The Static Between Channels

Ellen sat on her balcony with a wilted salad of spinach she'd forgotten to eat, watching the baseball game through the rain-streaked sliding door. Her father had loved the Dodgers. He'd died three months ago tomorrow, and she still hadn't cried.

Inside, her cable package—expensive, comprehensive, utterly hollow—flickered and died. The screen went black, then blue, then black again. She pressed the remote until her thumb ached. Nothing.

Perfect. The universe had a sense of humor. Forty-two years old, newly single after David walked out with his embroidered pillow and his yoga mat, and now her television was dead too. She'd paid for the premium package because David said they needed it. Needed what? Five hundred channels of strangers living lives that looked better than hers?

The spinach on her plate had gone slimy. She remembered her mother forcing her to eat it as a child, the way the leaves clung to her teeth like secrets. David had loved spinach in his smoothies. He'd leave green rings on her coffee table, on her nice white coasters, on the bathroom counter. She used to find it charming. Now she couldn't look at the vegetable without tasting her own foolishness.

Her father had taken her to baseball games every Sunday of her childhood. The hot, dusty smell of the stadium. The collective roar when someone hit a home run. She hadn't been to a game in twenty years. "Too loud," she'd told David. "Too many people."

The cable remained stubbornly dead. Ellen sat in the silence and finally understood what her father had meant, those last months when he'd stare at the television without turning it on. Sometimes you needed the static to hear yourself think.

She tossed the spinach in the garbage. She called David's number—just to hear his voicemail, just to remember he'd existed—and deleted him from her contacts. Then she looked up ticket prices for tomorrow's game.

The television stayed dark. Ellen didn't notice.