Summary

In this section of Flashlight the narrative moves among Anne in the present, Louisa in late adolescence and early adulthood, and Serk in confinement. Anne listens to old cassettes with Walt and remembers nights by the sea, when Serk watched for a pulse of light as if it were a code. The radio’s voice once ran like a current over her body, and memory turns the small plastic box into a vessel for distance and dread. The scenes establish how technology, attention, and fear braid together in the family’s archive of ordinary nights.

The shore memory fixes Serk’s habit of deciphering the world. As Anne recalls, they sat watching a signal blink and disappear at irregular intervals, and Serk named what he thought it was and what it was not: “That’s not a fishing boat, that’s something different...