On Tap
On this page, we’re pleased to post fresh-brewed fiction from writers across the greater Saint Louis region. For the most part, the pieces are posted as is. In other words, BSP does little, if any, editing. In this way, readers get a sense of the author’s work straight from the author’s brain & fingertips, so to speak. We’ll list links to all the stories and then feature a full piece on the page, so please scroll down. We hope you’ll pay special attention to the stories from local St. Louis City Lift For Life Academy students courtesy of their creative writing instructor Denise Bogard. Denise is founder and coordinator of the St. Louis Writers Workshop and is a writer herself. We’re looking forward to reading her forthcoming novel.
To submit your story to On Tap, paste it into an e-mail and send it with your contact information to ontap@blankslatepress.com. We look forward to hearing from you!
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On Tap Shorts
Scroll down (or download) for flash fiction, short stories & novel excerpts.
Life After Life by Ken McGee
Cigarette Bar by Jason Makansi
Marginalia Hallucination by Jason Makansi
(originally published in Marginalia)
Christmas by Benjamin Westbrook
Rough Draft by Ken McGee
Fortune Smiles by Ken McGee
Slurried by Dan Koester
Summertime by Kelli Stuart
Weightlifter by Joe Schwartz
Parker’s Maelstrom, by Steve Stranghoener
For Security Purposes by Nancy L. Baumann
Paper Bag Surgeon by Scott Thomas Smith
Place Your Ear by Tim Lepczyk
Those Drowned Out Stars by Tim Lepczyk
End of the Workshop by Frank Kovarik
Intersection by Sarah Weinman
Gemini Courtship by Harry Knopf
The Boy and the Tower by Jaysen Cryer
Rock and a Hard Place by Georgia Lee Kester
How the Seasons Started: A New Myth by Nadia Felder, Lift for Life Academy
Memento Mori (novel excerpt) by Kennedy Hemme, Lift for Life Academy
Semiotic Love (novel excerpt) by Quin Mendoker, Lift for Life Academy
What I Can’t See (novel excerpt) by Selena Castro, Lift for Life Academy
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Current Featured Shorts
Life After Life
© Ken McGee
The second he awoke, Andy knew he was dead. He was lying in a king-size bed in a perfect hotel suite. It was too plush, too spacious, too clean to be real, as if no dust mite or microscopic virus had ever intruded there. When he got up, he discovered the room had no windows, the pulled drapes revealing only a bare wall. His naked body in the full-length mirror looked as it had in his twenties although he remembered celebrating his 80th birthday a few weeks before. He shook his head, amazed at the thick mane that flowed from his skull – his old hair. As he walked to the huge bathroom, each step was free of the aches which he had come to accept early in the morning (assuming it was morning).
To his surprise, he was not in a panic, and out of habit he decided to take a shower to prepare for whatever would happen next. The hot water felt great on his young skin, and the soap and shampoo smelled of mint. The provided towels were large and fluffy; the heat lamp came on automatically as he began to dry off. He tried to remember his last moment of life, but could only recall saying good-night to his wife before going to sleep. He put on the white robe hanging on a large brass hook and walked from the bathroom to find that his bed had been made. The only sound came from the slap of his wet soles on the tile as he approached a heavy door that seemed to be an exit. He put an ear to it, but heard nothing. Andy opened the door and left.
He came not into a hallway, but another room where a young woman sat knitting behind a mahogany desk. She put down her work and motioned for Andy to sit in a comfortable-looking chair opposite her. There was no other furniture. Behind her was a door painted sky blue with a gold knob. It was the only bright color in the room apart from the dark-red nails of the woman drumming her fingers on the desk.
“Andrew Edwards, how are you feeling? Hungry? We have anything you can think of. Steak and eggs? Western Omelet?”
Andy stood there looking at what he was beginning to realize was a very beautiful woman, who smiled as someone without an earthly care. As she walked over to shake his hand, he noticed that she was wearing a white robe similar to his, except a bit shorter with the name “Allison” sewn into the lapel. The thought that she was probably also naked underneath conjured up an image he would have assumed impossible in this place and one he quickly suppressed.
“Are you an angel?” he asked as their hands touched. She laughed the way people laugh at a joke they have already heard.
“Hardly. I’m just here to explain your options.” She had perched on the edge of the desk, ankles crossed, and was slowly swinging her shins toward him. Her toenails were the same red as her fingernails.
