No Words, Just Notes

The chime rang heavily on the stone step, echoing against the brick walls of the subway station.  The heavy gold coin bounced, wobbled in the air, and flashed a merry, winking orange up at Massoud in the warm light of the metro’s mouth.  Then dove back down, tinking again and again as it tumbled down the steps to rest below him.

Slightly more annoyed than anything at first, he stilled his thin fingers on the guitar strings and glanced up, his dark brown eyes scanning the edges of the station, up where it met with the sidewalk.   No passing pedestrian had thrown it down at him.  His caution and suspicion were not unfounded.  It could be a trick, to send him chasing after one coin to steal the bait-money of a couple of paper dollars and a few quarters already in his swati cap.  Frowning, he retreated a step or two to lift up the coin, and found it much heavier than anticipated.  It was a full dollar, slightly abraded by the fall, but clearly well taken care of beforehand.  Sacagawea squinted knowingly over her shoulder, appearing to wink due to the new scratch across her face.  The effect had him huff a brief laugh to himself, and he dropped the impressive tip down into his upturned hat, and he relaxed.

Massoud had only been playing this early because it was better to keep the guitar strings warm before the morning rush picked up, so that he remained in tune for all the people that would pass, pockets jingling with the unwanted change from their coffee purchases.  He’d had no audience that he was aware of, not unless he counted the homeless couple huddled in the lee of the staircase below, or the occasional early dog-walkers and joggers.  The gold coin floated warmly in the colourful cap, and brought Massoud’s fingers around to play a flighty, high octave ditty he’d heard from a music box once.  Perhaps unconsciously, he plucked the same note the coin had made as it struck the stairs more loudly than the others.

A streak of whimsy had him more alert now as he played, recalling his mother singing the tune to him and telling him about Peri, the fairyfolk who played their roles as helpers and tricksters both in stories.  Perhaps, he thought, one had dropped the coin out of the air for him, in thanks for his early morning music.  As he smiled down to his guitar, another harsh ping struck against the steps.  This time, the coin bounced toward his legs, and he brought one of his brown leather shoes down on top of it to still it.  His head whipped around, and then up again, but again, there was no one to be seen.  This time, however, he saw a flick of motion - just a small streak of brown from the second floor balcony of the shop nearest the stairwell.  Like the coin, the window glowed softly orange in the chilly morning air.  He stared, and waited, but no one came to the window.  As his eyes focused, he could tell it was open; the tan curtains moved when a bus passed on the street above.

He began to play, after a short while of nothing happening.  The first business people were starting to tromp their way past him, and he could not afford to miss many tips, not these days.  His eyes, however, remained fixed on the golden window above, until his neck developed a crick and he began to fantasize himself a swain standing underneath his beloved’s bower.  The fantasy affected his music, and he again went back to a more whimsical, lighter fare that tinkled and teased among the passing commuters, winning the occasional nickel and dime off them the way children might pickpocket a crowd just for mischief.

And then she leaned out. Moussad’s breath caught in his throat, sure for half a second that he had plucked her into being.  Skin the colour of a chestnut glowed like an ember in a fireplace, and a white sleeveless shift draped loosely around her.  Her hair, uncovered and loose, tumbled forward as she peered down at him, one hand in a fist, and drawing forward.  She saw him looking, and recognized that she’d been caught with a girlish giggle.  Still, she flung the third dollar coin down, and Moussad’s hand flicked out to catch it in midair, startling an older woman who bustled quickly down the stairs, glaring back at him and his big satisfied grin.

His eyes remained on the young woman, however, who drew her arm back in to the safety of the balcony, and twisted it to pull her long hair back away from her face.  As she turned to head back inside, she lifted her free hand to open and close all of her fingers in a graceful, fluttering wave, and disappeared inside, where for the rest of the morning Moussad serenaded the commuters of Market Street, his eyes and thoughts above their heads to the happy golden glow of the window, which thereafter remained empty - but open.

---

Originally published on Reddit.

Inspired by art owned by Pascal Campion, [website]

The Rusted Mall

The black sludge, Shannon Vega figured, was likely a mix of leaves that had rotted along with the emulsified remains of any papers or cardboard litter accumulated in the bottom of the deep, dry, brick fountain.  It had long ago ceased to stink, though she suspected if she gave into a temptation to chuck something into it, to disturb the gelled surface, it would belch something rancid into the still air of the tiny little mall.  She met her temptation halfway, and brushed some leaves from the edge into the basin, where they stuck promptly to the top of the sludge and refused to sink.

