The Radio Turned Itself to Static Every Time I Woke Unable to Move

I inherited my father's bedside radio when he passed, a heavy old thing with a dial and a mesh speaker, and I kept it more out of sentiment than use. It sat on my nightstand unplugged for the better part of a year. I want you to hold onto that word. Unplugged.

The paralysis started that spring. I would wake in the dark, sometime past three, and find I could not move a muscle. My arms would not lift, my head would not turn, my mouth would not open. There was pressure on my chest and a certainty, thick and animal, that I was not alone in the room. I had read enough to know the name for it. Sleep paralysis. The body still locked in the paralysis of dreaming while the mind wakes into the room. I told myself that, lying there, over and over, like a prayer. It is a known thing. It passes. It is only your brain.

But the first night it happened badly, the night I truly could not talk myself down, the radio came on.

Not music. Static. A low even hiss filling the dark, coming from the mesh speaker of a radio that was not plugged into anything. I could not turn my head to look at it but I did not need to. I knew that sound and I knew where it came from and I knew it should have been impossible. It hissed and hissed while I lay pinned and breathless, and the longer it went the more I felt that the static was not empty, that there was something underneath it, a shape in the noise, a voice pitched just too low or just too far to resolve into words.

I strained to hear it. That is the part I am ashamed of. Frozen and terrified, unable to move, and instead of praying for it to stop I found myself leaning my whole attention into the hiss, trying to catch what was buried in it, because it sounded, God help me, it sounded like my father's cadence. Not his words. His rhythm. The way he used to talk low to himself doing crosswords at that same nightstand.