Zach Edson teaches science to middle schoolers in Providence, Rhode Island. He is procrastinating from getting a novel published by writing short stories. His first short story was published in Twenty-two Twenty-eight and he writes more at thestrangesttimes.substack.com.
A Signal Echoing Through Radiospace
by Zach Edson
I press the button to open the garage, but the door refuses to budge. It’s pouring rain. Tonight we went on our sixth date. Thomas took me out to my favorite bar. We watched the Chiefs give away the game to the Broncos. When the bar got loud after that, he said we should watch the Packers game somewhere else. I don’t know why I suggested my house. I thought I was avoiding this.
I press the opener button again, harder.
“I don’t really use the second door anymore,” I say. “It could be dead.” This house embarrasses me. There are four bedrooms, two garages, a finished basement. All for only me, these days. It is identical to its thousand neighbors in every way but one: my late husband did the electrical work. When I push the button a third time, the door starts to rise. Thomas proceeds, but before his car can get halfway in, the door starts to drop again. He reverses abruptly and I jam the button again and again, but the door persists downward. Rain pelts the windshield. He decides not to come inside. “The Packers are going to lose anyway,” he says. “Nice house. Maybe next time I’ll get to see inside.”
I have to go in the front door. The rain pummels me as I fish my keys out of my purse.
All night, the door opens and shuts, as though the many angry times I pressed the button are echoing through radiospace. The master bedroom is right above the garage so the opening and closing keeps me up. A repair guy comes over the next day. After looking at it for five minutes, he says it seems fine to him and changes the batteries in the opener.
“I could have done that,” Thomas says when I catch him at work that afternoon. “Has it been trouble again today?”
“No.”
“Almost sliced my car in half,” he says.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“No,” he laughs. “I’m just joking.” I am not used to Thomas’s easygoing nature. “I was thinking Antonio’s tonight. I can bring it over.”
“All right.”
“You sound so excited.”
“Can we go to your house tonight?”
I have to Uber there. Now neither garage door opens. I can’t get my car out. Thomas drives me home, kisses me, wants to come inside, I can tell, but not tonight, I tell him. I am exhausted.
“Don’t look at me like a puppy-dog,” I say.
“I wasn’t looking at you at all,” he smiles.
I should have learned from last night and gotten my keys out of my purse before I reached the front door, in the pummeling rain, but I have never been considered especially smart. Potential, I heard a lot. I heard I had a lot of it until I met that loser Eric Anderson. Then people stopped believing in me. When I get in, dragging a lake in with me to the front room floor, the lights won’t flip on. “Oh Eric,” I sigh to the dark.
He must not be happy to see me moving on.
My husband died eighteen months ago. Twenty-three months ago, a woman texting and driving robbed my husband of his ability to walk, to move his arms, or to speak. Over the five months between those events, he stopped being the person I loved. He stopped eating, stopped drinking, stopped breathing on his own. He communicated by tapping his fingers for a while, then gave up. Thomas is the first man I’ve been interested in since Eric died.
An electrician comes the next day to look at the garage. He used to work with Eric. I have met him a time or two. We gave him a ride home after an IBEW meeting or something. “I was real sorry about Eric,” he says as he pokes at the wiring. Eric and I built this house. He wired it himself. “How long ago now was it?”
I signed the consent to take him off life support eighteen months ago. “Summer of ‘23,” I say. “Can you fix it? This is the second half-day in a row I’ve had to take over this.”
“Sorry,” he says. “Did you try changing the batteries in the opener?”
Eric’s mother and father come over that evening. They have to park in the driveway, drag another lake inside with them. No Thomas. Bandit, the dog, still screams with delight when they come. Roxie, the reclusive black cat Eric picked up one Thanksgiving, emerges from wherever she was hiding when she hears them. Their visits have gotten less and less frequent. This is the first in four months. They bought this house. They gifted it to Eric in a trust. Eric named me the beneficiary. It is my house, but it has always felt like theirs.
“Are you seeing anyone?” Linda asks once the pasta is served and Bob has said grace. This is the woman who, at my own wedding reception, asked if I was still on the pill. I was. I still am.
“No.”
“It’s an awfully big house to have all to yourself.”
“I have Roxie and Bandit.”
“Oh, I miss Skittles. The three musketeers.”
I had to put Skittles down, too. Skittles was Eric’s cat since high school.
“Please don’t be a stranger,” Linda says when it’s time to leave. Bob grunts cheerfully. “I mean that, honey,” she adds. The porch light won’t come on. I wouldn’t think anything of it if I didn’t know exactly what it means.
“I know,” I say.
“And you’re in our prayers.”
“Thanks for cooking.”
“Every night when we say grace.”
