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.

I kept my son home from school that day. I told his teacher he was poorly. I did not do the school run, did not walk our usual route at our usual time, kept us both in, feeling insane, watching the clock.

There was an accident on my road that morning, at the junction, at the time, a car and a pedestrian, exactly as the day-old bulletin from a radio that broadcasts yesterday had said — except the pedestrian, thank God, was a stranger, shaken and hurt but alive, and not me, and not my son, because we were home, because a cranked charity-shop radio that runs a day behind had, for one morning, run a day ahead, and I had listened.

I keep it wound now. Every morning I wind it and I listen to yesterday's news, and I pray it stays yesterday, and I dread the morning it slips forward again and reports, day-dated and calm, something with my road in it, or my name, because I've learned that when this radio talks about tomorrow, it does it in the past tense, as though it's already happened, as though it's too late — and the one time it did, I only saved us by refusing to let it be.