the glowing square in the kitchen illuminated by the window. He let his stew cool and sat humbley on the colorful chair with a fork. He ate slowly to fill the time until the sun had set and the room was lit only by the unpredictable fire light of the stove. He noticed the shimmer of metal from somewhere behind his piles of pots and pans on the counter. It was another fork, rusted on the tips and powdered with settled dust. He watched it shine, in the dancing light of the fire, and for a moment a few notes of a melody he once knew drifted into his head. He let himself indulge in its sweet ring, reverberating from within his head out toward his ears in a perverse way of listening and let the imaginary vibrations soothe his bones. The lyrics gradually became louder and he almost opened his mouth to sing, hearing the faceless voice tell him about how he, “just wants to be the one you love. And with your admission that you feel the same-” but he was suddenly cold and still. “That you feel the same-” what? What was the next lyric? His gently opened mouth, ready to sing, snapped shut, nicking his cheek with a small prick of pain. Immediately he rose from the chair with a grunt and went into the doorless bedroom. 

After some trouble getting to it, he found a small metal box under his bed. He sat back in his chair and opened it on his lap to reveal an array of small tools and wires. He flipped over the radio to where he had already taken the back off and began tinkering. 

For over an hour he rearranged wires, tightened and loosened screws, twisted knobs and pushed buttons, but nothing became of it in the end. He defeatedly put it back and brought the toolbox back to the bedroom with him when he finally retired for the night. 

When the sun peeked through the bedroom window at dawn he wasted no time rising. He woke with a strong hunger for the third potato, but drank instead the cooled boiling water from last night's dinner. The water level of the bucket worried him, so he went with the bucket to the back of the house where his most recently dug well was. He scooped the last of the water from the undesirable bottom of the well. He made a mental note to remember to twice boil it. 

He turned to head back inside, where the coals of the fire might still be warm, but was stopped in his tracks. Unlike when he walked toward the well, he could now see quite plainly the pile of junk and waste that he kept behind the house. Atop the miscellaneous pieces of tin cans, broken tools, and rotten wood, layd a clean, white sewing machine and dark wood stool. Again, the same few notes as the night before and the night before that before that 246 more times, a melody began in his head. Frozen in the cold, he stood and listened to the song grow louder, warmer, wrapping around him and lacing their fingers. Unlike before he could hear a new instrument now, the rhymes of a sewing machine, starting and stopping perfectly in time with the chorus of the song. Again he became lost in the day, in the feeling, in the false of the sound until the lyrics began, and suddenly stopped. “With your admission that you feel the same-” what? Suddenly it was quiet and the cold infected his fingers and toes, and his mind drew back to the warm coals in the stove. He turned in a huff and hurried back inside.

He tinkered again with the broken radio as he waited for the sun to heat the day as the fire had heated his shack. Again with nothing to show. Around the midmorning, when the sky was bright but the air still cool, he killed the fire and got in his truck. In a puff of smoke the car denied his attempts to start. He struck the hood hard with the bottom of his fist, and by some miracle the truck obliged when he turned the key. His hand was sore as he drove the long, bumpy road into town, trailing a brown cloud behind him. 

By the time he pulled past the other trucks and horse pulled wagons in town, the temperature had already begun to rise. Because he had not been into town in over a week, he received a few stares, some surprised that he was still alive, and others pitiful of what it meant that he was. He pulled over at the saloon in the center of town. On his way to the door he stopped to eavesdrop through the window on a conversation between the owner of the town market and his wife.

“Pitiful thing.” The man said. “Livin so far out and all on his own.” He took a large sip of the mug of beer in front of him. 

“A real shame. He doesn’t even have a dog or nothing.” His wife replied. She looked down at the table thoughtfully. “Do you think maybe he’d like to have dinner with us?” She asked meekly. He set his beer down heavily on the table.

“Sarah, I told you, we can’t. Stop inviting people over, we’ve already got two growing boys, there's enough mouths as it is.” They were quiet for a moment before the conversation moved on. 

The man stood silently and in the absence of conversation to focus on he noticed the radio in the bar was playing. For only a second he thought he recognized the song. He thought he had heard it just that morning and every night before, but he quickly realized he was wrong, he had never heard this tune before. He decided he didn’t like whatever it was the radio was playing and left back for his car.

He drove down to the town market, the one owned by the man with too many mouths. It was reasonable that everyone was in the saloon, it was closer to noon now and he was suddenly missing the infection in his fingertips and toes. New droplets of sweat followed the salty trails left on his unwashed skin. 

The market was a ghost town except for the salesman, one of the owner’s mouths, who was sitting under the shade of a tent. The colorfully painted signs labeling the food were almost illegible from sun bleach, but it didn’t matter much because the selection of fruits and vegetables was so depleted and depressing that it mattered more to find a healthy looking plant than one of specific taste. The sign above the potatoes, if you could call them that, they were the size of gumballs, said, ‘Quarter for Four.’ He was about to hand the salesman his quarter, when a plump, red, juicy radish caught his eye. It was, in reality, a very ordinary looking radish but in comparison to its grey and shriveled sisters it looked quite delectable. The sign above the radishes said ‘Dime a Radish’. The man handed him a dime, grabbed the prize radish, and left without another word. 

He had trouble starting the truck again. He tried to find the source of the problem under the hood, thinking that the skill he’d learned tinkering with the radio would translate. He was right, he couldn’t fix the truck either. 

