"To Be the Sun": A story based on "Farmer In the City (Remembering Pasolini)" by Scott Walker, as suggested by musician Steven R. Smith (18/100)

To Be the Sun

Gabe counted the ten-penny nails in his lower lip. There were two rows, like the base of a pyramid: eleven in a line and then, a bit further away from his teeth, ten more. He had woken up seated at his kitchen, his hands bound behind his back and his lower lip nailed to the edge of his giant oak table. The blinds and curtains were open, but the windows were closed. It was dark outside and the lights overhead were dimmed to a dull yellow.

“You’ll start to get some more feeling back in that lip as time moves on,” John said from behind Gabe.

Drool and blood were pooling together in Gabe’s mouth. He kept moving his tongue forward and pushing out loads of the whole mess, where they fell in long, shiny pillars that crawled downward onto the carpet.

“I’m not the brightest, and I can admit it,” John said. “But I do know what a premonition is. And, since you seem like a man refinement, is it fair to assume you know what that means, too?”

Gabe said nothing and John dropped a hammer onto the table. It landed within an inch of Gabe’s lip, and the tiny vibration cut into his mouth.

John pulled out a chair and sat next to Gabe. “Good. I had one of ‘em, once. It was after you killed my daughter.”

Gabe became omniscient. He knew the things he already knew, that nearly two decades ago he had helped two other men kill John’s daughter. He’d been consumed in a fit of restlessness. Extreme restlessness. Still, it was just a magnification of simple, ceaseless anxiety. And in his omniscience he learned new things. His current position—punishment—and what would come. More punishment. Heavy and soon.

“That premonition I had came after y’all killed her. I thought, ‘Hell, this thing came a bit late. All the bad stuff already happened.’ But then it got worse and worse and I figured that the premonition came just in time.” John cleared his throat. “I began to forget everything except that dream, that crazy dream where I see three guys beatin’ her. I couldn’t remember how to run the thresher. I couldn’t saddle a horse to save my life. There was just that dream.” He kicked his feet up on the table, and Gabe felt another vibration surge through his lip, regaining feeling faster now. He both smelled and saw the cow shit sitting thick and green in the treads of John’s boots.

“Farm’s gone now, like everything else. I like to think if I still had her, I’d still have the rest of it. I can’t prove that, though, you know? I can’t prove that you had anything to do with it, either. A dream don’t hold up in court,” John brought his feet down and stood up. “But I ain’t wrong.”

The kitchen lights were dimmed slowly down to nothing. Gabe remained silent. Within a moment John had taken out a large, wide buck knife and rolled the edge of the blade over Gabe’s lip. The sound was like that of a palm slowly gripping a moist sponge, coiling finger-by-finger into a fist. Gabe fell to the ground and began kicking his legs. He didn’t yell out, but he began to nosh his teeth and sputter out moist noises, producing tiny bubbles that ran down his face.

John watched him, would watch him and occasionally feel for a pulse until there wasn’t one. The bottom of John’s stomach was cold and he felt as if it were cavernous, completely empty and larger than his body would allow. He walked over to the window and looked through it for hours until the sun began to come up. It slipped in between the buildings, unlike on the farm, where it hit everything at once, like a new apocalypse every day. I’d switch you places in a heartbeat, John thought, looking at the rising sun. John began to think of the places it would light, the places it would pass over.

**********



Lyrics

Scott Walker is a crazy old genius from Ohio. In the 1960s, he was a part of the group The Walker Brothers. None of them were related or had the actual last name of Walker. They're probably best remembered for their version of the song "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine (Anymore)" but I think their best track is "The Electrician" from their 1978 reunion album Nite Flights. Scott put out four self-titled solo albums in the late 60s, each one showcasing his giant voice and, as time went on, his originality as a songwriter. After the completely-original Scott 4 was declared a commercial failure (and later praised as a masterpiece, as is usually the case), he lost whatever self-confidence he had gained and made a couple lackluster albums that were supposed to pander to the masses. Then he started taking about eleven years between albums. But goddamn, it's so worth it. 2017's gonna kick ass!