As malls went, this one was indeed extremely small, exactly, in fact, the size of a cotton warehouse.  Most parking garages were larger by several stories and half a block.  It had previously featured a large plexiglass dome over the center fountain, though multiple hailstones and new gunshots had broken all of the panes.  Finches, distressed at Shannon’s presence, continued their twittering, chatty evacuation of the center room.  Their wings were mini thunderclaps in the building, bringing life to the memory of an ancient sound.

The mall was three stories high, and all around the broad stairways, boarded up storefronts stood like crypts in a mausoleum.  They memorialized a plan one Chamber of Commerce had to save the dying little farming town.  To Shannon, the abandoned building memorialized something else.  She lifted her camera and snapped a short series of shots of the flaking signs.  Many were gone entirely, but the bolt-holes left behind still spelled out the names anyway.  Hair Barn, Nail Glam, Boots Made for Walking.  The proud spot at the short end of the building, opposite the entrance, had been a rare multi-story Wallblue’s.  The nearest one to the town now was forty minutes by car.  She’d stopped in that one to pick up extra batteries for her camera.

Shannon began her grim climb up toward her target, her ears almost visibly twitching every time a bird, raccoon, or just particularly ill-timed falling detritus made a crash in the scrub that had grown from the mall gardens.  In time, perhaps, the little maples reaching up for the broken dome might make it out.  For now, however, it had to compete with the ivy that had gone mad in a search for anyone and anything to strangle.  The floor in most places was still quite sound, and begging Shannon to pause were the scrawlings of the town’s teenaged previous population.  Occasionally she obliged, finding some comfort in the crude declarations of lust, love and conquest that peppered among the more distressing words.

At the very top of the mall, she unholstered her bag from her shoulders, and sought the wall she came here for.  For a long while, her solemn eyes roamed over the tableau.  It had been done with brush strokes, instead of the sharpies and spray paint below, and was, mostly, a list of fifteen names, each with a number for an age inscribed after it.  A rotting mass of silk flowers and chunks of burned down candles lay at its feet.  Beside them, Shannan placed her bag, opened it, and let the camera hang heavy as an albatross from her neck as she pulled out the can of white enamel spray paint.  The clattering sounds of bones echoed through the stricken building as she shook up the marble inside the can.

With one hand on her camera, and the other on her paint can, she hesitated.  The words at the top of the memorial were at the bottom of her list of expungement, scraping the name of her father from the face of the earth as best as one woman could.  She could take a photo, here.  She could capture the words “On August 15, 2017, Gregory Wilcox opened fire on...”   She made her decision, and lifted up her hand.  With the disapproving hiss of a snake, the spray can struck his name from the memorial.  At last, with her other, she took a picture of the glistening streak of pure white paint.

Originally published on Reddit.

More Than Enough

The teal tiles that lined the floor and half of the walls always smelled like cheap cleanser and just a bit of wee, I remembered.

When I was little, and my father brought me in for my weekly treat of just one donut selected with my eager finger smushed up against the glass case just above the tarnish-spotted metal border.  He'd ruffle my hair, chastise me for putting a finger smudge on someone else's hard work, and slide his thin leather wallet from the back pocket of his overalls.  It was too old to crackle when it opened, but I always imagined that it did, because the dark lines of decades of use on the creases of it. 

I never knew or understood how important it was to my father to be able to do this for me once a week. A little levity - a little bit beyond “enough.”  It was another chink in the chain of the poverty that followed my family line back to the coal mines.  

I was also too young to see the big machine in the back, too, behind the glass case and beyond the teal tiles, churning out the pastries by the dozens.  A lot of inhumanity went into that ritual.  A lot of automation.  A lot of jobs lost.  

Today,  I lifted my own son up to see the miniature factory behind the counter, and let him pull his own dollar from my dad’s, crackled, leather wallet.  He went to a good school.  He had his own savings account.  He had more than enough.  But once a week, I still took him here, to where my father’s sacrifices still mattered, and where the teal tiles still smelled like cheap cleanser, and just a bit of wee.    

--Originally published on Reddit.

Mr. Bends, a Blue Holly Wrath Citizen

Mr. Bends was a zombie, but people tried to not hold it against him.  

They also, politely as possible, tried to not hold anything at all against him, as it tended to come away sticky.  If you allowed the mucous to dry, he'd hasten to reassure you, it'd brush off with no problem. Learning what the gunk was didn't really help.  When he was alive, Mr. Bends would tell his customers, he had an astigmatism, also known as a squint, and he had to wear special glasses to adjust how his eyes focused.  These days he could adjust the wandering eye manually. This was better, he said.  He also appreciated not having all of his finger-pads anymore.  Some were still attached, and of course that was good, but occasionally it was useful in his line of work to have a good dry poking tool at hand.  

