The static started a week after the divorce papers arrived. Not on the TV, not on the radio, but in my head. It was a low, abrasive hiss, like the sound of an old television set left on a dead channel, that would bloom behind my eyes whenever the house was too quiet. My ex-wife, Sarah, had taken the kids, and the silence was now an empty, cavernous thing.The first night, I blamed my tinnitus. The second, a bad migraine. By the fifth, I was convinced my house was haunted. I walked through the darkened rooms, snapping on lights, half-expecting to see a shadowy figure coalesce in the corners. Nothing. Just the slow, creeping anxiety and the ever-present static.One evening, I was in the garage, sorting through boxes of Sarah's old things.
The static grew louder, not just a hiss now, but a low, guttural murmur beneath it. I froze, holding a box of her childhood photos. The murmuring sharpened into a whisper, though the words were a garble of white noise. It seemed to come from the box in my hands.Static is a form of communication, a voice, not my own, murmured in the back of my mind. It is the sound of things that were never meant to be heard.I dropped the box, scattering the photos across the concrete floor. The whispering stopped. My heart hammered against my ribs. Had I imagined it? The isolation was getting to me, that much was clear. I was starting to lose my grip.The next day, I found a strange note on the kitchen counter. "It's about what you don't know," it read, written in a shaky, unfamiliar hand. Sarah had the kids. No one else had a key. The hair on my arms stood on end. I tore it up, threw it away, and told myself it was another symptom of my fatigue.Later that day, while showering, the static returned with a vengeance. It vibrated through the tiles, through the water, through my very bones. The whispers were clearer now. They spoke in a language of hisses and clicks, but I could somehow understand.You see the skin, the meat, the bone…but what came before? What came before the skin?
I turned off the shower, trembling. The static faded, but the words echoed in my head. My reflection in the foggy mirror seemed to ripple, the contours of my face shifting, flattening. For a moment, I saw a dozen indistinct, featureless faces swimming beneath my own, struggling to surface. I wiped the mirror furiously, and the hallucination was gone.The horror intensified when I noticed the small, almost imperceptible changes. My reflection would blink a half-second after I did. A shadow in my peripheral vision would twitch and un-twitch just as I turned my head. My toothbrush was always damp, even when I hadn't used it. I felt like I was living with a phantom, or worse, that I was the phantom, and something else was wearing my skin.
I decided to leave. I packed a bag, grabbed my keys, and headed for the door. But as I reached for the handle, the static erupted louder than ever before. This time, it wasn't just a sound. It was an image.Through the white noise in my mind, I saw a snapshot, an image from Sarah's old photo box that I had dropped. It was a picture of my first son, taken shortly after he was born. But in the static image, his face was blurred, a featureless, pale oval, and behind him, in the baby carrier, a cluster of impossible eyes stared back from the darkness.We were there first, the clicks and hisses screamed in my head. Before the skin. We were the static.I collapsed to the floor, my hands clapped over my ears. The static was inside me, behind my eyes, at the back of my throat. It was not a haunting. It was a revelation. I was the medium, the vessel. The sound was not in my house—it was in my mind, and it had been there all along.
The final, horrifying thought, the one that broke my sanity entirely, was this: The whispers never spoke of Sarah. They never spoke of the kids. They spoke only of what was here, what had always been here, trapped in the frequency of a reality that wasn't quite right. And as I heard the faint, metallic click of the front door opening, I knew that whatever had been inhabiting the static was now ready to wear a different kind of skin.This time, someone else's.