Steven R. Smith is a highly-prolific and inventive Californian that people sometimes refer to as "the ambient David Lee Roth." His music is occasionally like Jim O'Rourke and occasionally like Stars of the Lid, but more often than not his music is his own and, because of its emotional impact, it is ours, too. His album Cities is the audio equivalent of a Cormac McCarthy novel, the way violence sounds when it's slowed down enough to be beautiful. The rest of his catalog is as wonderfully thoughtful and apocalyptic, and you can order some stuff from it right here.

"Oriel" from 2002's Lineaments

"The Road" from 2009's Cities

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Next week: A story based on "Mike's Love Xexagon" by The Fall, as suggested by writer Thomas Cooper.

"Grace": A story based on "Code Blue" by TSOL, as suggested by writer Matt Baker (17/100)

Grace

Most of the people who remembered Monica Kelly remembered her because she had two first names and she was dead. Will thought there was so much more to her than that, but the name and the death were the only things people ever brought up about her. Will himself remembered that her father had been the undertaker in town, running the funeral home out of the basement of his house, and that Monica looked like the people her father worked on. She wasn’t morbid or suicidal. She was just soft porcelain, shapely and white, calm as a coma.

When Will got the invitation to his ten year high school reunion, he contemplated not going, but he was more curious than spiteful. Monica Kelly had been gone for almost fourteen years and his Mohawk had been gone for about seven. All that was left was everything else.

Will had been at the reunion for over an hour and no one had recognized him yet. A few people walked by him and assumed he had shown up with his wife—the real old classmate of theirs—and had been left to fend for himself while she was away talking to old friends. He overheard one woman say to another something about that one girl who drowned freshman year, the one with the weird hillbilly-styled name, Mary Betty or something. They agreed it was a shame, a tragedy, even, and then kept eating chips and commenting on who had gotten fat, who had gotten fatter.

It had been years since Will had thought of Monica Kelly, and he hadn’t expected to hear her name that night. She came up again later on, an entire table of people trying to recall anything else about her. No one there had grown up with her. She was homeschooled until high school and even then was only with them for three months before she drowned, down in the deep, wide part of the Fever River, her ice skates sinking her to the bottom like a bullet. When Will first heard about it, he imagined her pirouetting like a drill.

The people at the table were all guessing wrong. Monica hadn’t been short by any means. She had been of average height, average weight. She had several different green shirts with the bottom hem colored in black marker. She slipped her shoes off in class and scratched the top of one foot with the bottom of another. These things were lost and Will wondered why. Had everyone done so many things before and after Monica Kelly’s death that they were able to squeeze her entire life into a non-sequitur? Will went over to the table with the yearbooks. He turned the pages of the book from his freshman year and found Monica’s picture, an inch by an inch with a timid, black and white smile in the center. He walked to the table with the people arguing, debating one inaccuracy against another, and then slammed the book down, his palm sticking to the open page.

“Monica Kelly smelled vaguely of formaldehyde and had such grace that you missed her completely,” Will said. The yearbook was splayed open on the table and Will remembered why he never bought one, from any year of high school, and looked around at the sallow eyes of the people around him, people he’s always known to have the worst qualities of both the hectic and the dull: disorganization with no eye for detail and nothing relevant to say. They turned to one another and asked loudly if the man in front of them was Will the Punk, Fuck-up Will. As they sat there figuring it out, Will walked away from them, the real corpses of his youth.

**********



Lyrics

TSOL are a punk rock band from Long Beach, California. In 1988, I bet a couple metal nerd started to get into punk because they saw Steven Adler wearing a TSOL shirt in the video for "Sweet Child O' Mine." Unfortunately, Izzy Stradlin was unable to bring back the vintage Rod Stewart haircut he was sporting in the same video. In a move that I thought only happened to Ratt, LA Guns, Faster Pussycat, and other bands of that style and era, there were once two different TSOLs playing shows at the same time (sometimes in the same cities). We can get two TSOLs but not one Misfits. I call bullshit on the universe.

