Static

1. The Noise

It started with the hum.

Not a real sound, exactly. Not something anyone else could hear. It lived just behind Sadie’s left ear—a low, restless buzzing, like a detuned radio buried under her skin. Sometimes it flared into voices. Snippets. Half-thoughts that didn’t belong to her.

At first she blamed the city. The trains. The old wiring in their flat. She told herself it was just stress. Sleep-debt. The kind of thing that happens when your mum’s gone and your dad drinks from coffee mugs that don’t smell like coffee.

But then it followed her.

Down the escalator at the station. Into the library. Through the concrete echo of the school hall. She’d be mid-step and a flicker of something would run through her spine, like static. And just for a moment, she’d know things.

Private things.

Someone’s birthday. A recent breakup. A name they hadn’t told her. A smell that didn’t belong to the moment.

At first, it felt like a trick. A strange one. But not awful.

For a while, Sadie thought it might be a gift.

In the second week, she used it to avoid questions in class—she sensed when teachers were about to call on her, felt their attention flicker in her direction like a change in air pressure, and ducked before it landed.

She started winning games of poker in the library at lunchtime. Not for money—just pride. But the thrill that came when she knew the bluff was fake before the smile even formed… that part was real.

The hum seemed to reward her for paying attention.

But it wasn’t just the thrill. It was the way she felt seen by something vast and invisible. Something that hadn’t forgotten her.

That’s what made the next part worse.

2. The First Time

She was in the lift, on the seventh floor of a carpark near the back of the old cinema. The building smelled like burnt popcorn and spilled Coke. She didn’t like lifts, but the stairs always reeked of something much worse.

There was a man standing beside her. Blue polo. Thinning hair. Head down. He didn’t look at her.

But the hum behind her ear surged, and then—

She saw it.

Not with her eyes. Not even in her mind’s eye, exactly. It was more like the memory of someone else’s thought dropped into her like a stone into water.

He keeps a blade in his sock, just in case. Never used it. Thinks about it sometimes.

The words landed with the weight of knowing. Of certainty.

Her stomach clenched. Her fingers twitched toward the lift buttons, but she was already at seven. Nowhere else to go.

Sadie stumbled backward, her shoulder hitting the mirror with a thud that sounded too loud in the tiny space.

The man didn’t move.

Didn’t even glance up.

But the buzzing behind her ear sharpened—turned to a needle’s whine—and then dropped into silence as the doors opened.

She didn’t wait.

She ran.

Halfway down the hall, her breath caught on something sharp. She bent over, gripping the wall, but there was no pain. Just a pulsing aftershock in her spine like she'd carried something toxic for too long.

By the time she got home, she’d convinced herself it was a one-off. Just a fragment. Just a man. Just... coincidence.

Except the hum came back that night.

And the next day.

And the one after that.

3. Pattern Recognition

By the third week, it wasn’t just people anymore.

It was places.

The city started talking through its bones.

She’d walk past a boarded-up shopfront and flinch as images flared in her mind—fights, theft, shadows of things that happened too fast to make sense. A stain in the shape of a child’s hand. A woman screaming without sound.

The hum returned like a fever. Hot under her skin. Feverish in her blood.

Sleep got thinner. She stopped speaking at lunch. She started wearing her hoodie everywhere, even in class. It wasn’t comfort—it was armor. A barrier between her and the crackling interference of everything.

At first, she’d thought she could control it. Focus it. Use it like a compass.

But it was more like a flood. No direction. No meaning. Just noise.

One morning, she caught her reflection in the window of the 426 bus and didn’t recognise herself.

Eyes too wide. Shoulders drawn in like she was folding away. Her skin had taken on the grey tinge of early morning fog. Her mouth was always just slightly open, like she was waiting for a voice to speak through her.

At school, she ducked into the toilets between classes. Tried to breathe.

Count to four. Hold. Out for six.

The hum dipped, briefly.

And that’s when she heard it again.

Not a voice.

Not her own.

You don’t belong in your skin anymore. You’re filling up with echoes.

Her knees buckled.

She braced herself on the edge of the sink and stared at the tap until it dripped once. Then twice. Then stopped.

The silence afterward was worse.

4. The Girl with the Bracelet

Her name was Miri.

