Oriole's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

By the third hour, Oriole has run out of albums worth playing. She switches to talk radio mode and realizes she can say anything she wants. No one's listening anyway. She leans into the microphone and starts with a knock-knock joke her bunkmate used to tell. The silence that follows is so complete she can hear sand shifting against the tower's rusted frame outside. She tries another joke. Then a terrible pun about dirt that got groans back in the bunker kitchen. Nothing. The emptiness swallows every word, and she feels the weight of it settle in her chest like concrete dust. But silence has never been her style, and neither has quitting. She uncaps the bottle of nail polish she found earlier on a shelf, bright red and somehow still liquid after all this time. The chemical smell fills the room as she paints her nails between broadcasts, one hand holding the microphone while the other dries. She starts narrating what she's doing. Describes the color. Makes up a fake commercial for it. Switches to weather reports for a world with no one left to warn about sandstorms. She does celebrity impressions no one will recognize, reads ingredient lists off old food packaging like poetry, delivers plot summaries of movies she half-remembers. Her voice fills the room and spills out through cracks in the walls, past the mutant still sitting outside, out into the desert where the tower stands like a rust-covered beacon broadcasting absolutely nothing important to absolutely no one. The mutant shifts position when she starts singing off-key, but it doesn't leave. She takes that as encouragement. She talks about the bunker, about the kitchen where everyone complained about her questions but saved her the good portions anyway. She names people. Describes their faces. Tells their stupid jokes and their worst habits and the songs they hummed while doing dishes. The carved names on the concrete wall behind her are permanent, but this is different. This is their voices moving through air, traveling as far as the signal will carry. Someone passing through might hear a fragment. A word. A laugh. Proof that these people were loud and messy and real. When dawn light finally cracks through the high window, Oriole's voice is raw and her nails are dry and glossy red. The mutant outside stands and stretches, then lumbers away across the sand. She watches it go and realizes she's been talking for six straight hours. Her throat aches. Her hand cramps from holding the microphone. But she's not done. She queues up another album, leans back into the microphone, and keeps going. The world might be dead, but she's going to make it listen to every single thing she has to say. No footnotes. No asterisks. Just her voice, refusing to disappear into silence.