Matt Baker is a writer from Kansas City who lives in Little Rock, Arkansas. He thinks the movie Repo Man is awesome and he saw Slayer a few times back in the late-80s/early-90s. He also likes Bill Hicks and Barry Hannah. As if you don't think he's exceptionally rad already, he's also a badass writer, and you can read his short short story "Frank"--which is how I found out about him--over at SmokelongQuarterly. He rarely does flash fiction, though, so you should also do yourself a favor and get his novel, Drag the Darkness Down. I'm guessing his height at about 6'2".

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Next week: A story based on "Farmer in the City (Remembering Pasolini)" by Scott Walker, as suggested by musician Steven R. Smith.

Sittin' In: "Buzz" by Samuel Snoek-Brown, as based on the song "Omens and Portents I - The Driver" by Earth

It's only fitting that Sam Snoek-Brown stepped up to the plate to sit in on this week's OBCBYL, as I spent a fair amount of my time away from this project reading/editing/mocking/feedbacking the stories in a collection he recently finished. (Ten years of work, but a hell of an anthology so far and only getting better. Butthole Surfers fans, stay on the lookout.) He whipped up a killer little short short about Earth's "Omen's & Portents I - The Driver" and I did some Gordon Lish style heavy-editing to it--with Sam's consent, of course.

I'll be back next week with a story based on "Code Blue" by TSOL, but for now, enjoy Sam's story (and check out his blogs).

(Also, for anyone else interested, the list of songs featured in this post still stands if anyone would like to do a story for OBCBYL in the future. I'll always take time off if it shows up.)

**********

Buzz

There had been thunder, flat as a hand, driving in the storm behind Ray, and it had reminded him of earlier, the click and the pounce and the silence. He’d left shortly afterward and had been in the old Ford for some time, almost nine hours since, with the promise of Texas hills ahead of him.

He wasn’t sure he could sleep or if he deserved it anywhere except behind the wheel. When he saw a rest stop up ahead, he felt like he’d found a church. He didn’t need confession, he just needed sanctuary. For now, sleep. Forgiveness would come later or not at all.

He parked his car and dozed in a driving position, his head leaned back against the seat. When he woke, he did so in a flash, gripping the air with all fingers. He blinked and looked at his hands, remembering the way the white noise we all hear every day—the hum of lightbulbs and refrigerators—grew louder in his head, like a bright pang of reverb, and then snapped off in an echo.

A door opened and closed behind him. Ray sat up and cranked the car. The sun had just stuck up over the hills as the starter whined and quit. He scooted forward in his seat and turned the key again. Nothing else happened. He tried the radio. Static. Silence. Again.

He thought about the car that woke him, but when he turned in his seat to find it he saw it was a state trooper’s. He squinted his eyes and saw the seats were empty. He pulled on the door handle and eased out of his car, left his door open. Stubby cedar trees dropped down a slope behind the rest stop. A tangle of barbed wire outlined the woods.

“Can I help you?” the trooper asked from the restroom doorway, a paper towel still in his hands.
Ray swallowed and blurted out, “Battery’s dead.”

“Don’t you worry none,” the trooper said. “Got some cables, I’ll give you a jump.”

As they stood between the open hoods, the trooper’s engine running and Ray’s battery charging, the trooper said, “Arizona plates? You drive all this way by yourself?”

“My wife,” he said. He had left her on the floor, head broken and limp as a single plum in a plastic bag. Her neck turned purple before he even made it out the door. Ray felt, but did not hear, the slight crunch of her throat in his hands, like a beetle under his foot. “She’s back home.”

The trooper nodded, said, “Shoot, I wish sometimes I could get away myself.”

