Radiogram

 The discharge meeting was as pointless as a stylus without a needle. Ray wore a blue sateen Anko robe, he insisted was made by extraterrestrials.

“This is not my first time on the ship,” he told the doctor who was shining a pen torch into his eyes, refusing to surrender his watering can for any part of the exam.

The demand for his bed was high. In the garden, on the other side of barred windows, Pierrot-collared roses barely concealed their giggles, the punchline of his release clear as a cling film face mask.  

Pouring wet cement into the ocean, after the funeral, I stripped off to wade in and lie on my back. Lost in lenticular clouds, I recalled Ray’s certainty that UFO beams evaporate puddles, and wished like a child at Christmas.

Driving back to the old house in my underwear, the traffic lights tested my adhesion to mortality.

 “Why slow down now?,” a stop sign at the level crossing taunted.

 I got out of my car and clambered up on the bonnet to punch it, in case it had spoken this way before, or planned to ever again.  My old high school principal chose that moment to drive past, tactful enough to solemnly wave but not stop. He would have known that Ray had died the week prior, thanks to the Dominion Post, whose thoughts (if not their discretion) were ‘with the family of the deceased’ – a story about a body found in two pieces on Moonshine Road, pulled from the wreckage of a stolen car my brother had neither the licence or knowledge to drive.

But Ray hasn’t left the lounge of the family home. Forever a tin-foil-hatted boy of five, 10, 15, pointing a coat hanger at the sky, only travelling in the glow of the radiogram’s regional dial, the mystery of telephone wires.

 “Good evening, Ray, always good to hear from you,” the talk show host greets him like a trusted envoy. “What’s happening in Plimmerton tonight?”

Bee Trudgeon

Bee Trudgeon is a writer, rocker, mama, storyteller, children’s librarian, perpetual student, and frequent Crip the Lit collaborator. Her journalism has been published in Capital Times, RipItUp, The Sapling, NZ Poetry Shelf, The Spinoff, Muzic.NZ, and AudioCulture Iwi Waiata; her poetry in  NZ Poetry Box, NZ Poetry Shelf, a fine line, Tarot, and the NZ Poetry Society 2024 and 2025 anthologies. She was awarded the 2024 Story Inc. Poetry Prize. She has been posting a poem a week on the Patreon page of her alter ego – Grace Beaster – for over a decade. Read more here.

Bee says: “‘Radiogram’ contains my grief for the ones squeezed out of our broken health systems, turned into indiscrete news stories while their families are still wondering what went wrong, remembering them the ways they were, not the ways they were let down. It’s a quiet protest, like the ones we hold inside ourselves that very few placards are ever lofted for.”