He walked down the street to the mechanic’s garage, it was only a block but his knees became sore and his back felt tight. The mechanic was quite familiar with the man, and more so his delinquent car. As he worked on the engine, silently except for a few curses, the man watched and tried to understand what the mechanic was doing, but he couldn’t see much of the mechanic's hands and he was becoming increasingly more distracted by the heat. He was regretting not going into the saloon, and the feeling of condensation in his glass and ice against his lip taunted him. The mechanic stood up abruptly in a flurry of curses.

“God! I’m sorry, I know what the problem is and I tried to fix it but what I did is only temporary. For a permanent fix there’s a part I need to install but...it’ll cost you.” He said, closing the hood and leaning against the headlight. He noticed the stains of sweat under the man's arms. “If you don’t got anything else to do, you can drink with me back at the garage.” He said, in better attempt to hide his pity than the rest.

“No thanks. I'll see you tomorrow about that part.” He offered the mechanic the last of his money, a nickel and a penny. “I insist.” He said. The mechanic started to gesture to reject it but hesitated, quietly took the money from the man’s hand, and walked back to the garage quite sunken. He also had too many mouths.

The drive home provided a nice breeze for him to cool down by. When he returned, he was welcomed back into his rocking chair with the same horrible sound it had made when he left. He studied his field again. Somehow it looked even more barren than when he saw it just yesterday. But he didn’t tap his hand, nor did he even rock back and forth. 

That evening after he boiled the water, not two but three times, he started dinner. He chopped the rest of his potatoes into larger chunks. He diced the radish. He fried the radish stem until it was crispy, like he remembered his mother teaching him to do. He found some old spice containers and put the water into them, then poured it into a pot on the stove. His eyes were starting to cross from tending to the stew by the time he decided it was done. 

He sat in his chair with the pot of stew warm on his lap. The firelight was already brighter than the sun. He put the pot on the table and went back to the kitchen to get a spoon but could only find the rusted fork. He stood staring at the fork for a moment, and suddenly the same melody began. This time, however, the chorus started as if he had never stopped listening to the song, and it was sung by someone new and entirely familiar. The soft, high vibration of a woman’s sweet voice began the lyrics and led him through the song. She explained, “I don’t want to set the world on fire-” and, “I just want to be the one you love-” but when she came to the same point, “with your admission that you feel the same-” she also did not know. Finally he grabbed the fork and took it over to the chair with him.

All season he had gone to bed hungry on a belly of not enough potatoes, but that night he almost had to unbuckle his pants. The taste of spice, even though it was incredibly vague, was so refreshing to his mouth that he decided, in that moment, to consider himself a good cook. After he had picked out the bulk of the stew he drank the broth directly from the pot, it was only water but strangely it tasted of beef. 

When he was done licking the pot, he put it back on the counter to dry, along with the rusted fork. He wiped off the forks with a hand towel that was barely any cleaner. Then he maneuvered the metal box back out from under his bed and sat in the chair. He worked tirelessly with the abundance of energy that a full stomach brought. But again, nothing worked. His feet were threatening to swell from sitting in the chair for too long but he didn’t yet accept defeat from the radio.

He took the box and the radio to bed and worked on it there. He tinkered with it until late in the night. He began to feel incredibly tired. He had lost the energy he had found in the stew, and his bed suddenly seemed more comfortable than usual, and his eyelids more heavy. Finally, eventually, he felt overwhelmed by his need to sleep, and fell into a dream without even putting away the tools or taking off his shoes. Some time while he was drifting away, his arm relaxed and his grip released the radio he had been holding on to so tightly. It rolled off his bed and hit the floor.

Somewhere in the fog of his dreams, he began to hear a song playing. It grew louder and louder the deeper he fell asleep. It was a love song. Using the fabric of his sleep he pulled together a clear picture. A memory. He saw himself almost twenty years ago, sitting outside a gas station in the heat of summer, listening to the melody for the first time, watching as a beautiful woman pulled up to the station. “I don’t want to set the world on fire”. He stood up, dusted off his clothes and tried to look presentable. She noticed him, for the first time. Then suddenly he was at a diner, with a cliche strawberry milkshake with two swirly straws and the same beautiful woman. The radio changed and the same song came on. “I just want to start a flame in your heart.” He leaned over the counter and tried to kiss her, but she turned her head in time and he pecked her on the cheek. They erupted in laughter, spilling their milkshake in the process, and laughing all the more. Then he was dancing with her, months later, swaying to the same song. “In my heart I have but one desire.” Then everything began to flow like a broken dam, and he was lost the current of his memories with her. Dancing, dining, getting into trouble. “And that one is you.” When he proposed at the same gas station they met at. “No other will do.” Jumping into his delinquent truck after their vows were made and driving west to wherever they find themselves. “I’ve lost all ambition for worldly acclaim.”  When his truck broke down, they walked almost a mile down the road, only to find a small house on the edge of an adorable town with a for sale sign in the yard. “I just want to be the one you love.” How excited she was that one Christmas when he gave her that new sewing machine, and how fast she began to make something for him with it. “And with your admission that you feel the same.” The smell of her making their favorite potato stew, and them eating together in the light of the fire as the old radio played their favorite song, their love song, and how after it was done and their plates were empty, he asked her to dance and she would play it again. And how she would sing the lyrics herself, louder than the radio. Her voice came to him clear as day that night. “I’ll have reached the goal I’m dreaming of.”