Ray’s stomach churned. Blood throbbed in his brain, bile jumped into his throat and burned. Sweat poured from his messy, oily hair and dripped all down his arms. When he opened his mouth, he vomited in a spray that splattered the trooper’s pants and car. Ray himself fell down alongside the vomit, and nearly beat it to the ground. The trooper jumped back and cussed, then said, “Listen, sir, no offense, but you been drinking?”

Ray coughed twice, gripped the trooper’s shoulder, and pulled himself up to his knees. “No sir, I’ve just been driving all night to get here.”

“Well, I feel a little woozy after a double night shift m’self. I guess that and the heat must of done it to you.”

Ray nodded along, anything to explain himself. The tropper insisted Ray not drive just yet and offered to take him the twenty miles into town and back. Ray was in no position to decline, though he tried faintly to do so.

As they stood there waiting for the battery to finish charging, Ray stared at the shotgun perched between the front two seats. The trooper spoke into the microphone clipped to his epaulette, and he was writing something, then he opened the back door for Ray.

They pulled out from the rest stop, the sky behind the car, back west, roiling dark and thick. Little flashes jumped in the clouds and the trooper said, “It’s something, ain’t it? It’s all one system, I think. Pretty sure it started east of California, just inside Arizona. You must of been just ahead of it the whole way.”

Ray thought of his wife eyes bulged in their sockets, the vessels an absurd red. The living room furniture lay in ruins around her. Two flies moving through the dust mites.

It was so silent then.

**********

Earth is a band that used to play really loud, heavy-as-fuck power drone music until guitarist/leader Dylan Carlson took too many drugs (and then stopped taking drugs). Then all the songs became like the background music to a western made in Hell. One time, while listening to Earth 2, I thought my brain stopped working. It was that awesome. This song is from the 2008 album The Bees Made Honey In the Lion's Skull, which I played one time for a girlfriend who said, five minutes into the first song, "So it's pretty much just this for 45 minutes?"

Samuel Snoek-Brown is a Texan living in the Middle East. He owns over 400 bolo-ties. He has been known to write short fiction, with his most well-known story being "Orgasm In French." He put out a poetry chapbook as an undergrad. I think one dude bought it (collector's item, bro). Due to "a few" streaks of grey in his hair, he refers to himself as "the Anderson Cooper of literary fiction." Here's a link to some of his stories, all of which should be required reading for any writer worth their weight in free trade coffee and black berets. He runs a blog about smiley faces and I'm pretty sure I saw him wearing a Rusted Root shirt once. Everything else about him is unknown.

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Next week: A story based on "Code Blue" by TSOL, as suggested by writer Matt Baker.

"What the River Drinks . . .": A story based on "Doing An Evil Deed Blues" by John Fahey, as suggested by musician Drew Bissell of Aseethe (16/100)

What the River Drinks In Sun, It Spits In Bones

Moses figures there’ll be a next morning, because there’d been one every day thus far. He’ll be right, and on that next morning, the police will drag the lake and find him at the bottom with his tools in his pockets and a 12 foot boa around his neck. The kids will not stop playing nearby after he is found. Three boys will count the sunbeams on the water and argue over the numbers they come up with. A thousand. A million. Infinity. An old negro will tell them that it don't matter who's right and who's wrong, because no amount of sunbeams is gonna move that damn still water. The sheriff will tell them all to leave when he notices that the snake isn’t constricted and stuck, but, rather, tied in a knot. It’ll be an albino that’s even more pale than when people spotted it originally, whiter than a wedding dress and looking a whole goddamn lot like the snake the Keech boys had found dead near the lock and dam a few days ago. The sheriff will cross his arms and tell his deputy to quit taking notes, that a snake around a nigger’s neck is accident enough, knot or not. They’ll laugh about that for the rest of the day. Knot or not. They’ll go home to their wives and God and whiskey. Until then, until the next morning, Moses will be whistling, walking along by the river and saying Morning, morning to everyone he passes. The words will slip through his lips pained and quickly, like a tongue made of sandpaper, in such a way that everyone will swear that they hear his mantra as Moanin’, moanin’.

