Chapter 1 of Higher Climbs the Fire

The Bleeding Tree Trilogy is 3 new novels of mine coming out in late March that you can pre-order now at my shop.

Here is the prologue and first chapter of the first installment in the series Higher Climbs The Fire.

Higher Climbs the Fire

SIDE I

Introitus

Hanging from a bent black branch were six guitar strings with a girl on the end of them. Atop an upturned snare drum that was fixing to wobble she was standing with the strings tight around her neck. She was breathing but couldn’t use her voice. Only a steady rhythm of short, sharp gasps in its place. The sickly simple iambic of complete and total panic. Bound behind her were her wrists and with every slight shift of the drum the guitar strings coiled tighter into her throat. Her chin and her eyes were fixed upward to an empty heaven, and framed against the perfect afternoon sky the dark red hair on her head looked like a blood-soaked cloud. Dirt kicked up, hitting her legs and ringing against the drum and she tried again to find her voice. But it wasn’t there, only the sound of a horse and its rider leaving her behind on the tree before they could witness the end of the opera. And after they went to such lengths putting on the production. The girl on the strings listened to the horse’s stiff steady gallop getting further and further from her. Then it was just her, the black tree and the endless empty surround of the desert.

            When the drum finally got to rolling, this girl, she tried to stop it but her toes just danced in the air touching nothing. Then the strings cut through the outside of her neck and the blood poured down just like spilled milk. And now she couldn’t make any sound at all. And because she was a singer, with her own guitar strings what were strangling the life from her, the thing that troubled her most was that she couldn’t hear her voice. One last time, to sing, cry, scream, even pray. But who would she pray to? Blue empty endless above. But this girl, she prayed anyway, as her own hot blood covered her dress and dripped down to her toes. She prayed in silence. And she prayed for nothing more than for her own voice.

The drum below kept spinning in smaller and smaller circles. Finally it came to a stop just below her with a loud crack off the skin of the rim when it settled. And then her eyes rolled back, and her toes stopped dancing and there was only the sound of blood dripping down onto the drum.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

…

Snap. 

The branch broke and her body hit the ground fast with the crash of a cymbal that had been left below, the overdue stinger to this entire ugly old joke.

Then the desert was all quiet. There was no sound at all. Not a thing. But then, this girl breathed in.  She cried out. But there was only a noise now that wasn’t her voice. This noise, it wasn’t like any voice at all. Any voice a person was supposed to have anyhow. More like the sound of some bad dream coming true. So she screamed. And the sound was the same now only worse.  She kept on screaming. Because she knew she’d never hear her old voice again. That voice was lost. Lost for good. Now she had a new voice.

My voice.

1. The Folksinger (6:33)

Past tense, future tenser.

_From “Tomorrow Mourning”

By Mal Leatherberry

Nobody could ever tell what I really was. But then that just let me know exactly what they were. Not that I gave a scram but they’d always work themselves up into such a bother in trying to figure me all out. So I had to make sure a long time ago of exactly what I wasn’t, so as not to let them be the ones doing the deciding of what I was. Because they will if you let ‘em. Believe that. There’s lots of things they’ll try and hang you on. Just you watch. Ideas, identities, institutions, even supposed illuminations, they’ll try and get you hung up on each and every one. Even when it all shakes out the same; somebody else telling you what to do. How to live. How to think. Somebody else telling you who you are. To keep you under thumb they’ll try and hang you on all sorts of things. If you get really out of line they’ll try a tree…

            Listen, long as I could recall everybody was always trying to tell me what I was and what I wasn’t. She’s a fool, they’d say. No, she’s a genius. Or she’s a prophet, or she’s a devil. She’s a boy. He’s a girl. And all other manner of half-soaked high foolishness.

            They’re always looking to put a word to the things they don’t understand. Not that I’m such an unusual case either; chances are they don’t understand you no better. And with all their little words they’re fixing to put you in a neat nice little box, so as you don’t go nowhere else, don’t grow too big. Only thing fit for a box – you ask me – is something that don’t plan on growing at all no more; something dead. They want a word for everything. Because not having a word for something scares the shit out of them. Because it reminds them how worthless all the other words that they already got really are. Words are imprecise and ill-fitting, approximations at best, abominations at worst. Words are dead. Ghosts we hang on real living things so that we can make out their shape better in all this dark. Words are especially useless if you’re hoping for them to show you the truth. For truth you need music.

