The Wind-Up Radio Broadcasts Yesterday

The wind-up radio was a two-coin charity-shop curiosity, the emergency kind you crank by hand, and I bought it as a novelty, a nice object for the kitchen shelf. It works — you wind it, it plays — but it only ever receives one station, and that station, it took me a while and a lot of disbelief to accept, broadcasts yesterday.

Not old recordings. Not a nostalgia channel. Yesterday's live radio — news bulletins, weather, traffic, the ordinary furniture of a broadcast day — but dated, always and specifically, to the day before. I'd wind it in the morning and hear 'news at six' with yesterday evening's date and yesterday's headlines, delivered as current. I confirmed it against my phone, against the papers, obsessively, unwilling to believe it: the radio reports, as live, the news of the previous day, every day, a broadcast running exactly twenty-four hours behind the world, and receivable on no other set in the house, only this cranked little box from the charity shop.

For weeks it was a harmless marvel, a party trick I didn't dare show at parties. Yesterday's football scores, yesterday's weather, all faithfully a day late, all useless, all impossible. I came to enjoy it, a small private strangeness on my kitchen shelf.

Then it stopped being useless. One morning I wound it and the local bulletin — yesterday-dated, as always — reported, among the day-old news, a road traffic accident. On my road. My specific road, named, a serious collision at the junction I cross twice a day on the school run, at a time of morning I would ordinarily be there, involving, the day-old bulletin said, a vehicle and a pedestrian.

Except it hadn't happened. Not yet. The radio was dated yesterday, but the accident it calmly reported as day-old news had not occurred — I checked every source, phoned to be sure I wasn't losing my mind; there had been no accident on my road. The radio that always runs a day behind was, that morning, for the first time, running a day AHEAD, reporting as yesterday's news a thing that belonged to a tomorrow that hadn't come — or reporting today's future in the voice of the settled past, I genuinely cannot tell you which, only that it named my road and a pedestrian and a time I'm usually walking it.