**********

John Fahey was a guitarist who played unaccompanied steel guitar licks and made it sound totally badass.

Drew Bissell is a bassist who likes to ask the question, "Are you sure that riff can't be slower?" when writing songs with his band Aseethe.

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Next week: A guest post from someone!

"Vandalism": A story based on "Only Shallow" by My Bloody Valentine, as suggested by writer Victor David Giron (15/100)

Vandalism

Growing up Catholic meant that I learned context faster than most. Good sex was functional, bad sex was vandalism. I explained this to Sandi on our third or fourth date and she asked me about dancing.

“I’m pretty sure you’re thinking of Baptists. As far as I know, Catholics don’t have any rules regarding dancing.” I told her.

She jangled her bracelets, leftovers from her mother’s gypsy phase in the 70s. “Are you sure?”

“Not really,” I said and looked at the bracelets again. She wore them well, all the way up her forearm to the meat above her elbow. She was thick everywhere it mattered, but instead of finding a charming way to tell her that, I picked at my food for a minute and she did the same, bites the size of dimes as we watched each other on the sly. Slow sips of wine, pretending to be able to pick out the different flavors.

She went back to the sex thing. “What do you mean by vandalism?”

“Destruction with no motivation. Misuse of the body, depreciation of the soul.” The light didn’t hit her so much as meet her, glide across the top of her chest and lower neck. “Things like that,” I told her, hashing over the first time I heard such implications at mass and in bible studies. Some things we’ll believe forever just because we heard them first.

I start again. “There was a philosopher who rallied against people being the means to an end instead of the end itself, which is the exact opposite of Catholicism, I think.”

“Cunt.”

“No, it wasn’t Kant.”

"No,” she said, setting her wine glass down gingerly. “I’m saying the word ‘cunt.’ Can you say it?”

“You mean, am I spiritually allowed to say it? Sure. Cunt. I like big ol’ sloppy cunts.”

“You’re not the best Catholic I’ve ever met.”

“I doubt you’ve met any,” I told her as a joke, but we both became quiet as she thought about it. I had moved to the city a couple years ago with my faith already gone. The people I met seemed to never be born with it, which was fine but different. The sex thing was the weirdest to me, how open a topic it was. The first summer I was here I saw a man sitting down against a dumpster I normally jog past. When I slowed up to check on him and make sure he was all right—not passed out from the heat or anything—I saw he was holding his cock in his hand, a pile of semen on his shirt above his navel. Several flies had landed in it, their wings in a drastic flutter to help their legs get out. The man looked up at me and said, “Howdy.”

She was still thinking when I said, “No worse than Kerouac.”

“What?”

“I’m no worse a Catholic than Kerouac was, and even though he battled it in odd ways, he claimed to be a good little French-Catholic boy his whole life.”

“I never liked Kerouac.”

We were quiet until I said, “He’s a very male writer.” She’s smart and uninterested, like other girls I’d met in the city, but she had the good nature to roll with things for her own amusement, meaning, at that time, that she questioned me and Kerouac’s supposed denial of feminine adventure. I denied it on behalf of the both of us. Women are plenty adventurous. I just think Kerouac gets a bum wrap sometimes. He’s adventure, on the road and intelligent reverie and all that stuff, but he never gets credit for his lack of understanding and dislike of cruelty in his own life and work.

“To me, that’s the male of the 1950s, the perfect male who has taken up the option of spending his lifetime pondering the blatantly incomplete aspects of his being.” I notice that I’ve been holding my fork in the air this entire time, poised for the bite of steak at the end of it. I take the bite to shut myself up. She asks for the check.

I feel wrong, headstrong for no good reason. We go back to her place and she’s forgotten about it. When I’m taking off her clothes, I bring it back up. “I think I was wrong about that 1950’s male thing.”