            Truth was, I didn’t rightly know if there was a word for what I really was but the term most generally agreed upon was folksinger. The curly words stamped down on the dead wax of all those spinning vinyl records claimed my name was Mal Leatherberry, and if you believe that then you’re liable to believe the rest of this. I suppose the beginning’s as good a place as any to get started. But don’t worry, I’m not gonna waste your time going over all the things that everybody already knows about. All the boring historical bits like The Great Reckoning, the Banapple virus or the Old Electric World falling to heap, nor the subsequent resurrection and supposed salvation of mankind or the things that happened after that which were even worse. Don’t worry, I’m gonna skip on ahead of all that bullshit.

You’re welcome.

I’m a take you right to the good part. Namely, myself. When I started figuring into things. Now, I don’t know how far ahead or behind you might be when you get this…so I’m going to go ahead for your sake and take my time explaining who I am and what I was up to. You most likely already heard of me, no matter how far up ahead or back behind you are, I was famous in my day. But even if you do know the name Mal Leatherberry you probably don’t know a bit of truth about me. Not even from the records I recorded myself. Not even from my own singing voice. Music is the truth, believe that, but it’s only the big truth. Not the little truth. That tiny, day to day truth. That hasn’t been told. Which is what I aim to rectify here. But I’m most accustomed to telling my stories through song, so do me a kindness and don’t forget your patience as I’m setting down this account. See a song – a good one anyhow – is a distillation of the most of a given thing. The most beauty, the most ugly, the most absurd, the most holy. And a really good song, well, it gets it all mixed up until you can’t tell where one of those things begins and another takes over. I’ve written a lot of songs, even some of your favorites, not that you’d know it. Some of them weren’t even half bad. But this is how I come to write the finest song ever that’s been written. Well, maybe it’s not fair to say I wrote it, leastways entirely on my own, but I at the minimal worked up my own version of it. Changed some parts, fiddled with the register and tempo, rewrote the words where it needed it; made it my very own. See, there’s plenty of people who’ll delight in telling you that you can’t change the world. Especially with something as fugacious and tenuous as a song. But I say just because you haven’t noticed doesn’t mean the world hasn’t already changed. Maybe it just left you back behind when you couldn’t keep up?

            Which is how I was feeling around the time just before I started composing what would become my masterpiece. Like the world was leaving me behind. To tell it to you true, I was feeling like I was still hung up on that tree with them strings around my neck. Like I had no voice anymore. But of course now I did have a voice, an uncommon one. I just didn’t have a scammed thing to say with it.

Which is probably why I decided to get high.

            All of us was dressed up in our finest dilapidations like we were getting sent to church in the morning or at the very least setting to do some front row coffin gawking. Both of which we were, after a fashion. But no one there really wanted much to talk about it, even though it was the reason for the revelry. Which happened a lot actually. No one wanting to admit why they were there. For what could be said? So instead they danced and they drank and they dressed in rags. There were tailors and ragdolls at any inch you’d aim your eye. Tatterdemalions of all stripes stretching their heads and getting good and warbled off the togs they was wearing. The air in the place was a thick red fog of ragweed smoke for those who couldn’t afford or tolerate the unspooling narcotic clothing. Music was being played from a fleet of gramophones that lined the floor of the barn in a corner. They had begun synchronized and such, the horde of them playing the same record at the same time to make a massive swell of sound but now the stomping and dancing had shook off a good number of the players and the result was the same song being played at two dozen different speeds and with two dozen different parts all at once and the same time. It sounded like the world coming to an end to me, or maybe another one trying to push its way on through. But everyone who was dancing continued doing it, no one seemed to mind the ugly old sound at all. Least of all me. Which might have been because it was my voice that was on those records overlapping itself. My voice stuttering, split into countless different shards and then singing back in legion most eerily at points when it seemed of the highest improbability. I walked through the ragparty and thought what I heard might have been an improvement.

