as it fights through the clouds of static.
Starting and then stopping…taking off and landing…the emptiest of feelings…
Julie’s mother watches the radio as if the singer is inside it. Her eyes begin to glisten.
Floors collapsing, falling…bouncing back and one day…I am gonna grow wings…a chemical reaction…
The song ends with an ironically cheerful guitar strum, and a kstr wingsyoung woman's voice claims the silence, soft and shaky between spasms of static.
This is KEXP, 90.3 Seattle, bringing you the perfect soundtrack for huddling with your loved ones waiting to die.
To Julie’s surprise, her mother laughs. She wipes at her eyes and grins at her daughter, who returns the grin twice as big. They both turn to the radio.
If you’ve been listening for a while I apologize for the repetitiveness. We usually try to keep things diverse here, but our door’s being battered down as I record this and I didn’t have much time to put a playlist together…
Her mother’s smile starts to stiffen.
But anyway, if you’re hearing this it means they didn’t break the equipment, so enjoy the loop for as long as the power lasts. Consider it the last mix tape from us to you before our big breakup. I’m sorry, Seattle. America. World. We knew it couldn’t last.
Julie’s mother hits the radio’s off button and sinks back into her chair. Her smile is gone with no trace.
“Mom?” Julie says softly.
Her mother doesn’t respond or react. Her damp eyes regard the ceiling, as blank as a corpse’s. Julie feels horrible things crawling in her belly. She gets out of the truck.
Her father is still securing the area, marching around with his gun in position, all procedure and tactics. Her mother has told her stories of when they were both young and wild. How they met on an airplane while in line for the bathroom, how he stole her away from her friends at the airport and showed her around Brooklyn, how they holed up in his tiny apartment for days and played music and drank wine and talked philosophy and causes and things they wanted to fight for. She knows he changed when the world changed. Adapted to survive. And there is a small part of her—a tender, bleeding organ that’s been battered and bruised for too many years—that’s starting to envy him.
She wanders out toward the trees that surround the rest stop like an infinite void. She sticks her earbuds in and clicks play on an iPod she found on a dead girl somewhere in Pennsylvania. There is a song on this dented, cracked device that she reserves for moments like these, when she needs a reminder that there’s still a world out there. That her family is not alone on a spinning ball of rock.
The song is called “For Hannah.” She has never heard of the band and the song isn’t especially good. What makes it her favorite is the date listed on the file. It’s the most recent date she’s seen on a song by at least two years. Everything else in her collection was released back when there were still remnants of a music industry, money to be made and goods to spend it on. She has come to believe that this song—a sappy little ballad strummed clumsily on an out of tune guitar—is the last song ever recorded in the daylight of civilization.
Can you hear me? it begins. Look up…
She stands at the edge of the forest, listening to the indefensible beauty of the singer’s flat, tuneless tenor, and whispers the melody into the shadows.
The tall man watches the girl. He stands absolutely still, staring at her through a gap in the bushes, and although she is so close he can see the freckles on her ears, she does not notice him.
What is she?
She is different from him. Smaller, softer, yes—he knows what a female is—but also something else. A fundamental contrast that has nothing to do with her physical shape. Something ephemeral that he can’t explain.
The brute knows what it is. The brute is ecstatic about it. Its cloud of hands swarms around the girl,
Starting and then stopping…taking off and landing…the emptiest of feelings…
Julie’s mother watches the radio as if the singer is inside it. Her eyes begin to glisten.
Floors collapsing, falling…bouncing back and one day…I am gonna grow wings…a chemical reaction…
The song ends with an ironically cheerful guitar strum, and a kstr wingsyoung woman's voice claims the silence, soft and shaky between spasms of static.
This is KEXP, 90.3 Seattle, bringing you the perfect soundtrack for huddling with your loved ones waiting to die.
To Julie’s surprise, her mother laughs. She wipes at her eyes and grins at her daughter, who returns the grin twice as big. They both turn to the radio.
If you’ve been listening for a while I apologize for the repetitiveness. We usually try to keep things diverse here, but our door’s being battered down as I record this and I didn’t have much time to put a playlist together…
Her mother’s smile starts to stiffen.
But anyway, if you’re hearing this it means they didn’t break the equipment, so enjoy the loop for as long as the power lasts. Consider it the last mix tape from us to you before our big breakup. I’m sorry, Seattle. America. World. We knew it couldn’t last.
Julie’s mother hits the radio’s off button and sinks back into her chair. Her smile is gone with no trace.
“Mom?” Julie says softly.
Her mother doesn’t respond or react. Her damp eyes regard the ceiling, as blank as a corpse’s. Julie feels horrible things crawling in her belly. She gets out of the truck.
Her father is still securing the area, marching around with his gun in position, all procedure and tactics. Her mother has told her stories of when they were both young and wild. How they met on an airplane while in line for the bathroom, how he stole her away from her friends at the airport and showed her around Brooklyn, how they holed up in his tiny apartment for days and played music and drank wine and talked philosophy and causes and things they wanted to fight for. She knows he changed when the world changed. Adapted to survive. And there is a small part of her—a tender, bleeding organ that’s been battered and bruised for too many years—that’s starting to envy him.
She wanders out toward the trees that surround the rest stop like an infinite void. She sticks her earbuds in and clicks play on an iPod she found on a dead girl somewhere in Pennsylvania. There is a song on this dented, cracked device that she reserves for moments like these, when she needs a reminder that there’s still a world out there. That her family is not alone on a spinning ball of rock.
The song is called “For Hannah.” She has never heard of the band and the song isn’t especially good. What makes it her favorite is the date listed on the file. It’s the most recent date she’s seen on a song by at least two years. Everything else in her collection was released back when there were still remnants of a music industry, money to be made and goods to spend it on. She has come to believe that this song—a sappy little ballad strummed clumsily on an out of tune guitar—is the last song ever recorded in the daylight of civilization.
Can you hear me? it begins. Look up…
She stands at the edge of the forest, listening to the indefensible beauty of the singer’s flat, tuneless tenor, and whispers the melody into the shadows.
The tall man watches the girl. He stands absolutely still, staring at her through a gap in the bushes, and although she is so close he can see the freckles on her ears, she does not notice him.
What is she?
She is different from him. Smaller, softer, yes—he knows what a female is—but also something else. A fundamental contrast that has nothing to do with her physical shape. Something ephemeral that he can’t explain.
The brute knows what it is. The brute is ecstatic about it. Its cloud of hands swarms around the girl,
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