At least, that’s what Sadie thought. She wasn’t on the roll call. Never answered to teachers. Always arrived late and left early, as if the rules didn’t see her.

Sadie noticed her because she sat alone—but not out of shyness. More like other people hurt. Like sound itself scraped too loud around her.

She had frayed headphones and a woven bracelet that looked handmade. Old, as if it had outlived something. There were whispers about her. That she didn’t have parents. That she’d been enrolled here and elsewhere and back again. No one really knew.

Sadie watched her for two weeks before speaking.

They sat on the back steps during a fire drill. The concrete still held heat from the morning sun. No one else came near. It was like people’s eyes slid right over Miri, like she was half-glimpsed between frames.

Sadie didn’t know what made her say it. The words came out before she could think.

“Do you ever hear things that aren’t yours?”

Miri didn’t laugh.

She didn’t look surprised, either. She just studied Sadie’s face like someone trying to remember a dream.

Then she reached up and tugged the bracelet halfway off.

There, hidden beneath it, was a thin black line tattooed onto her wrist. Like a crack. Like something fractured.

It wasn’t ink.

Sadie blinked. For just a second, she swore it moved—widened, pulsed—before stilling.

“I used to,” Miri said. “It nearly split me in half.”

Sadie swallowed. “What did you do?”

“I stopped letting it in.”

“How?”

Miri didn’t answer.

She just pulled the bracelet back into place and stood.

Before she walked away, she said, “You’ve got about three weeks. After that, it’s permanent.”

Sadie opened her mouth to call after her, to ask what she meant.

But Miri was already gone.

And somehow, there was no imprint in the air to prove she’d ever been there at all.

5. The Mirror

It got worse after that.

She smashed her phone.

Not on purpose. It slipped from her hands during one of the episodes—one of the downloads, as she’d started calling them. She’d been walking past the train station when it hit her: an old woman’s grief so heavy it drove her to her knees.

The woman didn’t even notice her collapse.

Sadie got up on numb legs and threw the phone against the bricks. The pieces scattered like glass bones, each shard catching light that wasn’t there.

That night, she sat in the bathtub, knees to chest, and turned on the cold tap. Let it run until her skin went numb.

The noise faded.

For an hour.

Then it returned louder, like it had been waiting behind the walls.

She pressed her face to the porcelain. Her mouth opened but no sound came. Just a low, static pulse behind her teeth. A dull throb of everything she couldn’t keep out.

At 2:13 a.m., she stood in front of the hallway mirror and whispered, “If I’m losing it, just tell me.”

The mirror didn’t answer.

But her own reflection looked away.

Not quickly. Not dramatically.

Just slightly—her gaze turning half a degree to the left, to something behind Sadie that wasn’t there.

Sadie didn’t sleep that night.

The hum pulsed in time with her heartbeat.

6. Transmission

The next morning, the city felt like it was speaking.

Every metal surface hummed with residue. Shop shutters. Bike racks. Train rails. She couldn’t look at a handrail without seeing a flicker of the last person who touched it.

Strangers’ eyes became trapdoors.

Memories leapt out.

A man on the tram thinking about his dead dog. A girl gripping a sketchbook filled with faces she hadn’t drawn. A woman at the café grinding her teeth to silence a scream.

They were full of static.

And Sadie was the antenna.

There was no longer a difference between knowing and feeling. She started forgetting where her own thoughts ended. She’d walk into a room and taste someone’s fear like metal in her mouth.

She found herself drawn to rooftops. Carparks. Fire escapes. Places where the city blurred at the edges.

Where the signal felt thinner.

There, the hum stretched long and low like a warning tone. Like something that wanted her to listen.

That’s when she started to suspect:

The city wasn’t alive.

But something inside it was.

Something gathering.

And she was its receiver.

7. The Blackout

Three nights later, there was a blackout in her block.

No wind. No lightning. Just dark.

Everything went dead except the flickering exit sign in the stairwell. It buzzed in a sick green light, like something was still trying to breathe.

Sadie lit a candle and sat cross-legged on the floor. Her phone was still shattered. Her dad had fallen asleep with the TV remote in his hand. His snores were the only sound.

That’s when they came.

Not in person.

In waves.

Thoughts that weren’t hers. Regrets. Shouts. Prayers. A man reliving the moment he left his son in the car too long. A girl running from something that wore her mother’s face. A heartbeat that didn’t stop when it should have.

