Inktober 2020

The 4th day of the Inktober repurposed as a writing challenge (word of the day: “Radio”). A representation of the literary chaos of the manic episode, but also of the creativity that emerges from it.

That was it. His work was finished. For days he had been striving to restore this vintage radio he had found in a storage room, one that nobody wanted. He had a soft spot for electronics. Repairing the little device had been a real challenge. With a bit of equipment salvaged here and there, he would save it from oblivion. It was done. The moment had come. He plugged in the radio, pressed the power button and… nothing. He turned up the volume. Still nothing. Not discouraged, he tapped it lightly, naively, hoping to hear some sort of sound. But nothing. He took it apart, checked that everything was in working order, then put it back together and switched it on again. Still nothing. After spending a few hours trying to figure out where the problem could be coming from—and annoyed at hearing his wife shout his name every half hour to tell him to stop playing and go do the groceries—he gave up. Slightly frustrated, he climbed the stairs to leave the basement, and that’s when he heard a strange sound. A faint, surprising beep that could only have come from the radio he must have finally managed to repair. He was a genius! He ran back down the stairs, forgetting about his wife, and sat beside the device. The beep stopped as he arrived. Excited, he adjusted the frequency until he heard a new sound. Another beep. He changed the frequency again. The same thing. He repeated the action several times. Always the same beep. Sometimes short, sometimes long. That’s when he had a revelation. If the radio wasn’t speaking, it was trying to tell him something—perhaps a story. He shouted his discovery to his wife, who ignored his yelling, nearly exhausted by the daily and completely useless discoveries of her husband. He, however, was focused. Because what the radio was emitting was Morse code. He knew it. Armed with an unsharpened pencil, he wrote down each sound on a small torn piece of paper and then searched for one of his books to help him translate the Morse. With some difficulty, he eventually deciphered it all: “Do not believe what they say. The Earth is flat.” He opened his eyes wide, unable to believe what he had just read, because it confirmed everything he already knew. He had proof. The radio’s beeps could not lie. Aristotle had better watch out. After that, he decided to do what no man had ever done before: he built a rocket. In the hope of photographing the flat Earth and exposing the lies of those satanic NASA researchers. A few months passed; the first tests failed. Years went by, and he finally felt ready to take off and reveal the truth to the entire world. He even filmed the event that would become global. He climbed into the rocket and started the engines. The excitement was rising. A radio had shown him the way, had guided him. It was the big day. After a ten-second countdown, watched by his wife from about a hundred meters away—bewildered and ready to divorce this madman—he launched the rocket. And crashed in a small explosion. Some say the radio is still emitting beeps, years later.