Show Notes
A lonely late-night talk show host at a 50,000-watt "blow torch" station goes from no callers to every line lit up, with every caller sharing the same impossible story. These listeners are from across town, but much father away. Dead Air is an original New Tales Told story about connection, loneliness, and the signals that resonate out into the void.
Authors Note: Dead Air is a very loosely autobiographical story. In the mid-1980s, I worked the overnight talk-show shift on the 50,000-watt clear-channel “Voice of the Rockies,” 85 KOA in Denver. Some nights, I’d find myself talking into the void, waiting for a caller — and every now and then, a voice would drift in from halfway around the world. If you enjoyed this original New Tales Told story, please share it with a friend and leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. (If you didn’t… maybe just forget you listened. I’m no O. Henry or Hemingway — just trying to entertain.)
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from New Tales Told – Original Short Stories
He has four words. He's had them for forty-two years. He's said them in the car, he's said them in the shower with the water running, and he still can't get the stress to fall where it belongs.
Dr. Nathan Cole measures water for a living. It's quiet work, gauges and spreadsheets, the slow arithmetic of things that don't change much. Then a reservoir gains four inches overnight with no rain, no inflow, no explanation, and gives them back by morning. Everyone blames the sensor. The sensor is fine. What follows is the worst thing a careful man can discover, which is that he's been measuring the right thing all along.
There is a job nobody warns you about. After the dying comes the paperwork, the hold music, the strangers in call centers who need proof that she is gone.
Winter, 1906. A clerk who speaks to no one from Saturday to Monday buys a mahogany graphophone for far less than it’s worth. The widow selling it keeps her eyes on the snow. Her husband, she says, liked to keep his own voice.
Nobody in New Orleans had ever made Bernard de Marigny look foolish in public. He was rich past counting, small as a foil, and very likely the most dangerous man in Louisiana with a pistol in his hand. Then a blacksmith from a far parish, seven feet of him and slow to speak, said something true on the floor of the legislature, and the whole chamber laughed.