They have to fumble in the dark to their car. I try to light their way with the flashlight on my phone. The dishwasher leaks all over the floor after I go to bed. I slip in it the next morning. It is Saturday. The rain has finally let up. I call Thomas.
“Hey handsome,” I say when he picks up.
“Hello gorgeous,” he says. He is not yet trained to the tone of my voice.
“Want to come over?”
“When?”
“Soon.”
“After my jog?”
“Ew. You jog?”
“It’s good for you.”
“Bring coffee. And a mop.” My charm is one of my finer characteristics. “Do you know how to fix a dishwasher?” I ask when he arrives, requested mop in hand. He parked on the street.
“No,” he laughs. “But I can file your taxes.”
Eric could have fixed it, I think. Which is exactly why it broke. It is the same with the front lights and the garage.
After we get the mess cleaned up, Thomas shows me how to disconnect the garage door from the motor. It slides up and he beams at me with triumph. Then my car won’t start. He takes me out ice skating. “I haven’t skated in years,” I say.
“I can’t believe I used to play hockey. I’m just hoping I don’t tear my ACL again.”
“Ew, were you a jock?”
“A jock? What are you, a high schooler?”
“People can still be jocks not in high school.”
“What were you if I was a jock?”
“Eric and I were the kids doing whippits under the bleachers.”
We are skating. Thomas is holding my hand. To drag me down with him when he falls, he says. He doesn’t reply right away. He says, “You haven’t told me much about your husband. What did he do?”
“He died,” I say.
“I know that,” Thomas laughs. My humor makes him uneasy.
“He drank a lot, too,” I say. “He was an electrician. He was a good man. A sarcastic jerk. A metalhead. And a stoner. We both were. He had even more tattoos than me.” I have a full sleeve on my left arm, a cross behind my left ear, and a phoenix on my right leg, from the hip to the knee. I want to get something on my sternum soon. Haven’t decided what. Thomas has none from what I have seen.
“He and I have a lot in common,” Thomas says, wobbling on the ice. He went to college. When we go out to restaurants he drinks only one glass of wine. He gets his hair trimmed every other Thursday. He reads the paper.
“Exactly my point,” I say.
We go to dinner. We have a nice time. Thomas drops me off. What was this, our eighth date? Am I too old to count dates? Thomas is right, I’m not a high schooler anymore. But we make out a while in the driveway like we both still are. We’re out there so long the motion-detecting light over the garage door shuts off. “Good night,” I say after I muster the will to push myself off of him and slide back into the passenger seat. I am too old to be making out in a car.
“Good night,” he says. He smiles. But in that way that guys do.
“I’m just not ready yet,” blurts out of me. “That makes me sound like a teenager—”
“No, no,” he forces out brightly. “It’s fine.”
“And I think my house is haunted.”
“You what?” He laughs. Not the easygoing laugh but the uncertain one.
“Because of the…” I say, but his reaction stings. “Forget it.” I shove the door open. I get out and shut it harder than I mean to. The motion lights don’t come back on as I cross the driveway and go up to the front door. Again, I have to fumble for my keys in the dark. “Damnit, Eric,” I hiss.
I think I need some space. I do not answer Thomas on Sunday when he writes to say, “hi there,” but it does make me smile—and that makes me wish I had never read it. Eric’s death melted me down and as time passed I hardened into this new shape. Giggling at texts, making out in cars. I make myself cringe. That’s never what Eric and I had. Our first date was me beating his girlfriend up. She was cheating on him.
But was it Eric’s death that made me like this? I’ve been pacing for half an hour since Thomas texted me. Bandit has been tapping along in my shadow. On one wall Eric mounted a sign that reads in florid cursive, The Andersons, est. 2018. It was a wedding gift. He hung it up sarcastically. But it still looms over the kitchen. In the living room looms another sarcastically-hung sign that says Live Laugh Love. But it has hung there for six years.
I resent this house in my darker moments. It is too big. It was always too big. What were we thinking, buying a house with four bedrooms? We never wanted kids. I barely use those rooms. It wasn’t our money, that’s why. It was Bob and Linda trying to buy back Eric’s love. And why did we buy a place in the burbs, a cookie cutter place in the middle of a thousand houses that look exactly like this? Because that’s what you do. You buy a house and you die in it. Getting married killed our marriage, not Tonya Williams’s iPhone and her Escalade. Buying this house killed Eric.
I’ve been clenching my phone. I notice that only because I jump when it vibrates. “I had a great weekend with you. I hope you’re okay today.” And then a ghost emoji. I squeeze my phone and then fling it onto the kitchen counter. I don’t want to feel excited. I don’t want to feel happy. I don’t even want to feel annoyed that Thomas is teasing me. I want to suffocate the butterflies boiling in my belly.
