// the written half of the signal
The Wire
Not everything that comes in goes out over the air.
Four people sit at the Wire desk. They file copy the station cannot broadcast: things that have to be read rather than heard, or that arrived on paper, or that nobody has worked out how to say out loud yet.
// the desk
Who Files
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Harlan Ross
Field Correspondent
Files dispatches from towns on the route between somewhere and somewhere else. Some of them are on the map now.
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Iris Pennywhistle
Obituarist
Writes the obituaries before the deaths. Underwritten by Hollow-mere Memorial, who pre-need everything.
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Marlon Greaves
Classifieds Clerk
Curates the classifieds. Reviews every listing for grammar, price, and whether the thing for sale can exist.
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Delphine Okonkwo
The Editor
Reviews every GZS Records release. Has never once been wrong, which the artists have started to find unsettling.
// 8 filed
The Copy
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Duffy, Tennessee, Population 311
State Route 13 climbs out of the Buffalo River bottom past a feed store, a grill in an old bank, and a town the state does not list.
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Vesper's 'Flood Stage' Is Two Permanent Songs and One Long Wait
Eight songs, forty-one minutes, and one of them runs eleven. The band is at its peak everywhere except the song it named the record after.
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The Week's Classifieds
Thirty-one listings came in, six did not run, and the fee is still four dollars in exact change. Marlon Greaves on the week's intake.
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Earl Dean Tackett, 1945 to 2027
Earl Dean Tackett climbed poles for the co-op for thirty-six years, kept eleven hives behind the house, and would not take money for fixing a man's alternator.
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Pell Switch, Second Trip
The volunteer department paid nine thousand four hundred for the pumper. Confirming that took two phone systems, one county office, and a shoebox of cancelled checks.
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A Bad Record Beats a Boring One
The Editor on why a failed record gets four more plays in the Vault, and a competent one gets a line in the log and no stars at all.
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Keeping the Card File
Iris Pennywhistle on unruled cards, green ink, the mail she gets from subjects, and why she reads the survived-by list back twice before anything prints.
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The Rules of the Back Page
The classifieds desk runs on four dollars in exact change, six columns at eleven picas, and a ledger that has balanced every Friday it has been kept.