He used to be a warlock’s apprentice, as could be expected of anyone named “Pugnacity Bends,” but soon grew out of that phase when everyone who was in the tower at the time of the explosion got zombified.  It was a long story, and one he’d wave off, saying it was too long ago for any most parts to still matter. As he’d sometimes joke, horgling phlegm around in his throat, the only parts that mattered to him were the ones he was personally still attached to.  Most people assumed this was a lie, but let him keep the full story to himself all the same.  The citizens of Blue Holly’s Wrath tended to do that, on the whole.  Everyone you’ll ever meet has a full story, after all, but the people in Blue Holly’s Wrath had full chronicles, usually written, sung, or performed by other people.  Even a question like “so where are you from?” could fill an afternoon with its answer.

Besides, there was a lot about Mr. Bends that people didn’t want to know.  What happened to the food he clearly still ate, for example. What the goop he painted himself with every morning was, before he went out into the sun.  Where that third ear came from and why did he dig in it when he was lying? Questions followed the man around like eager dogs on tightly held leashes. In place of questions being answered, you generally just got rumours.  Never anything too malicious, naturally. Nothing inherently evil would last too long in town without being found out and expelled. Just.. gross things, and it was honestly hard to try to make Mr. Bends grosser than he was on a day to day basis.  

But he had a skill, and that skill was priceless, especially in a town like Blue Holly’s Wrath.  He didn’t hang a shingle - it’d be too hard to explain what was being bought and sold in his walk-in-closet of an apartment with the same universally understood pictograms with which one could, for example, advertise “shoes repaired” or “hair cuts here” or even, in the case of Tigor Sjembairn, “symbiant extraction.”  Instead there was a cabochon amethyst gem set into a silver bezel inlaid into the structure of his door, and a dull light writhed within it like tortured eels whenever certain people - prospective sellers - passed by.  It would always draw a glance from them but almost no one else, and any questions they asked about it to a resident would only get the response, “Go visit him.” If they were kind, people would add that it was better to visit Mr. Bends on a cooler day, and in a well-ventilated area if possible.

It’s easier to start with what he sold, rather than what he bought.  What he sold were the tiny, clattering objects he walked down the street with.  He did not bother to close the cardboard shoebox held carefully in both hands, and at his slow, limping gait, it was easy for anyone walking alongside him to shop through the wares.  It wasn’t uncommon for him to sell out before he even got to the armory, especially since everyone knew that Menchalk doubled Mr. Bends’ prices if he had to store the things in his shop for more than a day.  It looked like cheap, fake, costume jewelry. In places that had plastic, they thought it looked like plastic. People that had only gotten as far as resin thought it might be resin. Once properly glossed up with sealant, of course, each piece would have the shine of a real gem, but they never quite felt like rocks under the finger.  

“What does this one do?”  is a question Mr. Bends did get a lot, as people keeping pace beside him pointed gingerly into the open box at a cluster of oily black beads of onyx.

“It’s good for making the bearer stay awake,”  he’d answer, not bothering to adjust his wandering eye as it rheumatically swiveled on its own to watch the person’s reaction, the other staying on his plodding path so that he didn’t step in anything that he’d regret.  

“Mmm, no good there.  What about this one?” they might press, of an irregular piece that looked like a pearlized slug on a chain..  

“Elicits great sympathy from anyone around the bearer.  Less likely to punch ya,” he might add, and, after a rattling laugh that’d restore his personal space, “Unless they’re really wanting to.”  

Mr. Bends didn’t wear any of his own jewels.  He sold them to people who already knew what they were, even if they didn’t know what they did.  He used the money to pay his rent, to pay for the jars of goop he needed, to pay for his occasional meal, and to pay for the town’s single and exceptionally brave launderer to wash his clothes.  His tiny shed of an apartment was kept clean and scoured, and had in it only a cot, one bucket of goop, one empty bucket, a thin wooden chair, a bright lantern and some copper mirrors, and a spool of thread from which protruded two long needles, one curved, and one straight.  We’ll get to those in a minute. Everyone knew it was worthless to rob Mr. Bends, even if you were brave enough to fish around in a zombie’s pockets or risk getting trapped in a tiny room with him when he was annoyed.  It wasn’t that kind of town anyway.

But finally, about what he bought.  A prospective customer, gradually lured in by the cabochon on the door, would announce some variant of “I was told to come see you,” and Mr. Bends would simply say, “I know.”

