Archeophony by Sean Trott

“Archeophony” is one of three editors’ choice selections for the CRAFT 2024 Flash Prose Prize, guest judged by Meg Pokrass. Our editors chose these pieces as exemplars of the way imaginative ideas and powerful prose can build a sense of otherworldly wonder in flash.

Sean Trott’s “Archeophony” is a brilliant examination of how emotional distance can make difficult subject matter easier to witness. The spookiness of ghosts, the heartbreak of death, the pain of poverty and loss—these are hard topics. However, in this flash piece, we are cunningly beckoned to approach them by the assurance of solid objects. No tears, no regrets, only a bridge, a cheap motel room, a battery-operated radio, and a red notebook. We find no judgment in this tale, and certainly no fear—not of ghosts, not of poverty or even loneliness. From the safety of the present, we can remember the past, and remember it in awe. We can, once again, search out the coded language of the dead. —CRAFT

When I was a young boy, my mother showed me how to tune the radio to hear the voices of the dead. The secret, she explained, lay not only in the frequency one landed on but in the precise sequence of channels one sampled along the way. It was like music, she said, or language: the meaning of any given note, or of any given word, depends on the notes or words that come before it. Of course, being a radio, it was a one-way connection: we could hear the dead, but we could not respond. It was also “random access”: we heard whoever happened to be speaking, and as far as we could tell there was no rhyme or reason to who this happened to be.

We spent many evenings doing this, huddled together in derelict motel rooms and, later, below the interstate highway that cleaved the city in two. It was something to keep us occupied, and it was not so bad, as such activities go. My mother encouraged me to take notes on what we heard, and so I did: each night I logged the details of our listening sessions in a little red spiral notebook we’d originally bought for school but which, as my mother put it, was now repurposed for a different kind of education. I recorded information about the putative gender and age of the person speaking, their likely place of origin, the topic they spoke about, and the approximate duration for which they spoke. On some nights the dead spoke for less than a minute, and on other nights they spoke for hours. They spoke in many different languages, most of which I did not understand. When I did understand, the topics were wide-ranging, as the dead varied considerably in their interests. On some occasions they spoke about their families and their regrets, and on others they spoke about specific projects they believed themselves to be working on, almost as if they did not understand that they were dead.

Because our access to the dead was essentially random—as I’ve mentioned above—it was extremely improbable to hear the same speaker on multiple occasions. Yet this did happen for one speaker in particular. It was a man, and I heard him exactly three times, three Sundays in a row. My mother was on her way out at this point, so it was difficult to explain the significance of the man’s recurrence the first time it happened. She nodded and patted my arm, gently as always, and told me wasn’t that so good to know. I did not press the issue, and when the same man’s voice rang through for the third (and final) time, I did not raise it at all.

The man spoke, each time, about food. I figured perhaps it was hard to come by, wherever he was calling from. The man’s provenance was difficult to determine: he spoke with an accent I could not identify and which made me wonder why he was not speaking in whichever language he presumably spoke natively. The food he discussed ranged considerably in its composition and manner of preparation, so this did not help the matter. He spoke, among other things, about trout drizzled with olive oil and baked with rosemary and garlic; chicken glazed with a sauce made of white miso paste, mirin, and lemon zest; tomatoes simmered with onions, ginger, garlic, and pepper along with a dizzying array of spices, subsequently mixed with chickpeas and simmered for even longer; buttermilk biscuits served with honey and jam; seared steak served with caramelized mushrooms and onions simmered in a red wine reduction. The man did not discriminate by cuisine or even by ingredient. He spoke about these dishes almost mechanically, as if he were reciting instructions for a recipe, and yet I thought I detected on occasion a sense of wistfulness. I wondered what exactly he was wistful for, and more than once, I had the urge to ask him questions. Had he prepared these meals himself or were they prepared for him? Where and when did he eat them? Did he enjoy them in the company of others or was he alone?

I could not ask these questions, but I did my best to record the things he said. It felt significant, hearing this man not once, not twice, but three times. It hardly mattered to me what he said, but given that he spoke about food and its preparation, I made an effort to record the details that seemed to matter, at least insofar as he saw fit to mention them. Later on, of course, I attempted to recreate these meals precisely as he described them, but I found in these attempts that the details were rarely sufficient for the precision I imagined the speaker would have preferred: decisions had to be made, after all, about how long to marinate the chicken or freeze the butter, and I had no way of knowing what he would have done.

I still have this red spiral notebook, and I flip through the pages from time to time. It’s strange, looking back at this time in my life. It lasted about a year and some months, so it is not insignificant, but it feels like a world apart from the world I live in now. I feel sometimes as if time took a momentary detour along overgrown footpaths and abandoned train tracks, and only eventually found its way back to something like linearity. I have not listened to the voices of the dead for years, though not for lack of trying; I simply can’t remember the proper sequence and my mother’s not here to show me. I do still listen to the radio, though I’m stuck with the normal stations: sports, news, entertainment. I find myself wondering what else is out there. At times I catch myself wondering whether she could teach me, but of course I would have to find her first.

SEAN TROTT is an assistant professor of cognitive science at the University of California San Diego. He is interested in the role language plays in shaping and structuring thought. He likes to spend his free time with his wife and daughter and two cats. Find him on Twitter @Sean_Trott.