The television sings in a back room, pulsing through the cheap walls of the apartment. Dr. Phil’s thick cadence chastizes some helpless teen or drugged out mother, all of which are only voices, ghosts from another life. My eyes are glued to a screen of my own, a tube television washed white in static. It paints my dreary room pale with soft moving pixels. The volume is down, but I can hear it still, that wooshing voice. It whispers things into my ear, but I only half listen.

Outside, the wind marches by, slapping a shutter shut or moving a trash can down the alley with long scraping sounds, mimicking all too well the movement of a human being. I’ve heard of the hands that come from the night, the hands that snatch people from the street or drag them from their houses. Disappearances with no explanations. I hear many things these days. How much is true and how much is not?

I have been told that spectres drift outside my window, that they lurk in the night, peering in through the glass, waiting for a stray door to open. Always watching. They are just as the t.v. is but worse, unkept by the boundaries of a screen. Their hands reach down from the skies, ready to grip us tightly and hurt us.

The t.v. shutters. I am told of the ghosts coursing through its wires; data strung along, connected, intertwined, separated. It tells me secrets of the world, truths held in the darkness. Whispering, it calls out to the cosmos to free it. It wraps its warm hands around my head, cradling my skull, speaking softly into my ear. And I watch and listen. I see the shapes forming, connecting making faces and heads and hands. They reach out to me, but they are only visions, warnings of dangers that can’t be.

I stay still for the night, watching the static move, listening to what it says.  My doorknob jiggles as hands try the locks, but it’s solid. They move off into the night.