At the meeting place, selected always buy the supplier, Mr. Bends would sit down and speak quietly and earnestly with the stranger for some time, and onlookers would witness, invariably, the speaker become enraged.  It showed up in different ways. Sometimes someone would try to lay hands on Mr. Bends, and, aside from finding him distressingly slippery, would find him to be as strong as steel and well defended by his neighbors. Sometimes they’d shout, and everyone would learn quite a lot about the stranger before the night was over.  Sometimes they’d cry. Almost always they’d leave the meeting outright, and Mr. Bends would patiently shuffle back to his home to wait.

They’d come back.

This time, they’d go in there with him.

Inside, they’d sit wherever they were most comfortable, and Mr. Bends would carefully ask questions of them, securing, as best he could, irrefutably and fully informed consent.  Then, he’d turn the lamp’s light up brighter, pick up the straight needle, and thread it.

This was where Mr. Bends stopped being a joke.  

Mr. Bends drew your curses out of you.  People, as it turns out, generate all sorts of curses all on their own.  Sins - which are really nothing but a sort of self-imposed curse could be drawn out of the hands on the head of Mr. Bends’ needle, and solidify in coloured chunks of emotions and intentions.  Sloth tended to make the softest sort of metallic structure that ran like mercury and took days to settle into a shape. Anger, a popular one in town, could be coaxed out of the palms in shards like jasper.  More esoteric concepts like loneliness might pull out from someone’s chest, beading up along the following thread like dewdrop diamonds, hollow and sparkling. A curse placed on someone by another was always more difficult to extract, and on those evenings Mr. Bends would request one of the town medics be present.  A curse of pain might be hiding up in someone’s sinus and needed tissues to be cut before he could safely lance it and drain it out. Death curses tended to hide under the rib cage, and sometimes their extraction brought on their bearer’s death anyway. If successfully drawn up and out, they tended to form beautiful rubies, so dark they almost looked black, but could be easily cut into all sorts of different shapes and sizes before they solidified.  His payment for this was the curse itself. You couldn’t keep it, and he would not directly sell it to you. There were ways around this, of course, but it was his own way of trying to break whatever karmic cycle got you into your mess to begin with.

Once the supplier, now no longer a stranger, left, Mr. Bends would spend the next few days nurturing the naked curse, calming it with strange whispers and prods of his fingers, and eventually get it to settle in a shape that could be reset, resold, and reused.  After all, all those enchanted gems in empowered armor and weapons had to come from somewhere, right?

 

And so it was hard for him to settle on a shingle.  He was the town therapist, a specialist doctor, and a gemcutter all in one, and when you really get down to it that’s hard to convey in just a little pictogram.  

A Promise I Won't Keep

Hi.  I'm Kaji.

I currently have a job that I love, I have people I care about, and I have a comfortable home.  I have a couple of cats and a fish, a lot of unfinished writing and art projects, and relationships too complicated to boil down in light conversations at parties. 

Not that I go to parties.  I'm terribly introverted and might suffer just one of those a year, if bribed financially and given professional incentive to stay.  I like dark, quiet places, a lack of small talk, and something to put my feet up on.  Everyday life tends to take a lot out of me.

That's mostly because of my mental illness.  Diagnosed with social anxiety with a sprinkling of entertaining hangers-on, I've apparently been working with a smaller toolkit than most people all of my life, though I didn't really know it until a few years ago, when I went to a few doctors about it.  It's one of the best things I've ever done, and I share the relief so many people feel when they realize that they feel crazy because they're actually a little crazy.

And boy, does it help me make sense of things.  I can understand now, why certain sounds make me rage even though I rationally know they're harmless and not even that irritating.  I can understand now why I would sabotage my nascent musical career (and writing career, it seems!)   And now that I can understand it, I am more equipped to know when and how to ignore the little voice in my head telling me that everything is going to go wrong, and that I ought not bother.

My head was such a tumultuous place for such a long time that my body had a stillness to it.  People though I was calm.  They thought I was relaxing to be around.  Mostly, it was just that so much was going on inside that I couldn't spare the energy for normal motor functions.  I am a champion waiter-for-things.  I tend to think before I talk.  I watch and I listen.  It hasn't been all bad.

In fact, quite a lot of my life has been good.  While I've experienced abuses, traumas, set-backs, bullying, and other horrible things, it hasn't been so unrelenting that I haven't been able to recover.  I sometimes feel like I have so many interests and so much curiosity because a lot of zigs and zags happened in my life to help me cope with whatever was going on. 

Anywho, this is the latest thing.  It's a blog about not knowing why I'm blogging.  A few people who mean well have been asking me to try to boot one up, thinking it will lead me to being published or some undefined "good" they haven't really been able to put into words.  I anticipate that sometimes this will be writing, sometimes this will be bitching, sometimes this will be psuedo-philosophical bullshit, and therefore I anticipate that this is going to be a pretty unremarkable place. 

Marketing has never been my strong suit.