The city never really slept. It just dimmed, like a dying bulb.
From her window on the sixth floor, Mira watched the streetlights flicker through fog, turning the puddles below into pools of liquid gold. Neon signs buzzed half-alive, advertising stores that hadn't opened in years. Somewhere far off, a siren cried like it was lost.
Nights like this, everything felt hollow. The kind of hollow that hums.
Mira lived alone in Apartment 6C—one room, one bed, one sink that leaked every eleven seconds. The building used to be a hotel before the city forgot it. Its wallpaper peeled in the hallways, and every door carried a different story of people trying to survive cheap rent and bad plumbing.
She was nineteen. Worked night shifts cleaning offices. Slept through daylight. Ate from cans. Her life had narrowed to routine, simple and numb, until even her thoughts started echoing.
Sometimes she'd hum to fill the silence. Other times she'd just listen to it. The silence here wasn't empty—it breathed, moved, pressed against her chest like it wanted her to notice it. That was how she learned to recognize its moods. There were calm silences, angry silences, and the one that watched her when she wasn't looking.
Tonight was the watching kind.
She sat cross-legged on the bed, half a sandwich untouched beside her, and scrolled her phone just for the motion of it. No messages. No calls. Not even a spam text. The glow on her face made her skin look ghostly, her eyes darker than usual.
With a sigh, she set the phone aside and glanced at the radio in the corner.
She'd found it two weeks ago, during a night shift downtown. Someone had tossed it into the dumpster behind the janitor's shed. Old, heavy, cracked casing, one dial missing. Mira almost walked past, but something about it caught her—maybe the faint hum it made, like it didn't know it was broken.
She cleaned it, took it home, and set it on the counter. Never turned it on. Not until tonight.
Now, staring at it, she wondered what kind of music it used to play. Who'd listened. Who'd thrown it away.
The clock ticked past 1:00 a.m.
Her chest ached with the kind of quiet that begged for noise.
Mira plugged the radio in.
It took a second, then coughed out a low crackle. The sound filled the room like dust stirred after years. She turned the knob slowly—
*shhhhh—click—shhhhhh—crrrrk—*
Nothing but static.
Weirdly enough, it felt comforting. The static was messy, unpredictable. It wasn't dead silence—it was alive, buzzing with tiny fragments of sound that almost made sense if you listened long enough.
Mira lay back on the bed, letting the noise wash through her. It made her think of rainfall, ocean waves, all the things she never heard anymore in this concrete jungle.
She closed her eyes.
The static deepened, pulsing softly, rhythmically—like a heart.
For a moment, she thought she heard her own breath loop through the static. Then a whisper of something underneath. Not words. Just motion. Like someone adjusting a mic, just out of reach.
Her eyes opened.
The radio's light flickered once.
She sat up slowly. "...Hello?" she murmured, half-laughing at herself. The sound of her own voice startled her—it had been hours since she last spoke out loud.
No answer. Just the usual static, gentler now, almost melodic.
Mira smiled faintly. "Guess it's just you and me."
Her voice seemed to ripple through the static, like the machine was breathing it in.
And when she leaned closer, she could've sworn she heard something—three soft knocks, maybe a breath, maybe her imagination.
She waited. Nothing followed.
The hum faded back to white.
She sat there for a long time, watching the small red light glow on the front of the radio. The world outside her window blurred into rain, and for once, she didn't feel completely alone. The noise filled the empty corners of her mind the way silence never could.
Eventually, she switched the radio off and curled under the blanket. The dripping pipe marked seconds, the city sighed beyond the walls, and Mira drifted into sleep with the faint ghost of static still ringing in her ears.
Just before she fully slipped under, the radio—still off—clicked once.
And from the darkness, soft as breath:
"…Mira."