“Is this Heaven? Do I get to stay this age forever? What am I, 24?”
“You’re a compilation of your best features as you once thought of them. Your face is 23. Your body 26. Your hair is what you had at 20. I think your internal organs are about 28 when you were running regularly.” She hesitated. “But no, this is only while you’re here.”
“So where else do I go? You said options, but I only see one door other than the one that goes back into the hotel room.” He looked directly at her face as he spoke averting his gaze from her legs.
“Ah, that’s just it. If you choose to go through the blue door to enter the next life, you will cease to exist as Andrew Edwards, but you will attain a higher form of consciousness for eternity.” The statement seemed to be one that she had learned verbatim like the pitch of a telephone solicitor. She was leaning quite close as she spoke and smelled of the same mint soap from the shower.
“What if I don’t want not to exist anymore?” Andy asked, hoping not to sound too flippant. He did not especially like her description of the other side of the blue door and for the first time since awakening felt a bit queasy. Allison leaned back and explained his situation slowly as someone might impart the rules of new board game.
What he could do no must do, if he chose not to opt for eternal life behind the blue door at this time, was to go back through the other door and relive his life again altering one major decision. Then he would return and see whether he had changed his mind about the blue door. She would write the decision on a piece of paper, and he would take it with him re-entering his life at exactly that moment of decision to begin living in a different direction.
“So let me get this straight. I can relive my life from age 22 on when I choose, this time, to go to law school, say, instead of getting a job and getting married right out of college? And I won‘t remember, I guess, any of this? ” She nodded. They both stared.
“But what if Jane doesn’t wait for me and marries someone else? What will happen to my kids?” The thought of his children being denied existence filled him with dread for the second time during his brief death. Allison laughed and walked back behind her desk.
“They’ll exist in that other life, the one you can’t go back to. And they’ll most likely exist in this one if Jane hangs in there for three years. Either way, this is about your choices and getting a slightly different life.”
She said “slightly” in an almost mocking tone, and for a moment he thought he should have made a more flamboyant decision, but couldn’t think of one. He sensed that he did not have much time to consider his choices, and not going to law school had been, after all, his great regret in life. Allison was writing something at her desk on a 3×5 card.
“OK. So no matter what, you’re going to law school this time. Nothing will dissuade you. All you need to do is take this card and go back into your room where you’ll actually be in your dorm in your senior year in college. OK? Study hard, pass the bar, see what happens. I’ll be here when you get back.”
“You’ll wait all that time? In here?”
“You’ll be back before I finish two rows on my scarf.” She indicated her work on the desk. “Ninety years go by in a flash.”
Holding the index card, Andy hesitated. She sensed his embarrassment and smiled.
“Don’t worry. Listen, almost nobody goes through on their first trip. It’s rather daunting to give yourself up. So, go on now.” She flexed her fingers twice as if saying good-bye to a child. He turned and walked toward the door to the hotel suite.
“By the way, next time, there’ll be a TV in your room. You should watch it before you come out. OK, then. Have a nice life.”
Waking again in the same room, Andy felt as if only a few hours had passed since his conversation with Allison, though he had lived an entirely different life and was filled with new memories. As she had said, a TV set was mounted on the wall, and a remote control lay on the nightstand. Only two programs were available: Life 1 or Life 2. He watched his first life, all eighty years of it, in what seemed like a half hour. The more recent life took less time because it was the same until he branched off into law school. He watched until his BMW was sideswiped by a pick-up truck and about to slide across the median into a semi. He turned it off and went in to find Allison sitting at the same desk, still knitting.
“Did I just watch my life twice in 45 minutes?”
“Strange, isn’t it? Time makes no sense here. No point of reference, I suppose. So, you became a very successful lawyer, respected by your peers, and all, and very wealthy. The damned pick-up was unlucky, of course. What do you think?”
“Jane didn’t wait for me. I married Karla who was much more beautiful, but we drove each other crazy. We fought about everything from the beginning. I was thinking about the divorce when the pick-up came over, or else I might have missed it.” He looked at her for a long time and then past her to the blue door.
“Ready for the leap of faith?” Andy considered the status of his faith, but was distracted by Allison’s bare clavicle visible in the neckline of her robe.
“Easy now.” She wagged a finger. “You did get to be quite a man about town during the time you were separated. Lots of broken hearts, I’ll say.” She did not adjust her robe.
