Fiction | “Fleeting Radio” by Lamarriv

Some people learn about life from books. Others from experience. The narrator of “Fleeting Radio” learns everything from songs played by a mysterious DJ named Louis, who drives a canary-yellow minivan and disappears without explanation. This short, dreamlike story explores loss, distance, and the way music becomes the language we use to process what we can’t say out loud. It’s nostalgic, surreal, and achingly specific in its references, a love letter to the teachers we never officially had and the lessons that arrive through static and longing.

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I’m the girl who learns everything through songs she listens to on the radio. Things of all kinds: the moods of heaven, the English Bulldog’s favorite croquettes, the summer colors of Bahía Kino, and the only thing people really need, according to The Beatles: love. The radio station I tune into is mobile and run by a single host. This peculiar and interesting character, over time, would become my greatest confidant and teacher without even knowing it. His name was Louis. He drove a canary yellow 1977 Volkswagen T2 minivan, simply going wherever his heart took him, blasting ‘Wish You Were Here’ by Incubus, repeating: “My hands are busy in the air saying… I wish you were…”

I remember the day I met him, his emotions on edge, his classic blue denim jeans and plain white t-shirt, and his Michael Hutchence haircut. A true closet rockstar. This entire profile was the product of a distant, imaginary perspective. Now you’re probably wondering how I even assumed I knew him. The answer is simple: I had experienced him through a lucid dream or something similar. Unfortunately, I lost sight of him in those incomprehensible twists and turns of life, in that blink of an eye, distracted by the path of that shooting star. I never saw him again. Not him, nor his canary-yellow minivan. In his absence, I remember not shedding a tear or speaking a single word for days. I felt it just as Cerati sang in ‘Puente’: “If I kept something silent, it’s because I understood everything, except the distance.”

He always wanted to be like John Lennon, philosophical, rebellious, and disruptive. But the future had other plans for Charles: nothing more and nothing less than he would end up as a rolling stone in the road, to the sound of Bob Dylan himself. And I, like the girl who learned everything by singing the songs she heard on the traveling radio, while the world turned to its rhythm.

The scenario got worse. My father was packing his luggage, without giving a date for his return home. The sky was beginning to tear itself apart with desperate cries, drawing a hole in the core of its blue hues. The absurd choreography of my emotions, traveling from one extreme to the other, while Stevie Nicks’s raspy voice outraged my soul, singing:

“Well, I’ve been ‘fraid of changin’ ’cause I’ve built my life around you but time makes you bolder even children get older I’m getting older, too.”

Here he comes again, Petrichor, my English Bulldog, being a bit of a glutton, playing with his blue Dr. Strange plate, giving me that look that says: “I don’t understand you at all, but I love you anyway; would you give me a little more of the filet mignon from last night’s dinner?” What a character, what a personality to take my sadness for a walk along the boulevard of sublimated illusions. Thank you, Petrichor! Thank you, fantasy!

Louis was, will be, forever a shooting star I’ll see every now and then upon the night’s sky.

The last song he played, before he suddenly vanished, was my last lesson; I learned that there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel, even if I didn’t believe it, with ‘Lyset’ from Efterklang in an absolute and exquisite Danish.

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about the author

Laura S Martineé, also known as Lamarriv, is a writer and visual artist with a rebellious mind and a deep love for music. She currently collaborates on several literary and art publications while developing an upcoming art show and an illustrated poetry anthology. An old and rebel soul who has always believed the moon is her home, she creates from the trench of a creative, introverted, and solitary existence, with music as the maximum beacon of her work. Her style lives in the constant search for what represents the extreme of an emotion, the crest of the wave, the boiling point, whatever is capable of questioning her circumstances. Her writing could be described as contemplative realism, while her figurative art oscillates between the metaphor of autumn and the endless search for why things happen. Follow the author ↲