Monday morning my phone is dead, which is especially bad because I need to call an Uber to bring me to work. My car still won’t start. I hardly even used my phone yesterday. The battery should be fine, even though I didn’t plug it in. The cord will not work. I dig out an old one from the junk drawer and try that. Doesn’t work. I try four different outlets even though I know I am just denying reality. It’s like Eric somehow fried the battery in this thing, like he did to my car.
I should have scheduled an Uber. As though I knew Eric was going to do something like this. What is he even doing? He is dead. I pace the house again and Roxie and Bandit study me from the couch. I go out to the garage and start my car, just for fun. It doesn’t even try to come alive. How do you call a tow truck without a phone? I pace. Work is going to be pissed. My laptop. I go back into the house. It’s where I left it on the sofa last night. Not plugged in.
It’s an aluminum brick, ten years old. I hardly use it. The battery is crap. But thank god it lights up. Once it finally connects to the internet I get to my email, mistyping my password twice, my heart beating faster, and fire off an email to—to who? Thomas? I hit send and the computer dies. I don’t know if it went through.
The Andersons plopped a house down on a plot of suburban hell the month after we got married. The roads here give me vertigo. Spiraling lanes of gray and blue and green houses, either the A-model or the B-model or the C, twist and churn like water in a sink. Most roads, I am sure, don’t lead anywhere except back to each other. I can’t walk anywhere. I don’t know any of my neighbors. They all have kids. They all have these normal, boring jobs and everyday names. They’re accountants like Thomas and they drive Honda Civics like Thomas because Civics get good gas mileage. I go back to the garage. Eric’s old bike is mounted on one wall. Eric skateboarded his whole life. When we got married, Linda told him he needed a grown-up toy, he was going to kill himself on a skateboard. He hated this thing. A few of his skateboards are still mounted on the garage wall. I will never be able to touch those.
I have to wrestle the bike off the hook Eric fashioned for it. It’s like the hook holds the disdain for the bike in Eric’s place. It lets go of the wheel roughly. As I drag the bike into the house, one foot pedal scrapes against my Jeep’s bumper. Up the three stairs, into the mudroom. The handlebars bang into the doorframes but it goes through. Roxie and Bandit hop and woof nervously, tails wagging.
As I’m rolling the bike into the kitchen, the TV which Eric mounted on the wall screams to life. The Morning Show, a dazzle of fake voices and pretend cheer. I flinch. Bandit barks at the screen.
I don’t bother trying to shut off the TV. I have learned my powerlessness. I wheel the bike over to the front door. I smear the cobwebs with a shirt sleeve. The living room TV clacks on too. A different New York morning show, same droning voices, volume on max. I think I can hear the bathroom radio going upstairs. The noises clash together. Bandit barks. There’s a bunch of spider crap or something all over the bike handles. I go back to the kitchen for a paper towel and notice the furious red disks burning on the electric stovetop.
“What are you trying to do, Eric?” I holler over everything. “Burn the house down?” I try to shut off the stove but the nobs are already at zero. The chaos gets louder. The dishwasher fires up. The microwave spins and hums. The insinkerator blades spin. Roxie claws at my leg. Bandit is barking from thing to thing. “Are you jealous?” I cry. “Is that it?” I say it so loud my voice thrashes. It doesn’t shut him up. He is making so much noise I can’t think straight. Smoke from something burning stirs me to action. I stuff my laptop, my phone, and their cords my backpack. I stuff Roxie into the bag. I fling open the front door and Bandit bursts out into the quiet. I crash the bike into the front door’s frame trying to get it out. I throw it down the steps and it flops onto the front yard. I’m just going to go. It doesn’t matter where. Bandit is bounding around the yard, barking and howling, as relieved as me to get outside. I can’t see straight.
Somebody is crossing the lawn and Bandit is greeting them. I can’t look up and see who. My head is splitting. The smoke made me dizzy. I wobble to a seat on the stoop. Eric used to get migraines. Were they like this? I used to get so annoyed with him for these. I can hear the sunlight screeching.
“Kait,” Thomas says. But I didn’t email Thomas. I am clinging to the iron railing, trying very hard not to puke on his shoes. I haven’t talked to him since Saturday night. “What’s all that noise in there?”
“Please just shut the door.”
“What’s going on?”
“Shut the door, Tom,” I say.
“There’s smoke in there.”
I don’t answer him. He must go inside and find a fire extinguisher. I think I hear it under all the noise. Eric always insisted on keeping one in the kitchen.