“So you know everything about me? You’ve watched the tape or whatever?” Andy had to sit down in the comfortable chair. Both of his lives weighed heavily on him.
“I watched it live, yes. You really tried so hard. It was very touching.” She paused. “So, do we try another?” Allison picked up a pen and waited, poised over another 3×5 card. Eventually, she motioned with her head toward the blue door bobbing her eyebrows.
“I’m still not ready for that. Can I do everything the same and just not marry Karla, no matter what?” She wrote a few words on the card, handed it to him and sent him back to another life.
This time he watched only his last life from the moment he broke up with Karla for good. He became a much more successful lawyer; married a woman named Bethany and through her family connections was elected to the state legislature. He grew powerful and corrupt. His son became an alcoholic, a mistress committed suicide as a direct result of his selfishness. While these things were terrible, Andy noticed that this time that the small cruelties were the hardest to watch. His flash of anger at his daughter wanting to sit on his lap while he was reading a case file devastated him. He looked for the fast forward button. There was none.
“It gets harder,” Allison said handing him a tissue as he slumped in the chair before her. “The more lives you have under your belt, the more difficult it is to reflect on them.” She was sitting on the edge of the desk again, her legs crossed.
They discussed all three of his lives in great detail. He was surprised by how much more she dwelt on the positive things he had done, not the accomplishments that might have appeared in his obituary, but also the smallest acts of kindness that went unnoticed by the world. When he had lost everything in this last life, Andy had spent some precious dollars to convince the old woman next door that her sons had sent her Christmas presents. It seemed a lame attempt to him, and the woman did not seem really fooled, but Allison thought it was wonderful.
“It’s like watching a baseball game. If somebody strikes out three times, but hits a home run to win the game, the fans forget the “K’s” on their scorecard.”
Andy didn’t see that the analogy fit very well, but he did like that she knew what “K’s” were. This was the longest time he had spent in the room, and she seemed in no great hurry. She clapped her hands and a table with dinner appeared. They ate and talked. The food was perfect and easily absorbed by his twenty year old digestive tract. When they finished, there was a long lull until she hopped up from the table gesturing with her arm toward the blue door.
“Will I remember any of me if I go in there?” He was standing, considering.
“You’ll be part of something else, something beautiful, without desire. You will be one with God.” He wondered if she noticed his eyes straying to where her robe, pulled open by her still outstretched arm, was exposing a significant view of her right breast.
“So I will see God, but there will no ‘I’, the ‘I’ I’ve come to know and love, left?”
“It’s hard to explain or understand, but it’s supposed to be really quite wonderful.”
“Haven’t you been there?”
“No.” Allison turned away to stare at the door and, he noticed, prevent him from seeing her face. They stood silently for what might have been twenty years on earth.
“I’ll tell you what. I’m not going that way or back the other way either. I’ve had three wives, seven kids, a bunch of grandkids and too much heartbreak to go through it all again just to wake up in whatever the hell this is.” He paused until she turned to face him. “And I’m not ready to choose annihilation. I’ll just stay here until whatever goons you have throw me out one of these doors.” He braced himself, but nothing happened.
“If you don’t choose one or the other, you’ll become like me.” Allison had reseated herself at the desk during his rant and was all business again. She was not smiling. The table and dishes had disappeared, and he thought he noticed the lights dim ever so slightly.
“You’re dead too?” She nodded.
“This is where you end up if you won’t go through the blue door and can’t stand the thought of another version of your life on Earth. I managed only three before I broke down. I guess they’re just waiting for me to decide, on my own, to go through the door.”
“So you just stay here in limbo or whatever you call this, trying to talk me into doing what you won’t do? That’s terrific. Who’s running this joint? I know, I know, it defies understanding, and all will be revealed if I just go through the door and end myself.” He thought a minute. “If I become whatever you are, can we still get together and talk? Do you get breaks or anything?”
“No. You’ll never see me again. You’ll be in another room working with whatever soul comes to you until you get bored with it and go through the blue door. There are always choices, Andy. Just not unlimited choices.”
“Are those your legs at twenty?” was all he could think to say.
“I think 23 or 24. My feet are mine at about 18 before I started to crush them into all those narrow shoes.” The lights dimmed again, and he noticed the temperature in the room had dropped again. Allison pulled her robe tighter. She looked nervous as she rolled the pen back and forth with her finger on the stack of cards making a tiny clicking noise. Andy picked up the pen and wrote, “Take that job in San Diego,” put the card in his robe pocket and went back to another life.
