The Blue Static on Channel 13

I never planned to tell anyone about the visions. They started, I think, with the radio in my grandpa’s barn—a battered old Philco that crackled with weather reports from thirty years ago. I was eleven, and the summer before middle school, I spent hours out there, pretending to fix the tractor while the heat shimmered off the tin roof. Then one afternoon, I heard a voice that wasn’t static. It said, plain as anything, ‘The bridge is out, and the train’ll be here at four-ten.’ I turned the dial, but the voice repeated, ‘Bridge out, four-ten.’ I laughed it off, wrote it in my notebook as a ‘weird occurrence.’ But that evening, my mother got a call: my father’s cousin, a man I’d never met, had driven his truck off the river bridge near Granite Falls. He died at 4:10 PM, just as the voice said.

I didn’t tell anyone. I thought it was a fluke, a sick coincidence. But then the dreams started—vivid, waking nightmares where I’d see a woman in a yellow raincoat standing at the end of a gravel road, and the next week, a neighbor’s daughter went missing. They found her coat by the quarry, but never her. The feeling you describe—the one where you know before it happens—it became a constant hum in my bones. My grandpa called me ‘the marked one,’ but he was superstitious, always sewing salt into his jacket pockets. My mother started leaving me with the TV on at night, thinking it would drown out the quiet hum, but that only made it worse.

The worst part wasn’t the deaths. It was the things I saw in the spaces between. The winter I turned fourteen, I started seeing him—a tall, hollow man with skin like old newspaper, who stood in the corner of every room, always just out of my peripheral vision. He never moved, but every time I blinked, he was a foot closer. I told my therapist, and he gave me pills for ‘anxiety.’ The pills made the hum fainter, but they also made the hollow man clearer. He started to whisper—not words, just a sound like a hundred flies buzzing under the floorboards. I stopped taking the pills after I woke up on my ceiling, staring down at my own body, which was screaming.

This went on for years. I learned to live with it, to smile when I predicted a fender bender, to bite my tongue when I saw the cancer in my neighbor’s chest before the doctor did. The only thing that kept me sane was the storm cellar—a concrete hole under the house where nothing and no one ever came. I’d hide there with a flashlight and a old dog-eared copy of *The Call of the Wild*, and I’d breathe until the hum stopped. But one night, the hollow man found me there. He didn’t walk; he unfolded, like a shadow made of origami. He opened his mouth, and inside was not a tongue, but a page from a newspaper, dated 1987, with a headline: ‘Local Boy Drowns in Mill Pond.’ I didn’t know that story. But I knew, with a sickening certainty, that he was showing me my own death.

I didn’t tell anyone about that night. I couldn’t. My voice had gone dry as dust. I started carrying a pocket mirror—I’d heard that sometimes, you can see the truth if you look backwards. It didn’t help. The hollow man just multiplied. Soon there were three, then six, then a dozen, all standing in a ring around my bed, all with their mouths open, all with different dates on their pages: ‘Teen Dies in Car Wreck,’ ‘Girl Falls From Roof,’ ‘House Fire Claims Two.’ I started to think I was going mad, but then I realized—the dates were all tomorrow. I woke up the next day with a bruise on my chest shaped like a handprint, and a new whisper in my head: ‘You are the antenna, not the receiver.’

That changed everything. I wasn’t the chosen one; I was the conduit. The visions weren’t mine—they were coming from somewhere else, something that used me as a kind of living radio. The hollow man was just a symptom, a static outline of the true thing that was trying to break through. I started toying with it, testing my limits. I’d close my eyes and try to listen to the hum, to trace it back to its source. It led me to the old TV in the garage, the one with the rabbit ears and the red plastic casing. I hadn’t turned it on in years. When I did, the screen filled with blue static, and in the static, I saw a shape—a huge, angular thing with too many limbs and a face like a spilled inkblot. It was trying to climb out of the static, limb by limb, and I realized it had been using me to feel its way into our world. Every death I predicted, every accident I foresaw—I was laying a brick on its path.

I know now that the stories you want me to tell are not about my gift or my curse. They are about the static between channels, the hollow things in the corners of the room, the way the air turns cold when you’re about to see something you shouldn’t. My name is Elias, and I’m the one who turns the dial. I’ve written it all down in a ledger, page after page of dates and names and the feeling of wet soil. But the last few pages are blank. They’re waiting for the final broadcast. I don’t know when it will happen, but I know that when it does, I won’t be writing it. I’ll be in the static, and you’ll be the one who receives the signal. So if you’re reading this, turn off your TV. Don’t touch your radio. And if you see blue static where there should be snow, don’t watch it. Just run.

I decided to share this because the hollow man has started counting down. I hear it now, every night, a soft ticking from the back of my skull. I don’t have much time. But I wanted someone to know—out of all the hundreds of visions, the only thing I’ve ever truly foreseen is this: you, reading these words, and then the static, and then nothing. Maybe that’s why I wrote it. Maybe it’s the only way to break the signal. Or maybe I’m just like my grandpa, sewing salt into my pockets and hoping it will keep the dead away. Either way, I’ve said my piece. The rest is up to the weather.

If you’re reading this in a room that’s slightly too cold, and you hear a low hum, and the light flickers just once, don’t look behind you. Don’t turn around. Just close your eyes and count to ten. If you make it to ten, it was just your imagination. If you only get to three, well, then you’ve already seen him—the tall, hollow man, with your own date printed in his mouth. And you’ll know, just like I did, that some stories were never meant to be told. They’re meant to be lived, and then forgotten, and then blacked out like a faded photograph. But I couldn’t forget. I never could. And now, neither can you.