You’d understand if you’d heard my singing voice. Or maybe you wouldn’t, now that I think on it. For folks seemed to take to it, despite it not being traditionally what was thought of as a good voice. Especially when it came to singing. Nothing about it was traditional. It was a remarkable instrument, I’ll admit, albeit an unadorned and severe one at times. And if I sound self-satisfied here, well, I don’t take much credit for the way I sound. It wasn’t at all my doing, not by a damn sight. So I can discuss it as if it wasn’t my own because plainly it didn’t sound like it was most of the time. My voice was uncommon weird, a specimen entirely unique to itself. It didn’t sound much at all like what a person was supposed to. At least what one person sounded like. If anything, having all the music broken up like this with all those scrammed gramophones, it was just a sort of exaggeration of what my singing voice already did on its own and to such uncanny precision: When I sang it was as if I was singing with more than one voice at a time. Like there was a whole choir sitting down in my throat lending their voices. And not all of the voices belonged to human beings either. Now, with the riot of drunken gramophones, the sound that slurred out from the horns just sounded much like that voice of mine brought to its logical conclusion. The quality of it was just being made blatant. Despite the disagreeableness my voice had a certain sway to it, it sounded unnatural and maybe it caused unnatural reactions. Of course you couldn’t understand a word I was saying but damn it if everything I said didn’t sound just like the truth anyhow. Which was a shame because I put a lot of care into making it so the words of all those songs fit perfect and precise so as to achieve maximum and absolute confusion. Least folks could do was try to suss ‘em out some and appreciate how frustrating I was working to be. Truth was – try as I might – folks went and found meaning in what I put down no matter how hard I tried to make that trouble for them. Mostly I did this because if you didn’t dress the truth a bit and make it mysterious and a little bit sideways – why – no one would take your word that you were being honest. So you had to say it crooked, had to say it in some way like it wasn’t what you were really saying. But it didn’t matter no more, I reasoned that I didn’t have much of anything to not actually say anymore anyhow.

We were throwing the ragparty in an often-overlooked farmhouse not far from the town of Yont Nellum, lower territory just above the Blind River. It was a frequent haunt for types like us. Ragdolls and such. Over my black frock coat and under my dress shirt I had on the tattered remains of a large rag shawl, a sort of tawny colored rebozo next to my flesh. The remnants of it were steadily disintegrating and the garment hung down in long strands over my waist giving it the appearance of a dead jellyfish slung over my shoulder. I had this rag rebozo tucked into my collar too so it could also hang down over the flesh of my back. Rag on your flesh felt warm, like that first bit of fever – that with some perversion – you actually looked forward to. It was a bit of boffle wearing the rebozo and keeping my checkerboard scarf around my neck but I never took the scarf off. Never. The rebozo was a tolerable bit of medicine but still wasn’t enough revelry for me so I supported it with a burning quirley stuffed with ragweed. It hung from my lip and I puffed it incessantly. I liked to watch the red plumes coming off the end of it so I looked back behind me to see how they had trailed me. There was a red hazy line from the path I had cut through the crowd. Which wasn’t bad to look at but made me easy to follow. So did the fact that I was the only one in sunglasses. “Hey, Karlin’s looking for you.”

            I turned. “Well, I ain’t looking for her.”

            It was the circus kid, Snowy. Of all the people who bothered me Snowy was the one who bothered me least. He had his own quirley hanging from his lip, a might spliff that burned out like a sconce or maybe even an upturned lighthouse. Despite having not smoked down my own but halfway I took it upon myself to relieve Snowy of his considerable burden and stole myself a good long drag from his spliff. Smoke webbed out of my mouth. Snowy was all business though. “What should I tell her if she come asking me up again about you?”

            I put my own quirley back to my lip and Snowy snatched him his spliff. “Tell her to stay put.”

            “You gonna go to her?”

            “No. No I am not.” I turned to depart but then Snowy came up from behind and gave me a big sloppy hug. The kid could still act the cuttooth at times. “You must have fog between your ears,” I told him. “You know how much I don’t like having someone’s arms around me unless the rest of us are likewise intertwined.”