Allison took up her knitting. She watched him fail in San Diego, ultimately dying alone. He tried marrying a passionate, but unstable, woman he had dated in college with predictable results. He lived the life of the academic and hated it. Between every life he remained with her longer, talking not just about his most recent experience, but about her lives as well. During one visit, she made the video screen appear, and they watched all three of her lives in total. Now he knew her joys, her hungers, her suffering as well as she knew his. He thought her lives were wonderful. Overall, he found hers to be much more steeped in love than his. Those were the exact words he used to describe them to her.
He tried the life of a rock ‘n roll singer, a talent he had always been curious about, but his strait-laced family had made its pursuit grounds for disinheritance. She watched as this became a disaster of drugs and meaningless sex without much music. His family disowned him.
Allison watched him die again suddenly of complications from a bad mixture of heroin and speed on New Year’s Eve and wondered what he would do next. Although he had been a long time in the suite, she had not heard the sound of him re-watching any of his lives. Seven was a lot to have on your soul; three had been terrible enough. All the love, all the loss hurt too much to go on.
Finally, she heard the shower and Andy singing a song he had written during this last life. He would come out soon. Allison walked to the blue door knowing that if she entered, a new person would instantly take her place behind the mahogany desk. There were many who refused to choose. Seeing she had gone, Andy would find it easier to follow her away from the curse of consciousness. She stood at the door just as Andy reached the chorus of his song.
“I’m back, back, back, back, back to see my b-b-b-b-baby.” He sang the trite lyrics with the great gusto that had almost made it a hit during that life. It should have been a hit, she thought. Allison looked at her 17 year-old hand on the golden doorknob, her fingers straight and strong, without blemish or wrinkle. She had seen two people enter before she had been Andy‘s guide. It only required the merest twist and they were gone as if their resolve alone sucked them through to the other side emitting only a slice of blinding light.
The water stopped, but Andy continued to sing. She walked back to the desk and turned it into a large couch, an exact copy of the overstuffed one she had bought for her first single girl apartment. She tossed her robe on it and smiled as Andy entered the room.
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The Cigarette Bar
© Jason Makansi
She stood in the corner, lit up a long slender cigarette, smoothed her maroon evening dress, gathered tightly at the waist, cut at the thigh, and traced the arc of her concentric pearls at the neck. She arched her upper body, as if following the smoke back into her throat and lungs.
He ordered a cigarette.
“How about a Viceroy?”
“You got it,” said the attendant, pulling on his white blazer.
The idea of a cigarette bar fascinated him. He had a theory: Smoking satisfied a primitive urge from when cave men and women inhaled smoke from their fires.
She looked over at him, as if on cue, when she heard his voice.
He smiled. The smokers’ quarantine fostered camaraderie, and he needed some kindness.
“Reminds me of the smoke team in high school,” he called to her.
“Did you smoke Viceroys then? That brand makes nostalgia seem recent.”
“I smoked menthols then, Salem, Newport, never Kools, though…”
“Rescue me,” she said, penetrating his eyes with hers, “from the interminable client dinner in a stifling private room. I’m exhausted already, and it’s only cocktail hour.”
“Mine’s a rather short evening, I’m afraid, a first date who didn’t show. He lit up and inhaled. The smoke filled his head like the flu.
“So, what was the smoke team?”
“Boys with permission from their parents could smoke in a garage underneath the infirmary, but nowhere else. We were the first huddled mass of smokers.”
“You went to an all-boys school?”
Kent nodded.
“I attended an all-girls school. It sure warped my mind.”
He laughed. “I know what you mean.”
“Well, you don’t, but that’s okay. Been here before?
“No.”
“Well, come, take in the view,” she said, in a voice like a dream chiseled in cement. She guided him to the railing.
“Over there is the university, see the blue neon sign? and that’s the medical complex.”
The moistened lipstick on her cigarette filter turned him on.
“My name’s Kent, by the way, Kent Bourshay. I’ve never been to a cigarette bar.”
“Virginia Eschenbach, delighted to meet you. You might say I frequent The Overlook.”
She extended her hand. He gripped it. She gripped his harder, until he could feel the roughness of her lifelines in his palm.
“Well, who knows,” she said, “maybe it’s a trend? Like water bars in the eighties.”
