Dying Hour

Can one voice on the radio save a soul? On a dark and lonely night, there is no line between radio and religion. This short novella is part prose, part radio play, part theatrical script. Stan Templeman is a late night radio deejay. Timothy is the nine-year-old who calls in. They're just voices in the dark for each other. And yet. Maybe that's enough? Dying Hour brings you into the dark, where fate and desperation bring every listener face to face with their own sharp and personal clarity. Stan Templeman has deemed the hour from 5 a.m. to 6 a.m. to be the 'Dying Hour' because he is certain he will die between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. in the morning, given how his chest tightens at that time of night. He challenges his listening audience to speculate about how they might die. Timothy is a nine-year-old who is awake at home and can't get back to sleep; he is listening to Stan's radio show on his laptop. Timothy uses his mother's cell phone to call in, to share the details of how he thinks he will die. In so doing, Timothy reveals details about his family situation that get other adult listeners riled up. Over the course of several nights, Timothy and Stan chat on air, and other adult listeners chime in, speculating about the circumstances of Timothy's home life while underlining their own ills and those of society as they attempt to diagnose, and help, Timothy. And yet the person with the most to learn about himself (and his past) is Stan, who has nothing but his large and gravelly voice to keep him company through the wee hours of his late night radio show, in an empty sound studio that is filled with Stan's visions of his mother and father as Stan grew up.