The Static According to White Noise Willy 

The seventh day of static was when the televisions began to cry. Not metaphorically—actual rivulets of blackened cathode rays oozing from their speakers like ectoplasmic ink. The Seers of Static collected this liquid in mason jars, insisting it held prophecies when shaken at 33.3 rpm. Their leader, White Noise Willy, dipped his fingers in the sludge and painted equations on the walls of the abandoned RadioShack that smelled of corrupted birthday candles.  

"The truth isn't in the signal," he whispered to his flock, "but in the spaces between the snow." His teeth had been replaced by tiny vacuum tubes that glowed when he lied (which was always).  

Meanwhile, on Channel 666, the mannequin anchor’s head now spun freely on its resin neck, completing a full 360-degree rotation every six minutes. Interns bet on when it would unscrew completely. Kafka (still partially fused with the faulty transmitter) murmured from inside the walls: "They're broadcasting the autopsy of the gods. Check the vertical hold."  

The FCC’s StaticVision™ goggles became mandatory by municipal decree. Citizens wandered the streets laughing at invisible canned laughter that followed their bad decisions. A barista at the Midnight Eclipse Café swore she saw her own death in the interference patterns of a malfunctioning toaster—a car crash set to a bossa nova version of Dies Irae.  

At the arsenic open mic night back on K. 666 Street, the necropoetic salon reached new heights when Grandpa Blackwood unveiled his pièce de résistance: a taxidermied slam poet whose abdominal cavity housed a tape recorder playing Sylvia Plath readings at half-speed, spliced into parts. The Victorian husbands (preserved in attitudes of perpetual polite applause) awarded first prize to a hemlock-ink haiku:  

Hanging by a thread  

The traffic light’s pendulum  

Ticks like a hanged clock  

The winner drank from the mug that read "Arsenic Is Just a Metaphor" and immediately joined the wives on the applause sofa—now a quartet of perfectly embalmed literary critics.  

Down the street at Count Orlok’s Lunar Lemonade Stand, business boomed after rebranding his insomnia-tear brew as "Existential Clarity." Patrons who gulped six doses reported:  

- Visions of their abandoned childhood dreams orbiting the moon like derelict satellites  

- The ability to hear the exact moment their parents stopped believing in them (usually a Wednesday)  

- An irrepressible urge to rewrite municipal zoning laws  

The health department shut it down when a customer turned inside-out while reciting the Pledge backward, but the stand reopened within hours—inspectors became devout converts after sampling the Schrödinger’s Flavor Limited Edition, which simultaneously did and did not contain elderberries.  

The trial that wasn’t (but also always is).  

In the skeletal corpse of the courthouse, the archivist-judge creaked his drawers in despair. The Durden twins had filed a 6,666-page brief written entirely in interpretive dance notation. The jury of broken clocks returned a unanimous "Maybe," while the stenographer transcribed proceedings using only punctuation marks—the resulting document looked like buckshot of semicolons and ellipses.  

Professor Loomis burst in screaming about "the grammar of hanging," insisting stoplights were actually commas in an unfinished sentence written by the city itself. He was subdued with a well-thrown Oxford dictionary and added to the record as "Exhibit Corpse."  

The Swing Manifesto  

In the park, the philosopher-swing had organized the playground equipment into a nihilist collective. The seesaw wrote political theory in chalk on one end while erasing it with the other. The carousel spun so fast it achieved brief moments of Zen nothingness, vomiting existential dread in rainbow colors.  

The children kept playing, now shouting Baudelaire verses during tag: "Run faster! The abyss is winking from the subway grates!"  

Their gum had evolved to "the sweet void of non-being" flavor—a marketing triumph for Wrigley Corporation’s experimental philosophy division.  

During the final broadcast at 6:66 AM, every television in the city tuned to a channel that didn’t exist. The static coagulated into a single frame: the mannequin anchor, now missing its porcelain face, revealing a void where the screen should be. From the infinite blackness came a sound like a vinyl record skipping on the word "ver—"  

Then, silence. Not just any silence—the kind that vibrates with potential energy. The silence of a pen hovering over a blank page. The silence of a hanged man’s last thought before the rope tightens.  

The stoplights swayed. The bodies spun. The city held its breath, waiting for the next word.  

Somewhere, a typewriter kept clacking—its keys punching holes in reality itself, each letter a tiny guillotine severing what is from what could be.  

And the red light remained.  

Always red.  

Always.  

By Carlos del Puente relatos