“The bartender told me this is the ugliest intersection in America.”
“I have to return to the herd of competing intellects. Take a walk outside. Maybe you’ll see what he means.”
She snuffed her cigarette out. It disappear into an ashtray that seemed to double as sculpture, and he imagined it tumbling into the discard pile with hundreds of others.
Kent returned to the wet bar inside, to the dark mahogany, and richly colored lamps of deep yellows and fire-y oranges. He ordered another Scotch on the rocks, then wandered outside. Around the corner, he could see the wide industrial artery that cleaved the city, the elevated interstate, and heard the faint movement of cars destined for anywhere but here. He hurried back in.
Back at the bar, he wrapped his napkin around his Scotch to warm his hand. He felt restless so he returned to the cigarette bar on the porch. This time he ordered a Camel non-filter. At the first inhale, he coughed up a fit.
Daylight quickly gave way to dusk. He noticed Virginia hidden by several smokers congregated at the other end of the porch, something white and fluffy draping her neck. As soon as they made eye contact, she pushed past the crowd and pulled a cigarette out while she walked towards him. He was ready with his silver-plated lighter. Though expertly cupped by his hands, the flame flapped in the light breeze, as she leaned into it.
“I took the walk,” he said, “felt like the next mugging victim.”
“But there’s something about it, don’t you think? You look long enough at ugliness, you find beauty.”
He didn’t think so but didn’t wish to be disagreeable.
“God, I am so bored in there, I could cream myself day-dreaming.”
Did she really say that?
“Take in the dusk, then” he said, “this is the light the artists love.”
She took a long drag and turned to look at him, puzzled, like, where did he get that line. It was sweet and sensitive, and rehearsed.
“What do you know about art?” she asked, then discharged every wisp of smoke from her lungs.
“Well, I…”
“Kiss me, Kent Bourshay.”
He looked at her, uncertain but needy.
“Don’t make me ask twice.”
She was already moving. She placed her hands delicately on his cheeks, adjusted her nose, and paired their lips. She closed her eyes, grazed his lips with her tongue, then pulled away.
“Your hands are cold!”
“Then warm them.”
He did as he was told and clutched them to his breast bone.
“Mind you, I’m not going to sleep with you. I just needed a release. My husband and his clients are driving me nuts in there.”
“Your husband’s here?” My God, you could have said something.” He looked instinctively at the bar’s exit.
“He doesn’t care enough to hurt you.”
“I doubt that. Babe like you? C’mon! You should have said something.”
She looked up at him. “You don’t take risks, do you? Aren’t I worth some risk?”
“Sure I do,” he countered, “calculated ones anyway.”
“Well, maybe I will sleep with you. I’m not that kind though. I just wanted to be kissed without the ‘tasting like an ashtray’ whine, you know? ”
He didn’t hear a word she said. He kept one eye out for the spouse.
He could smell the cigarette’s toxic burn into the filter’s fiber just as she was turning to walk way.
She glanced back and said, “start calculating, pretty boy.”
Chilled, Kent went back in to the bar. She’s all over him, he was thinking, and her husband’s here. She’s syrupy sweet then sour. But why? Then he thought, why not? He took a small vial from his jacket pocket, picked out a football-shaped pill, and chased it with the watery mixture that had become his scotch, once with rocks. He saw a trace of her red lipstick in the faint lines of his fingerprint after he drew his hand across his lips. A few minutes later, he watched Virginia breeze through the bar towards the ladies room, cell phone in hand, caught his eye, and smiled as if to share a private joke.
He headed back out to the porch and ordered another Camel. The first one kicked his head like velvet boots. He leaned over the porch rail and blew smoke rings towards the blue neon. He wondered about the kiss. Was it memorable? After the smoke, he walked back in, his head cloudy from cigarettes meant for a different era. He stared past the sporting events on the tube. When would she need her next cigarette? What he was hanging around for? He was either gonna get dumped or get pounded. He probably wasted that little blue pill and they weren’t cheap. If he left now, he could at least whack off, make good use of the hard on.
He noticed a woman enter with a stylish red beret, offfered her his space at the bar, and went out to have yet another cigarette, almost chain smoking now.
When Kent saw Virginia come through the bar to meet the red-beret woman, he started towards them, until he realized that a man was following her.
“Paul, look who was here when I came out for a cigarette!”