“I don’t care.”

“Fine. But just so you know.”

“Thanks, but I still don’t care.”

The things that happen next happened next and then we laid ourselves there, deliberately, to prove we could have been elsewhere had we so chosen. The only thing left ahead was sleep. She went there and I didn’t. I straightened up next to her. The sheets and the pillows and the people on her bed were pressed fine and smooth. There was nothing in the world but surface: the buzz of flies, flesh and silk.

**********



Lyrics

My Bloody Valentine is a band from London, currently trying to shake off about twenty years of dust. They put out a shitpile of EPs and two full lengths. Enough stuff has been said about their 1991 album Loveless--regarding both the music and the folklore--that I don't feel the need to really say anything about it except I wish people would talk about it less and listen to it more. Bilinda Butcher's name reminds me of that Patton Oswalt bit where he talks about how "b" sounds are the fattest sounds a person can make.

Victor David Giron is a writer who lives in Chicago, IL. He's the head honcho over at Curbside Splendor, an independent publishing company based out of Chicago that aims to publish solid writing, often with an urban tilt. He is the author of the novel Sophomoric Philosophy, a book that has been called something by someone (No blurbs are out there yet, folks, which means you're just going to have to buy it when it comes out soon here and blurb it your own damn self). He's got a couple little kids who seem pretty rad and he likes The Sonics. No word yet on if he likes the restaurant Sonic.

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Next week: I haven't decided yet, but I'll probably do that soon.

"Rust": A story based on "Your Friend and Mine--Neil's Song" by Love, as suggested by musician Bob Bucko Jr (14/100)

Rust

AVAILABLE IN THE COLLECTION SHAKE AWAY THESE CONSTANT DAYS, AVAILABLE NOW THROUGH JERSEY DEVIL PRESS.

**********



Lyrics

Love were a band from L.A. that had about as many different members as Dokken, but were always led by Arthur Lee (though they would have been better if they had been led by Don Dokken). Their album Forever Changes is famous for being one of those records that hipsters and their parents can both enjoy unironically. Their name proves that the idea of someone trying to Google them 40 years later was not even a concern.

Bob Bucko Jr has been in a thousand bands you've never heard of. He used to play baseball and he loves the Harry Potter books. He's also one of my favorite guitarists, and he wrote one of my favorite songs ever. I've never heard anyone use the phrase "three-minute pop song" more than Bob. A true multi-genre embarrassment, I've heard him play doo-wop, Poison, jazz, bar rock, Captain Beefheart freakouts, and just about everything else. Also, he's always wanted to write a song called "Is My Pussy Man Enough For You?" but is yet to do so. I urge you all to steal this song title from him.

MySpace grab bag of songs

Nitetrotter solo guitar session

Always With the Don't Go EP

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Next week: A story based on "Only Shallow" by My Bloody Valentine, as suggested by writer Victor David Giron.

Sittin' In: "A Short Illness" by David Maizenberg, as based on the song "Good Fortune" by PJ Harvey

If you want to be a jerk about it, you could say that I spent too much time reading comics and buying old Rod Stewart shirts on eBay, and when it came time to write this week's story, I let it slide because it was the one thing I had to do that required any actual thought. However, I encourage you to be civil and look at the facts: I worked an unusual number of hours (read: full time, like any other functioning member of society) this past week in addition to having to find time for music-related projects such as two band practices, two shows I rocked out front row at, and listening to the new albums by Heart, Accept, and Katy Perry (I'm not as surprised as I wish I was that Katy Perry's is the best of the lot).

Regardless, I wrote no story for this week. Not even a first draft. I listened to the song, got no ideas, and went back to not writing the story. I blame exhaustion. Luckily, in his attempts to help me out, my friend and fellow fiction nerd Samuel Snoek-Brown was soliciting this website out to some writers he knows. David Maizenberg thought he was taking the bait. Really, though, Dave is the one who reeled me in. He thought he was to write a story based on a song of his choosing. I blame Sam's explanation of the project, which is probably a verbatim copy of my explanation of the project. So, I blame me.