The candle flickered. Died.

She didn’t move.

The darkness deepened until it felt like it was inside her lungs. There was a silence so heavy it bent the air.

Then—one voice, clear as a bell:

You weren’t meant to wake up like this. But now you’re awake, you’ll never sleep again.

Her breath hitched.

And for a moment, just a moment, she wasn’t sure if she’d ever been real at all.

8. Miri, Again

She found Miri in the park just after dusk.

The light was gold and low, cutting through the trees like something about to vanish. Sadie’s feet had brought her there without meaning to. Like the signal was steering now.

Miri sat alone on a broken swing. Her spiral-bound sketchpad balanced on one knee, pencil working in tight, fast movements. She didn’t look up as Sadie approached.

The hum inside Sadie’s skull had become a roar.

“I need help,” Sadie whispered.

Miri finally looked at her.

Her eyes were darker than Sadie remembered. Not just in colour—but in depth. As if they had seen something so vast and quiet, it had swallowed the light behind them.

“Too late,” she said.

Sadie flinched. “There has to be something—”

“There’s a reason the others don’t make it.”

The others.

Sadie’s chest seized. She felt the weight of hundreds—no, thousands—of unspoken things rush toward her all at once. She collapsed onto the bench beside the swing, knees buckling.

“What is this?” she asked, trembling. “Why me?”

Miri didn’t answer.

Instead, she turned the sketchpad so Sadie could see.

It was her.

Sadie.

Drawn in charcoal—so lifelike it hurt. Hair blown back, hoodie slipping off one shoulder, head tilted toward some invisible sound.

But the eyes were scribbled out. Blacked so violently the paper had torn.

"You’re not a receiver anymore,” Miri said, her voice calm. “You’re a speaker.”

The word echoed.

Speaker.

Not someone who listens. Someone who transmits. Who lets the signal out.

“But I don’t want it,” Sadie said, voice small.

Miri stood, folding the sketchpad with a slow grace. “That stopped mattering a while ago.”

She began to walk away.

Sadie turned, heart pounding. “Wait—are you like me?”

Miri stopped.

“Not anymore.”

Then she vanished into the trees.

Not walked.

Not faded.

Vanished.

Sadie was alone. But her ears were full.

9. Broadcast

She doesn’t remember walking home.

Not really.

She remembers the streetlight flickering above her flat, the one with the loose wire that always buzzed when the air was wet. The letterbox yawning open. The smell of warm concrete and spilled beer.

Inside, her dad was passed out on the couch, the telly still going. Some endless rerun with laughter that sounded too sharp, too canned.

She turned it off.

Sat beside him.

And opened her mouth.

The hum poured out of her—not a sound, but a force. Like pressure escaping a ruptured pipe. Like all the stories that weren’t hers exploding at once.

Not words.

Just… everything.

His pain. His lies. His tiny, buried regrets. The way he still saw her as a toddler in overalls, even though she’d vanished into herself long ago. The way he thought about walking into traffic once a week and never did.

She could feel him begin to break.

He didn’t scream.

But he started to shake.

Tears poured from his eyes, uninvited. As if something inside had been turned to static and scraped raw.

And still she kept speaking.

Until he passed out.

Again.

But this time, not from drink.

She sat there a long time after, the silence now thick with afterglow.

A new sound rose in her chest—almost musical. But broken.

The hum had changed.

It belonged to her now.

10. After

She walks now.

All night, mostly.

City noise blends with the signal in her head. It no longer hurts, but it never quiets. It’s always on. Like a distant station you can’t quite tune out.

She wears noise-cancelling headphones—not plugged into anything. Just to keep people away.

They say the girl in the blue hoodie doesn’t talk.

But sometimes, if you sit too close on the 1:14 a.m. train, your nose might bleed.

Sometimes you remember things you buried so deep you forgot they hurt.

Sometimes your secrets rise like steam on your breath.

And sometimes, you see her watching you.

Mouth closed.

But still transmitting.

They call her urban legend. Ghost girl. Static.

But Sadie isn’t dead.

She’s the relay.

And you wonder, if you’re unlucky enough to meet her eyes—

What happens to someone who absorbs the worst of everyone and never gets to forget?

You’re about to find out.