“Amanda,” Paul said, arms out-stretched, palms up. “How are you?”
“Very well, thank you. Nice to see you entertaining in my neighborhood.”
“Well, it’s not our first time here. You and Amanda have met here before?”
“You know, for us smokers, what could be better?”
“Both of you should give up that nasty habit.”
“Paul, honey, I’m going to keep Amanda company, crash at her place. She can bring me home in the morning. We haven’t had a girl on girl chat in ages!” She winked at him.
“Cool. I’ve got another stop or two to make with the boys. I’m pleading with the one guy not to ‘jump the ditch’ but…I don’t know…”
“Well, if you do, only PT’s okay? Those other joints have bad raps. I don’t want you medi-vacked back to the city.”
“Don’t worry, this bunch’ll take care of me.”
Kent could now feel the relentless throb against his trousers. He thought about stroking himself in the men’s room, just to make it go down. The departure of the man talking to the ladies brightened his outlook. As soon as he left, Virginia and Amanda found him.
“He’s taken care of,” said Virginia.
“What?” Kent asked.
“Paul…and his clients. They’re on their merry way, to the strip clubs. C’mon…our festivities are just beginning! Oh…Amanda? Kent. Kent? Amanda.”
“A pleasure,” Kent said, blandly, taking Amanda’s hand.
“Oh, give her a hug.” Virginia pushed him into her. “We’re all friends now.”
Virginia grabbed one hand, Amanda the other, and pulled him through the crowd to the porch.
“Ladies, what are your faves? I’m buying.” Kent offered.
“I love those weird clove ones, you know, from India, or some exotic place.”
“Oohh, it’s been ages! I’ll take one too,” Virginia said.
“Well, I don’t know the brand but if the, what do you call him, the dispensier, has it, two of them are coming up.”
Before the hour was up, Kent was just plain drunk. Virginia was drunker. Amanda, having gotten a late start, wasn’t sober but at least coherent.
“Ever made love where love’s never made?” Virginia asked.
“Not I,” answered Amanda, “at least I don’t think so, because I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about the ugliest intersection, where want meets waste, where consumption meets its end.”
“It’s a strange place,” Kent said, “from what I could see.”
“Let’s go. See it up close and personable.”
Kent wanted no part of it, even if arm and arm with two lovely ladies.
“Surely there’s somewhere else, with romance and mood, live music…” he countered.
“What’s the matter?” Amanda asked, “Are you a chicken shit?”
Kent was blown back. He could feel the pulse and push in his trousers, more compelling than the shrink and swell in his head. He looked at his watch. When had he taken the pill? How many hours did they last? He read the label once.
“We’ll make it a threesome, right, Amanda?”
“Sure, I’m just your friendly neighborhood escort.”
They stumbled out the bar, then towards a crumbling concrete bridge, empty of movement, save a rare car hurtling towards elsewhere. He looked over the side. Train tracks, freight cars, warehouses. Then he realized he was on an elevated section of highway sloping downward, before being pulled by the ladies onto an exit ramp diverting into the rail yard. Above him were a dimly lit water tower, splayed with graffiti, smoke stacks and air vents, and a lumbering brown grain elevator keeping each other company against the backlit urban skyline.
He kicked at some scraggly bushes poking out of the sidewalk and almost tumbled over, yanking Amanda and Virginia with him. The ladies just laughed. In the rail yard the idled pitch black tank cars and yellow livestock cars loomed so much larger up close, and contrasted sharply with the beiges, dull red brick, and gray corrugations of the structures behind them. His eyes followed a rusting storm drain pipe from the road surface and down one of the support pillars emptying into a vast junk yard of strapped bundles of recycled paper and cardboard, old timber and rail ties, abandoned construction equipment from the Jurassic era, tangled meshes of rusting steel and wire, and rows of fifty five gallon drums as far as the eye could see.
“Have you ever seen so much shit in one place?” Virginia said, laughing, as she kicked with her heels at a drum teetering on some old railroad ties.
“Damn, it’s gotten cold. It’s too cold for this.” Kent shivered.
“Nonsense! Shared bodily warmth!”
Virginia looked up at the roadway structures above them, with their stalactites of bird droppings, peeling paint, and crumbling mortar. “Shared bodily warmth,” she yelled loudly, hoping it would echo.
“I wonder why it doesn’t echo,” Amanda said.
