Zenith

We didn’t have cable.

It was bad for my development, according to my mother. I had to be smart, and too much

television would make me stupid.

We did have a dusty black CRT television that swallowed up VHS tapes and spat out

three publicly available television stations—PBS, Spike TV, and something with cartoons. I

watched anything. Antiques Roadshow, This Old House, fifteen minutes of WWE before the

reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation came on.

But every summer for one week, we went to my great-grandmother’s house. A different

TV lived there—a creature from the seventies, branded “Zenith” in silver, with a wooden face

and knobs instead of buttons. Two antennae sprouted from its head and snatched invisible waves

of entertainment right out of the air, delivering them to my open hands and wide eyes.

I absorbed nineties anime through a veneer of static. Sometimes the voices would clip

and disconnect, and I couldn’t tell if it was the bad dubbing or the poor connection. My hand

hovered near the antenna, fingers brushing against the tin foil crumpled at its apex. A slight

touch could correct the screen just as easily as it could dissolve the image into scattered chunks.

To placate the television, I had to demonstrate commitment. So, I kept my palm up,

supplicatory, even when my arm began to tremble.

I would shuffle up close and press my face up to the screen, not enough to touch skin to

glass but enough to feel the energy emanating from it. Electrified, the tiny hairs on my face stood at attention and caressed the screen like a thousand tiny legs on the world's roundest centipede, crawling across a fuzzy image of Alex Trebek.

One evening, I fell asleep on the rotting leather couch, my little body exhausted from a

day of splashing around in a sea so dark it was almost black, a phantom sensation of the warm

Atlantic tide still clinging to me even as I laid still. My salt-stiff hair crackled as I tossed and

turned, and the whole world smelt of brine.

In that house, sounds were so much louder. Especially at night.

The living room was the best room in the house to sleep in, with direct, unencumbered

access to the single window unit. A low hum permeated the narrow room, accompanied by the

air conditioner’s heavy, constant breathing. Cicadas sang, a rejoicing gospel choir. Mosquitoes

buzzed faintly outside. The neighbor came home, his old truck rattling like Jacob Marley’s

chains. Yellow lights flashed through the window. The porch’s screened door clattered in its

frame, held closed by a rusted iron hook.

And closest was the television, so faint in comparison to the other sounds.

A soft hiss of nothingness. Late at night, I watched the static, enraptured. I imagined

fingers reaching out of it, bending the screen’s glass like a soap bubble right before popping. I

saw long fingers, with knuckles like knobs on bamboo, growing from a palm joined to a

toothpick arm by a spindly wrist. Blotchy skin like a corpse, rotting like the couch, as gray as the

static.

No sound existed in my imagined moment. Silence stretching on, hands stretching toward

me, entreating. The glass broke, not shattering as it should but bursting like the bloated body of a

possum on the side of the road as maggots surfaced for air. Ripe and dripping. And the hands

pressed onward, reaching out and into my chest.

I blinked and the image was gone, the noise resumed.

The air conditioner panted down my sweat-slicked neck. Cicadas screamed. Mosquitoes

clamored at the leaded windows. Transmission popped in the neighbor’s truck. Yellow lights

now extinguished, swallowed by the all-encompassing darkness beyond the porch. And the porch

door clattered, shaken by the sea breeze or an unseen visitor.

I wrapped myself in a musty throw blanket and reached out, just far enough to turn off

the TV.

Rhys Lee Hamilton is an emerging writer with an MFA in Writing from the Savannah College of Art and Design. As a gay man from the American South, he likes to explore queerness, masculinity, and philosophy in my work. His previous fiction and nonfiction work can be found in Aphelion Magazine, Half and One, and 7th Circle Pyrite, while examples of his freelance journalism can be found in Savannah Magazine, Hilton Head Monthly, and on his website, rhysleehamilton.com.