Write a story based on a song of his choosing is exactly what Dave did, and it turned out fantastic. I've been toying with the idea of having guest stories every once in awhile, though I was originally opposed to it. If the quality comes out like this every time, however, I don't see how I can stay in that frame of mind.

Enough blabbering. Here's Dave's story. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I do.

**********

A Short Illness
(Fiction inspired by PJ Harveyʼs song and video for “Good Fortune”, for Ryan Wernerʼs song-inspiration website project. August 2010)

When I found her, in winter, she was a beautiful, starving disaster. Bundled in throws and jackets, a kaleidoscope of bad choices and artistic fantasies. When she left me, in summer, she was a wraith, on a mission, sleek black, armored by my love, in the glow of the secrets I revealed to her. God knows how I worshiped that fickle witch. And now every night is a lonely fantasy. Visions of her naked writhing, her wide mouth, her whispered visions.

She was coming off some real bad luck that winter. Her appearance was unsettling. Beneath colorful thriftstore coats and shawls she wore draped over her boney clavicles an ancient cashmere cardigan, grey, the color of her disposition and the city’s winter-blasted sky. Her hair was a mousy brown, the tips blond and red from ancient dye jobs. Her hungry eyes stared out half-hidden behind her bangs.

She’d been on some complicated missions, and they’d all failed. She was of the surprised generation. The generation that discovered it didn’t really know what it wanted after all. Unmoored from traditions, betrayed by theories, left with nothing, the party had long ago stopped.

I stripped her down, unwrapped her identities, sat her on my bed, and performed a great and intricate magic show for her. I took my limbs apart, wrapped them in my lungs, tied the whole package with my ligaments, and gave it all to her: my secret wisdom, the key to my luck and prosperity.

Winter turned to spring and she became a new woman, her hair jet black, her gaze steady and vulpine. I introduced her to my friends, hoping they would tame her, but she insulted every one. They are simple people who just want to have a good time. They feared for my safety. Nobody knew what she wanted or what she would do to me. They suspected she was prone to random attacks. And she would never surrender the tasty discipline of her starvation fetish.

By summertime she was entirely new and ready for the next phase of her life. She no longer needed me, and she told me so directly. I could not respond at first. The air was hazy and tasted full of grit. Finally I burst out “I love you more than life itself!”

I regretted saying it the moment it left my mouth. How absurd and grandiose a statement. What could such a pronouncement possibly mean in our world? Such love would make any normal person uncomfortable. In her it brought forth venom. At first she looked appalled, but then all at once she smiled, knowing now she was free for sure. She went to the window to smoke, tap her high heeled boots against the wall, and prepare a few words to mark her exhuberant departure, complete with a handbag twirling, life resetting street celebration. I had given her my mojo and she gobbled it up! What an appetite she turned out to have! And now she was heading back out into the streets from which she came.

Its a pitch black night and the apartment is empty. I go to a bar and get too drunk to stand. As she dances past the window she sees me slipping, windmilling backwards, and then collapsing, knocking over a table and chair in my fall. As my faithful friends rush to help me she just walks past, knowing she cannot be seen in the darkness.

**********



Lyrics

PJ Harvey is a svelte musician from Corscombe, Dorset in South West England. She has worked solo, with the PJ Harvey Trio, and contributed to multiple songs on the Desert Sessions series.

David Maizenberg wrote stories and scripts back in the nineties. Thankfully heʼs been otherwise occupied since then. But every once in a while . . .

(Note: Dave wrote his own bio. PJ did not.)

Our Band Could Be Your Lit on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Next week: A story based on "Your Friend and Mine--Neil's Song" by Love, as suggested by musician Bob Bucko Jr. (For real this time.)