“This looks like a place to get KO’d,” Ken exclaimed, pleased at his wit, while he trembled inside.
“Now, look, pretty boy, you just leave your safety in our capable hands.”
Virginia stared at him, as if taunting him, put her hands into her gown, fiddled around until she slipped her brassiere out, and dangled it from the end of her finger. Then she flipped out her lighter from her palm and torched it, tossed it behind her, and reached in again, cupped her breasts and displayed them outside of her gown. Her pearls, adorned only by her flesh, looked like a collar. She pulled a cigarette out of her purse.
“Wanna see beauty and ugly? Wanna smell burning flesh, burning breast?” She brought the lit end of the cigarette towards her nipple. “I can feel the heat…now comes the singe…”
“You’re sick, darling,” Amanda said to her, “but I’ll still respect you in the morning.”
The sight of Virginia’s breasts, and the prospect that she would ignite them like wicks of a candle, made him reach for her, like iron filings to a magnet.
“I’ll keep you warm. Don’t hurt yourself.”
“Don’t touch me! I’m not cold, pretty boy. You’re cold.”
Kent backed off.
“Expose yourself!” Virginia commanded, “No secrets here.”
“You first, Amanda.” Kent said, sheepishly.
“You first, shit, Kent, I warned you about this chicken shit crap. Show us something!”
Not able to look down at himself, or at the ladies, he slowly unzipped his trousers, as if wondering himself what might spill out.
Virginia laughed. “Well, I didn’t say what you had to expose, but lookie there, Ginny. It ain’t that cold out here.”
She continued. “You a porn star, Kent…Kent Sashay?…or did you pop one of pappa’s little helpers?”
Kent began to shake. Should he confess? She was getting downright mean, but there was no turning back now.
“I did take one. I didn’t take it because of you…for my date. Who didn’t show.”
“Confident you’d score, but afraid you’d deflate? A calculated risk, I suppose? Okay, Amanda, your turn. Expose yourself.”
Amanda unzipped her jeans. Kent caught a flash of purple and green stripes before she zipped them back up.
“That’s all you crazy people are getting from me.”
Virginia hoisted herself and parked her rear on top of a drum. Then she tried to stand on it, wobbling in her heels.
“I’m gonna dance to the dark side of the moon.” She pointed.
It’s up there somewhere.”
Her hips began to sway and she closed her eyes. She put her arms out for balance.
“You’ll ruin your dress, Virginia.”
“Ah, it’s nothing. Paul buys me new ones all the time.”
After the last drag on her cigarette, she flipped it across the arrayed line of drums.
As soon as it landed, a flame shot up into the air.
“Christ!” Kent yelled, “you started a fucking fire!”
“Well, you’re the one said he was cold.”
“No, you don’t get it! This whole place could blow.”
“Goddamn, look at all these drums, Who knows what the fuck’s in ‘em.”
“Geez, pretty boy, don’t get all hysterical on us.”
“Damn, he’s right, Ginnie, let’s get the hell out of here. Now!”
“Calm down. Do I have to do everything around here?”
She got off the drum, walked over to the fire, stomped on the flames, then threw some bricks and gravel on it. It wouldn’t go out but it wasn’t spreading either.
“Virginia, I’m with Amanda. This is bad news. This is really bad news.”
“No, come on. Come here.”
“I’m out of here, love,” Amanda insisted, walking backward a few steps.
Kent stood frozen in his shoes, his rod pointing to the highway surface above them.
Virginia walked towards him, alternating a look of malice with one of nonchalance. She threw her arms around him, and wrapped her fingers around his pointer, warming him instantly. She squeezed, but only enough that he’d know she could hurt him. Then she guided his head to her left breast, as if cradling him.
“Douse the ember with your spit.”
Kent wrapped his lips around her nipple.
“Do you want risk free? No, you don’t, Kent. That’s not living. You’ve rescued me. Let’s burn together.”
Kent looked at the flames from the corner of his eye. He could see the top of the ramp where Amanda was, urging them with her arms to hurry up. Maybe there was just enough time. He was scared shitless but being this hard overruled every warning his state of panic sent him. She pulled him onto a bed of cardboard, his palms pressed against gravel and broken glass. She hiked her dress up, and he made love to her, losing track of time but not the progress of the fire, coming in a flood of tears to the reverb of “pull it out, pull it out,” as he deposited himself onto her while the burning puddle of solvent consumed itself.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hallucination in D Minor
© Jason Makansi
Only a second or two separates the dream from what is on the other side of it, another meeting. Up here in the clouds, above the city of New York, almost everything is dreamy. You never forget about the magnificence. If there was a cloud in the sky, it would be undulating. Every gaze you steal out the window is like peering through a slit of space-time continuum.
