jenga d CC
Comfort Creature RAIN. TRAFFIC SLOWS. Snake up the motorway. Sky clears. Weather delays the next day way back from the gig. Sun coquettish, behind clouds, shines down in widening rays, widening, widening fickle summer season. Leave with hope. Love the one who is far away. Rain some more. * * * IN she stumbles. Her name: Eiddwen, she says. Meet her in the unisex W. C., mop-bucket – filthy brown water. It’s also a storage closet for the PA, cables, microphone stands, backline, etc., etc. There’s a toilet. There’s a sink. There’s a miscellany of crates by the door. The young expressive face, small mouth girl, twenty-one, curly hair, bunched up shirt, twenty-two, melodic laugh flushes cheeks, taunt skin over jaw, tan arms, t-shirt says, nubile. Sip drink. Swallow irony. Cat eyes take in very little. Legs totter torso left right, right left. Arms still & steady the body by the tiled white wall. Are you a vegetarian? Open lights. Shine down benevolent fluorescence. The band is playing right of centre, outside the partition door. Stare Mr Lockeyes. Stare. Make small nothing. Easy listening that’s in the sky now, helicopter up. Get high. Stay up there unaware of everything going on down here at the bottom. Behind the door there’s music. Creature is starting into a rousing rendition of Chocolate Jesus. Be thin. Spread your arms out to touch both walls at once. Steady on. Close quarters. Have a wee. Hear it all. Clink. Whistle. Stool shuffle, shuttle, glasses tinkle with cutlery against plates. Cheer. Everyone is crammed in. Lights set to pink & purple, ready. Go. Eiddwen follows. Watch Creature play from behind. He has to move aside with his guitar slanted down to allow enough to room to pass back into the bar from the toilet. Inch. Inch by. People pack in. Hear them ordering by the bar. The back of the country vibrates it’s so loud. Travel. TRAVELERS, the name of the venue, there’s no sign. It’s tiny. Miss it. * * * CAPTIVATE CREATURE. Stretch strings. Drip sweat. A night out for music en Bristol? Creature slaps strings. Finger pick folky guitar tunes: a medley of hammerons and pulloffs. Hear (surprise!) the softest, sweetest birthday song sung by a choir voice bursting from the throat of this rake of a man who resembles a promiscuous brown bear or an aroused, feral lumberjack. Excess fat, stage right, swivels lewdly. Go. There. Goon swoon with the rest of the swaying bodies. Play. The beard hides bite. Bork low hanging jowls. Slop dark dax-coloured shirt. Shit-spill on jeans. That guitar, once a tree in a field, now—hear. Hear how straight it must have been. Pine for the longest straightest pine. Cut it down. Get it over with. Just make it painless. Create. Destroy. Make an instrument. Make music. Make mayhem. * * * BUTT ASIDE. Slide down. Watch Eiddwen, across the table, legs underneath, smiling. Find out that she’s friends with Char Cardwell who plays camogie with Meghan who knows Nadine who knows everybody. Creature slays Detroit City. Eiddwen says: There’s this short story, don’t remember the title, a young girl is staying with her father. Go on. Probably read it. Mouth the words. Write the lips. Make it out. Each day she asks for dime under the pretense of buying ice cream. Scream ice cream. The temperature in the bar rises. Fog windows. Her father fishes the dime from his coat pocket and gives it to her but the girl never buys any ice cream. Introduce me to your brother for eggplant at your place. She replaces the dime in his coat pocket, asks for it again the next day and the next. May not be remembering correctly but she meets characters in paintings. A fat woman in a fur coat? Maybe you know it. Read the story ten years ago and can't find it. Conversation, normally interesting, melts in music. Bio: Christopher McCarthy is a member of the League of Canadian Poets. His work has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Red River Review, The Cadaverine and Fresh Voices. In 2015, Flat Singles Press published his chapbook, Vancal. He lives in Iqaluit, Nunavut with his wife Stefanie.
1 Comment
6/3/2018 06:03:52 pm
This diamond-cut narrative never missteps, and, positively put, it is replete with original and apt images and turns of phrase (I could give an example from just about every paragraph). It creates an atmosphere of such intriguing strangeness, with fresh representation and expression, but with enough reader touchstones, or entry points, to entice one to go back and re-read (which I kept doing). A splendid little narrative. Congratulations, Christopher, and thank you, *Anti-Heroin Chic*.
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