Angels of the Airwaves by SeanMartin
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Description
"He said he found it in the barn," the Listener said quietly.
The Woman with the Shaved Head stared, incredulous. "And in all that time, he'd never heard anything else?"
The Listener shrugged.
He had indeed found it in the barn, back behind the trunk with his grandfather's army uniform and under a box of old postcards from small cities across the Midwest. It needed a few tubes and some resoldered wires, but when he took care of those small matters. then plugged it in and turned it on, the tiny light behind the frequency panel glowed with an anticipation to match his own.
They had a radio in the house, of course, permanently tuned to WXXY in Oklahoma City. The knob had broken off one night, and his grandfather, a proud supporter of Hank Williams and Tammy Wynette, sensibly decided that if it wasnt country-western music, there was no point in listening. Perhaps they played something else at school, but having left when he was fourteen, he had no real idea.
But now...
The station indicator slipped easily behind the glass, bringing in its wake buzzes and hisses and the occasional, fleeting sampling of... well, he wasnt sure what. It all sounded so.... new and different. Odd instruments playing in odd rhythms, to lyrics that made as much sense as the time granted them would allow. He was about to turn it off for the night...
... when suddenly he heard her. A voice like... an angel. Sure, he'd never heard angels singing, at least never outside the Friendly Avenue Baptist Church -- but if angels sang, they had to sound like this. He stood, entranced, for twenty minutes until the singing stopped and a voice came on to remind him he was listening to the Texaco broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. He wondered if Darrell at the Texaco station had anything to do with this and decided probably not. This wasnt Darrell's thing, not by a long shot.
After the commercials and some sort of game where a panel of guests had to answer what were to him unfathomable questions about composers and music hed never heard of, the "opera" continued, more glorious than ever. By now, he knew there was a story of some kind, that the woman he'd heard singing was in love with someone who was about to be killed. That didnt sound good.
But the music sure did...
"So the country boy discovered opera?" the Woman with the Shaved Head laughed. "How delightful!"
"Well, no, actually," the Listener responded, a bit ruefully. "See, thanks to that broadcast, he found himself caught between two worlds: the one that did the chores and went to school and listened to Tammy and Hank -- and the other one, that learned the difference between Mozart and Cerrubini before he was sixteen. But he had no one to share that experience with. As a result, he was never completely comfortable in either."
"Maybe he should have taken up the tango," the Woman replied.
"Perhaps so."
Comments (3)
A_Sunbeam
Splendid image - I like the lighting in particular
RedPhantom
Another great story. And I'm intregued by the reoccurane of the listener and the woman with the shaved head.
perpetualrevision
But doesn't the tango take two?! I, too, am intrigued by the return of these mysterious characters!