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.

The attack broke. My body flooded back. And the instant I could move, the static cut out, dead silent, and the radio sat there dark and mesh faced and unplugged, cord coiled neatly behind the nightstand where it had been for a year.

It happened four more times over the next two months. Always the same. I wake frozen, the pressure sits on my chest, and the radio breathes static into the dark, and under the static there is that almost voice with my father's rhythm, and I lie there caught between terror and a longing so sharp it frightens me more than the paralysis does. Because part of me wants to hear it. Part of me lies there straining, thinking, if I could just hold still long enough, if I could just stop being afraid, the words would come clear and it would be him.

I finally took the radio to the garage. Put it in a box, taped the box, set it on a high shelf. The rational move. And that night I woke frozen, chest tight, room dark, and from the garage, muffled through two walls, I heard it. The hiss. Faint but unmistakable, patient, waiting for me to come closer.

I have not brought it back inside. I have not thrown it away either, and I have turned that failure over in my mind a hundred times. A braver person would smash it. A saner person would have thrown it out the first night. But it is my father's radio, and the voice in the static has his rhythm, and some nights when I wake and cannot move I hold my breath in the dark and I listen for it through the walls, and I cannot decide, I genuinely cannot decide, whether I am afraid it will speak clearly one night, or afraid that it never will.