Lantern Static

Oct 15, 2026

At 3 a.m. the pumpkin started talking

Rain on the window. A jack-o’-lantern on the sill, lit not by a candle but by a fluorescent tube that will not stop flickering. Short, long, short. Its cold blue light catches the carved teeth, and the blinking starts to feel less like a fault and more like a message. The house is quiet apart from the rain and the low buzz of the tube.

It is three in the morning. She sits alone on the floor beside it, dressed in black, watching the light stutter. She does not move. She just counts the flashes, short and long, waiting for them to make sense. Candle teeth. Wax on glass. Say it again. The lyrics are barely there, a few words breathed out between flickers, as if she is trying to decode it herself. The longer she watches, the more the grin seems to hold another face inside it.

The sound is dreamy and haunted. A breathy female vocal floats over soft walls of shoegaze fuzz, and a drop-tuned groove pulses underneath like a slow heartbeat. Industrial textures buzz at the edges, the hum of a tube that should have been replaced weeks ago. Somewhere far off, screams drift in and out of the mix, never close enough to be sure of. Then the message finally comes through, one word: behind. She turns to the window, and in the reflection, someone is standing there. It is a quiet song about the moment a room stops feeling empty.