"How many times you gonna ask me that, Sted?” Reece snarled through the static. “No, it didn’t hurt when I died. Not that much anyway.”

Stedman Rains sat alone in a dark repair shop and leaned over a wooden workbench, a desk lamp illuminating the electronic circuits on which he worked. He wore an Army surplus headset with an attached microphone made of black Bakelite.

“You’re just saying that ’cause it’s what I want to hear,” said Stedman, adjusting the microphone. His voice sounded hoarse and intimate in the stillness of the darkened room.

Reece replied, “Sted, you know I’m dead as a doorknob, and you’re wacky to keep on talking to me every night on this bizarro electronic contraption you dreamed up.”

“Yea, but it’s still good to hear your voice sometimes.” Stedman retrieved a burning cigarette from the edge of the workbench and took a deep drag, slightly closing one eye to shield it from the rising smoke. Without looking away from his work, he exhaled while replacing the cigarette on one of the many burned black marks along the edge of the oak table.

Sted picked up a soldering gun in one hand and a length of dull gray solder in the other, which he gently touched to one of the exposed terminals of a new power transformer he had installed inside Mrs. Bailey’s old Sylvania chassis. He pulled the trigger, and a thin stream of acrid blue smoke snaked upward from the hot terminal, which sputtered and spat hot resin. It was quiet during this short procedure, but as he released the trigger and extinguished the gun’s glowing hot tip, Reece’s voice rasped through the earpiece again.

“How does it work?” he asked. 

“Mrs. Bailey’s TV?

“No, dummy, this radio thingy you’ve invented to talk to dead people,” said Reece.

“Well,” Sted began after thinking for a moment, “It’s kind of an ultra-wideband setup.” He pointed to a matched pair of glowing vacuum tubes nearly the size of Ball jars. “Those 5U4s right there create a very short pulse of...”

“Ah, Sted, sorry I asked,” groused Reece. “And I can’t see you or anything you’re pointing at. It’s radio, remember?”

Stedman smiled to himself and stopped talking. He reached over to pick up the cigarette and accidentally touched the high-voltage secondary of the power transformer, which he had left powered on to trace the voltage drop across the flyback coil.

Zap! The arc jumped the last few centimeters between wire and flesh.

Stedman woke up sitting on the concrete floor, his back against the opposite wall. He smelled something sour, which turned out to be smoke rising from the burned skin of both his thumbprints.

“Whoa! That was stupid,” said Reece. He stood a few feet away, peering down at the still recovering visage of his old friend.

Sted’s eyes grew wide, and he stuttered, “Reece? I can see you. You’re... here. With me. How...?”

“Nope,” said Reece. “So, did it hurt?”