A Lonely Broadcast: Book One by Kel Byron

Author:Kel Byron [Byron, Kel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B0C76FL4V9
Published: 2023-06-02T05:33:49+00:00

I knew I wouldn’t sleep well after the storm. When I went back home to my family’s old farmhouse, there was a shift in the wind that didn’t sit right with me. It murmured through the leaves of my grandfather’s apple trees, one of the fruits falling loose and rolling into the long grass. The hay field across the road was rippling in deep waves and the dogs were howling, agitated by something I couldn’t see.

This place held a lot of memories, stories of my parents and grandparents carved into the chipped paint and the old barn doors. I couldn’t find it in my heart to leave it, but sitting so close to the tree line was an endless nightmare. I knew that even if I couldn’t see what was lurking in the dark beyond those trees, they could probably see me just fine.

“Alright, settle down, old girl,” I reached to pat the head of a German Shepherd. Her name’s Ripley. Her brother, Sergeant, was pacing back and forth at the fence and baring his teeth toward the woods, snarling with his ears lying flat. Last time he growled like that, drool dripping from his fangs and lips pulled back, he was having a proper Wild West stand-off with a young black bear. This was different.

I could see something moving out there. When I blinked into the gloom, I could barely make out the shape of something dangling from the tree. It looked like a trio of legs, gray and rotten, swaying ever-so-slightly in the breeze. They were thin and petite, toes pointed to the ground, all of them converging into one body at the top. It wasn’t a human body, I don’t think. It was hard to tell in the dark. But I heard whispers, soft and hoarse, paired with the glow of at least a dozen white eyes, all blinking at different times.

Whatever it was, my dogs didn’t like it. I liked to think they were a pretty good judge of character.

I stayed up late, sitting in an armchair near the wood stove, tossing bits of kindling in and thinking about the nights my grandpa would sit in this very same spot and pluck the strings of his guitar. I thought about my mother, reciting old stories about the forest that her Cherokee parents used to tell her. The dogs settled down and decided to fall asleep on the rug near my feet.

I would doze a little now and again, but something always woke me up: the wind and rain, the cry of an animal, the sound of someone whistling outside my house. I didn’t investigate. I knew better. In the light of early morning, I stepped outside to see an empty tree line and a yard littered with tiny pebbles. They were all over the roof, too, as if they had just fallen from the sky. Folks around here would call that downright ‘biblical’.

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