Static

Hand Of Death

When he brought it home, I felt no sense of unease. This, to me, meant that I was really moving on. I remember listening to music with him on it that first night, dancing around our living room without a care in the world. We seemed to float away on it, losing ourselves in the plunky, up-tempo melody of some current top 40 hit.
Out of nowhere, there it was. That horrid, itchy, sporadic, menacing white noise. The endless void of millions of screams all rolled into one insane loop. I don't know who got to it first, since both of us launched at it the moment it began to emit that gut twisting noise. Both of our hands laid on that off switch for a long time as we tried to catch our breath. I immediately went into a rant, telling Jeremy to take it back and never ask for one again. I told him to get rid of the TV too.
He calmed me for a moment, telling me that everything would be fine. That it was probably just a fluke.
Until we got the call.
This...thing...came back with a vengeance alright. It took not just one person, but five.
Jeremy dropped the phone and crumpled to the floor, consumed by an overwhelming grief. His brother, sisters, his brother in law, and sister in law, who had all been on a cruise together, had died. They were in the ship's ball room, dancing and having a good time when the massive chandelier above them detached from its wires and crushed them. Because of this, his two nephews and three nieces were now orphans.
The funerals were all combined into one big one. There were so many people there...and as I looked into the saddened faces of each one I couldn't help but blame myself. Perhaps if I had not allowed Jeremy to get that radio, their lives would be spared. They'd still be here. Their children...the looks on their faces still haunt me to this day.
Despite getting rid of the television and radio, it didn't stop. It just kept coming in waves. No matter where we were, somehow it would find us. Our answering machine started it, taking Jeremy's mother. She sank to the bottom of a river in a fishing boat while out with a friend. Her friend survived. Next, after having been off for years, the radio in my car suddenly howled at me one day, this time taking Jeremy's father. He was a window washer, he'd become tangled in the ropes and part of one wrapped around his neck. Next, all of the televisions at the store suddenly went snow white while shopping one day. This time claiming his aunt and uncle in a skiing accident.
His other aunt and uncle went separately. One was shot in a robbery. The uncle who had given us the gift of our home, he shot himself on accident while cleaning his pistol.
The children...I don't even want to reiterate what happened to them. They were under our care at that time. The investigations that came after that took four years of our lives away as well as them. In six years, Jeremy lost his entire family. He wasn't able to handle it.
One day, I heard it from some guy's boombox in the park. That was the day my Jeremy took his own life. Finding him was agony, I will never be able to get rid of the sight of his body lolling back and forth at the top of the stairs. I cannot erase cutting him down, desperately trying to resuscitate him, or watching the EMT zip up the body bag and roll him away from me.
Finally...it took the only two people I had left.
Seven months after Jeremy committed suicide, I moved back in with my mother. Even before then I'd been staying with her on and off, unable to walk into my own home without feeling the cold, withered hand of death grab me by the shoulders. I was nearly committed in that time. I became reclusive, increasingly paranoid, barely showered, and nearly refused to come out of my room unless I had to use the toilet. I didn't eat either, I must have lost fifty pounds in that time frame.
After I moved back in, I didn't change much. Thomas would come and visit every now and then, trying desperately to get me out of the house. I just couldn't. I didn't want to be cornered by it. I didn't want to go out for groceries and have the store's speaker system suddenly become corrupt. I didn't want my car to suddenly sprout a new radio (I'd had it removed.) and explode into a mass of pure sound. I avoided everything and everyone for the most part. I didn't talk on the phone, in fact my mother would constantly ask me if I'd unplugged it, which I did. I slowly began to feel the last strands of my sanity float away on the breeze, piece by piece