The madness gets a little quieter. Thomas comes back out, shuts the door. He says some things about a small kitchen fire. It sounds like it is out now. I can barely listen. I am squeezing the sides of my head with my forearms, crushing my forearms between my knees, bent over, rocking side to side. I know I look like a lunatic. I can hear Bandit still bounding in circles, barking and barking. “Get the dog,” I mumble. He’s already up, trying to corral a dog that barely knows what sit means.
Eventually Bandit tires of his game and approaches me. “Got him,” Thomas says.
“Thanks.” I’m still curled up. I’ll stay this way until the world stops spinning. “Why are you here?” The noises from inside are still straining through the front door. My head throbs, but I can’t imagine moving any further away from the house.
“I didn’t see you at work this morning,” he says. I do HR for the company. I used to make bombs out of aluminum foil and toilet bowl cleaner. “I called and it went straight to voicemail. I figured maybe your car was still dead.”
After a while, when I don’t say anything, he says, “So your house is haunted?”
“Yeah,” I croak. “I think it’s Eric’s ghost.”
“Makes sense.”
“What do you mean?” All of my speaking is done with my head pressed between my knees to keep it in place. “How could that possibly make sense?”
“Well, who else’s ghost would bother haunting you?” Then he says, “Did Eric die here?”
“I took him home. I read somewhere it would help the cats grieve.”
“I didn’t know you had cats, too.”
“One’s in the bag. I killed the other one. He was old.”
Thomas is quiet again for a bit.
“It’s weird,” I say. I’m able to squint up at Thomas. “Killing the cat felt worse than killing Eric. Eric wanted to go, by the end. I knew him my whole life. He could barely stand getting a cold. He would get these migraines—we blew holes in our heads with all the shit we did as kids—and go to work with them. I want to throw up. I can barely see. And he went to work like this. So I knew he had to really be suffering. In the end he was ready to go. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t smile. He couldn’t wipe his own ass. He couldn’t have told me that but I knew he wanted to go.
“Skittles was an ordinary, old cat. I don’t think he was suffering especially. He was just… old. He had a tumor. The vet said they could operate, but it would be like ten grand, he’d be miserable, and it might not extend his life all that long anyway.
“I tried to explain it to him. But he was a cat. Eric, I knew I didn’t have to explain myself to Eric. But his cat, man. Eric loved that cat.”
“You feel guilty.”
“I guess.”
“What would Eric have done?” Thomas asks.
“He would have fought like hell for that cat. And I just killed her. He hates me for that.”
“You’re right. He might,” another voice says. Takes me a moment to recognize Linda. I heard, I realize, a car pull up, a door shut. I realize I heard Bandit issue one woof. I emailed her. Help, I said. It went through. She’s standing on the lawn, ten feet in front of us. Bandit sits on her feet. The sun is so bright I can’t look up into her face, but I can feel the weight of her watery eyes. “But Eric was wrong about a lot in his life. Never about you, though, dear.”
*
It takes only two weeks to sell the house. People love houses with zero personality. On the day of closing, I meet Bobbi-Ann, my realtor, out on the curb. She’s unbearable. She never stops smiling. She’s Linda’s racquetball friend and she helped us buy the house.
“I was so sorry about Eric,” she’s said to me four different times. She even smiles when she says it.
“Yep,” I say every time. She says it again as we’re standing on the curb outside the house. The SOLD sign thuds in the breeze.
I got my car towed. Thomas boxed up my stuff. He says the ghost has calmed down. Movers came two days ago and cleaned it out. It was nice of Linda to supervise them for me. I haven’t set foot inside the house since that day.
“You know, you really don’t have to be here,” she smiles. “It’s not… normal for you to be here.”
“I have to do something real quick. You got the key?” I ask Bobbi-Ann. She has started going on about something. She is always going on about something. I stick my hand out for it.
She looks at me skeptically. “It’s unlocked. The buyers will be here any minute.”
“Don’t care.” I cross the lawn, go up the three polished granite steps. I open the door. The smell of the house—the must of pets and smoke and me and Eric—wafts out into the air. I take only one step inside. “I’ll miss you,” I say. My voice echoes off all the bare walls and the vacant floors. “I’ll miss you, but don’t follow me, all right? You gotta let me go live a life. It’s not fair you didn’t get all of yours. But don’t take mine with you.”
On the hook by the door, beside the spare sets of keys—one that used to be Eric’s, one that was Bob and Linda’s—hangs the garage door opener. I pocket it and leave the house. I cross the lawn again, but not back toward Bobbi-Ann. I head toward my car. A truck is coming down the lane. Its bed is stuffed with cardboard moving boxes. This is their house now, but I can’t help myself—I mash the opener button in my pocket. The garage door remains unmoved. The signals float off toward somewhere else.
Copyright 2025 by Zach Edson