The Frequency of Silence
This story is part of a collection inspired by the legendary Joe Frank, a pioneering radio artist who transformed the medium from the late 1970s until his passing in 2018. Frank’s unique style blended fact and fiction, the mundane and the surreal, often starting with simple premises that spiraled into complex explorations of the human condition.
Visit and subscribe to The Immortal Frank Joseph on Medium for more stories.
I’ve been collecting silences.
It started as a hobby, really. A way to pass the time between sleepless nights and endless days. I’d record the quiet moments: the pause between heartbeats, the breath held before a confession, the stillness after a thunderclap.
But lately, the silences have been talking back.
It’s 3:17 AM, and I’m sitting in my car outside an all-night diner. The neon sign flickers weakly, casting a sickly glow across the empty parking lot. Inside, a lone waitress wipes down counters that will never be truly clean.
I press record on my tape deck and wait.
The silence here is thick, viscous. It oozes from the cracks in the asphalt, seeps through the windowpanes. I can feel it pressing against my eardrums, a living thing hungry for sound.
“Why do you collect us?” the silence whispers.
I don’t answer. I’ve learned it’s better not to engage directly. They get ideas if you do.
Instead, I think about the first silence I ever captured. It was in my childhood bedroom, the night my parents told me they were getting divorced. I lay awake, straining to hear their muffled arguments through the wall. But there was nothing. Just a vast, echoing emptiness that seemed to stretch on forever.
I recorded it on my little cassette player, a relic from the ’80s with more hiss than fidelity. But when I played it back the next morning, I swear I could hear my future unfolding in the static.
The diner’s door chimes, jolting me from my reverie. A man steps out, collar turned up against the pre-dawn chill. He lights a cigarette, the flame briefly illuminating a face etched with regret.
I keep recording.
“You can’t ignore us forever,” the silence says, its voice a soft susurration beneath the whir of the tape.
I close my eyes, willing it away. But the silence persists, filling the car with its presence.
“We know your secrets,” it continues. “We were there when you whispered them into the dark.”
Images flash behind my eyelids: a stolen kiss behind the school gym, a lie told to a dying friend, a promise broken before it could be kept.
I open my eyes, desperate for distraction. The man with the cigarette is gone. The diner stands empty, a hollowed-out shell in the gray light of almost-morning.
The tape keeps rolling.
I think about the woman I loved, or thought I loved. How she would fill every moment with words, as if afraid of what might rush in to fill the gaps. I recorded her silences too — the ones that fell between her sentences, heavy with all the things she couldn’t bring herself to say.
When she left, the silence she left behind was deafening. I played it on loop for weeks, searching for answers in the spaces between the noise.
“We are the negative space of your life,” the silence in my car murmurs. “The canvas upon which your existence is painted.”
I want to argue, to refute this cosmic truth. But how do you argue with nothing?
The sun begins to rise, painting the world in shades of possibility. I should go home, sleep, pretend this night never happened. But I know the silences will follow me, whispering their secrets in the shadows of my dreams.
Instead, I start the car and drive.
The road stretches out before me, an endless ribbon of asphalt cutting through fields of wheat. The silence in the car grows, feeding on the emptiness outside.
“Do you remember the day you realized you were going to die?” it asks.
I do. I was twelve, standing at my grandfather’s funeral. As they lowered the casket into the ground, I felt a sudden, vertiginous awareness of my own mortality. The world tilted on its axis, and in that moment of perfect silence, I understood that one day, I too would cease to exist.
I recorded that silence as well, though I’ve never had the courage to play it back.
The wheat fields give way to mountains, their peaks shrouded in mist. I keep driving, chasing the horizon. The silence in the car has become a physical presence, pressing against my skin, filling my lungs.
“We are not your enemy,” it says, its voice somehow both everywhere and nowhere. “We are the space in which you exist.”
I think about all the silences I’ve collected over the years. The hush that falls over a city in the wake of tragedy. The quiet of a hospital room at midnight. The stillness of a forest in winter.
Each one a world unto itself, infinite in its possibilities.
The mountains flatten into desert, heat shimmering off the sand in waves. My gas gauge hovers near empty, a warning I choose to ignore.
“What are you running from?” the silence asks.
“Everything,” I whisper, my voice cracking from disuse. “Nothing.”
The silence seems to consider this. “Perhaps,” it says after a long moment, “you are running towards something instead.”
I ponder this as the desert rolls by, an ocean of sand and stone. What am I running towards? Understanding? Oblivion? Or something else entirely?
The car sputters, coughs, dies. I coast to a stop in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but sky and sand and silence.
I sit there for a long time, watching the sun arc across the sky. The silence grows, expands, until it feels like the whole world has been swallowed by it.
And then, in the heart of that vast quietude, I hear it. A sound so pure, so perfect, it brings tears to my eyes.
The sound of a new silence being born.
I fumble for my recorder, desperate to capture this moment. But the batteries are dead, the tape long since run out.
I laugh, the sound startlingly loud in the desert stillness. Of course. Of course it would happen this way.
As night falls, I step out of the car. The desert air is cool against my skin, the stars impossibly bright overhead. I walk away from the road, into the heart of the silence.
With each step, I feel the weight of all the silences I’ve collected falling away. The whispers fade, replaced by a profound, peaceful quiet.
I keep walking, leaving no footprints in the sand. In the distance, a coyote howls — a lonely sound that is quickly swallowed by the night.
I realize now what I’ve been running towards all this time. Not an ending, but a beginning. A silence so pure, so complete, that it contains within it the potential for every sound that has ever been or will ever be.
As I walk, I feel myself dissolving, becoming one with the silence. My thoughts scatter like seeds on the wind, each one carrying the promise of a new story, a new world.
In the end, there is only the silence. And in that silence, infinite possibilities.
Somewhere, in a room filled with tape recorders and memories, a new collector begins their search for the perfect quiet.
And the cycle begins anew.