Except when you meet the eyes of the honcho at the head of the table sipping coffee, his supervisors to his either side. You and the other direct reports line up and down the sides of the long table. Paper is passed around. The honcho clears his throat, cracks a joke, compels everyone to get started, and the discussion about some dull engineering project begins. You look past him at, well, nothing, nothing in the sky but one tone of blue, with something huge barreling through it toward you.
After a few seconds, the tremolo opening chord sounds, the violent strings descend two notes, then a short hop and back up, reaching, for what? The ominous roll of the tympani completes the phrase, and the stylist in your hand is on automatic, like a pen recorder, tracing the modulations of Brahms First Piano Concerto on a tablet of graph paper. Then it escalates. You are a member of a Philharmonic. What is coming at you in the window disappears.
How many times during these meetings have you found your left hand clamping your right hand to the table so it wouldn’t obey the subconscious signals from your brain to conduct the music that you hear, as clearly as the solid blue you see out the window? This is one of
those times.
You see other musicians separating from you, physically sliding away. Instead of looking at the floor, you turn to look at the principal French horn player. She looks vaguely like a woman who had been sitting near you, who has captured the lusty ventricle of your heart. You’ve longed for her the way the ram-like curly-cues of that horn are nurtured by the cashmere fabric folding in delightful patterns around her breasts. And her lips, oh her lips. They are red, puckered from her craft. You want your lips to be where her musty breath is before it is transmogrified into the bittersweet sounds coming from that horn. How delicate a kiss must be, like the lighting of a butterfly, so she doesn’t feel pain.
Her horn sounds the clarion call after the notes from the strings extend, despairing to hang on, only to slip, descending level by level, like a body falling, hitting sections of building on the way down, back into the depths of the base.
On the other side, expressions of horror and fear float around the room, separated from their owners, but on this side, your French horn player only looks puzzled, as if she had just played a wrong measure, as if the conductor is tapping the stand, and admonishing her. In a fragment of a second after she glances at you, she acknowledges the melodic bond between you.
Instinctively, you move towards her, but then you notice that you are moving away too. The orchestra is spreading apart quickly. Your organs accelerate into your throat, the same sensation as when the elevator in this building rises very fast, whisking its occupants to the stratosphere. Your music stand falls over but the music pages defy gravity. They hang suspended in front of your eyes, like an image on film in a darkened room.
Flames vaporize the bits and pieces of everything on the other side of this dream. Your piece of graph paper, though, is floating somewhere over the city. Parts of you, and parts of others, are ahead of other parts, behind, to the side, above, and below. There are parts of the imaginary musicians floating amongst the parts of everyone sitting here a moment ago. All are just the parts of the sum now. There is no cashmere-cloaked horn player, and no you, yet you still hear.
Pages of music defy gravity, defy relativity. Just when what is left of your mind praises the resistance of the music to this calamity, the air where your hand was grasps at the music, something to hang onto, in the absence of a person, the horn player, anyone. Then the glue
and string of the spine explode, the pages drift away, and the paper dissolves. Still, the notes of the concerto hang in the air, intact, each one where it is supposed to be relative to the other ones. They appear like organized dots between your eyelids and your eyeballs.
The concerto continues. The unbearably sweet but firm entrance of the piano, “I am here now,” it seems to say, coquettishly, the triads and chords ascending up, then down, back up, and ending on the same notes as the melody begins, a pause, then the melody in a long ascending rush. The shrink and swell, the outline of the horn player’s small, powerful frame flows through her instrument. But she is not there.
Finally, the notes disintegrate. Now you know what is the last sense to survive. But, as the propagation of your last brain pulses crash toward the asymptotic zero, it comes to you, the years you’ve been in love with this concerto, its tortured path from the composer’s brain to notes on the page, the microsecond you’ve embraced the empty space that was once this woman. You glide on a bed of air, the serenity of the piano’s melody, the gentle perpetual breath, a conveyance away from the rebellious tonality collapsing underneath. At the final moment, a weak human bond suspended on a melody is better than no bond at all. Maybe Brahms knew that.
