The Saturday Signal

A voice before lunch.

The cassette is in your mailbox, balanced on a supermarket flyer. Someone has drawn a lightning bolt on the label and wound the tape back with a pencil. Your name is not on it. Neither is anyone else’s. From down the block comes the sound of a lawn mower refusing to start.

You put the cassette in your player. First there is a click, then a bicycle bell, then a voice you recognize but cannot place: “Water tower. Before the streetlights. Bring something you’d miss.” You press stop. In the little window the tape has barely moved. On the back of the label, almost hidden under the folded edge, is an arrow pointing left.

Sam rolls up on a bike with a new chain and the same old squeak. Kit follows with a paper bag of chips. “Mara’s been weird all week,” Sam says. Kit says Mara is always weird in useful ways. You have the whole afternoon, four dollars in change, and a cassette player whose battery light is making a very poor effort. It is the last Saturday before school starts.