Original fiction · Chapter 1 of 2
The Tape Before Midnight
The community radio station was going off the air at midnight. At eleven fifteen, the producer handed me a cassette with my father's voice on it.
I had come to pick up a folding chair he'd left in the studio. He volunteered there on Thursday nights for seventeen years. After he died, the station kept his chair in the corner because it was the only one without wheels and guests preferred it. It was just a chair. I wanted it anyway.
The producer was named Vicky. She'd done the weather and the school closures when I was a kid. On the other side of the glass, somebody was reading the names of sponsors into a microphone. Vicky said she'd found the cassette in a box of old fundraiser tapes. It was marked with my father's name and the time of his Thursday show.
“Was he singing?” I asked. He sometimes forgot the microphone was on while a record was playing.
“It's a request,” she said. “He recorded the whole thing because he didn't think he'd get through it live.”
I used to sit in the control room after school. Dad let me press a button to turn on a light in the hallway. Every week he said I'd be allowed to introduce a record when I could get through the station call letters without stopping. I had a stutter then. I remember how badly I wanted to be able to say those letters once, quickly enough that nobody would notice.
One night I found a piece of paper on the desk with my name on it and a microphone waiting beside it. I walked out before Dad could ask. He didn't bring it up again.
Vicky told me to sit down. She put the cassette in a deck and pressed play. There was a long stretch of hiss and then my father saying good evening. He sounded younger than I was now.
“Tonight,” he said, “I want to play the record my son picked.” He stopped, cleared his throat and tried again.
Then he said something I had never heard him say in all the years he'd been alive.
“I used to stutter, too.”