            “Don’t mean it like that, Mal. Come on, it’s a party, let’s you and me hide from Karlin together, maybe get some of them ragdolls to come along too, I’ll let you have your pick.”

            I had to show teeth at that. “I do believe the rag has soaked you through, young man. Have my pick, how you talk, Snowy? There’s not a chance in the world that I wouldn’t already get my pick even without your charity. Kind as it was for you to extend…” I took a drag from my quirley. “Besides, without me even the most ragged woman in this collection is liable to send you back to Circus Town to play with your own pizzle. Not even old enough for scruff.” I put a hand back to his chin, scratched at it then gave it a small slap. “Now boffle me no longer.”

            Snowy released me and coughed out that little laugh of his. “You use words like I use my sword.”

            “Don’t insult me, my words have actually cut down their targets.”

            As I walked away Snowy said, “Calliope Slade is here tonight too.”

            “Oh?”

            “She looking for you, same as Karlin.”

            I didn’t say nothing back, just slipped away into the crowd. I was floating hard on the rag now with its numbing hum circulating out from my center. The sounds and smells of the world intermingled and got fairly indistinguishable and I celebrated with another drag from my quirley. The faces in the room stretched and blurred some, not on account of the rag mind you, just the rapid movement and the flickering lamp lights. Everybody was grinning and hollering like they were desperate to convince anyone who happened upon watching them that they were having a good time. That they weren’t afraid. They did a tolerable good job putting on with the show which only made it all that much worse. So I decided to get to a quieter room. Their eyes here gave them all away.

            There was no dancing in the next room but there were still plenty of eyes fixed on me when I entered. I could hear ‘em too, bits of conversation at least, the words the folksinger coming to me from all over. Near the entrance there was some cuttooth girl standing on top of an upturned bucket performing pontification about knowing who the true enemy is. I squizzed down at the girl’s toes on the bucket then adjusted my checkerboard scarf around my neck. “Sister, who isn’t the true enemy?” I think I said, the rag sometimes made it hard to know what words were inside and which you let out. Either way the girl didn’t acknowledge it, just kept on with her sermon. Then some drunk, whose rags had fallen away to total disrepair and who was without his pants, ran past me and the bucket girl giggling. His gleaming white ass bumped into my shoulder and I laughed at this ragdoll and moved my quirley out of his way. I took a moment to ponder whether or not the pantless scram had taken off his legwear or if they had been rag pants that had simply given out over the night? Rag pants? I was well and warbled if I was trading in skrobble thoughts such as that. I was so far out I even considered picking up on his fashion cues but everyone was already too damn invested on finding out what I wore to my first trip to the hospital.

            It never was just on account of the voice either. Even before it had changed folks wondered a lot about me. I didn’t fit, there wasn’t room made for me. I even wondered myself sometimes. I was never one or the other with anything, who was? To me, I was most comfortable somewhere in between or outside all of it. I figured if folks would just forget about sussing it all out they’d reach the conclusion that it was best thinking of me as a bit of both. Maybe they’d be even more comfortable if they started thinking of themselves likewise? But mostly I was sick of them thinking of me at all. I was growing tired of telling truths. More and more it just got me feeling like some scrammed minister myself.

            Now bucket girl was finally paying me mind and looking down trying to say something. Most likely she was wanting me to expound on what she was on up there railing about and such. Or worse, she’d want me to pick apart and explain the words to one of my damn songs. These types, cuttooths, they always wanted everything explained. So instead of letting her keep on squawking I held a finger up and corked her. “Listen, you hear that? Silence. That’s god trying to talk to you.” Bucket girl was quiet for a measure but then started to ask me what that meant? Did I believe in god? What about the true enemy? And such and so on. I kept on moving.

            The lamps hung high in the room and the candle light gave off a jaundiced sort of glow to everyone and everything in it. Jaundiced was one of those forgotten words I collected from the Old Electric World. Snowy would always dismiss them as nothing but bafflegab but I couldn’t help myself. Being a folksinger and all I made it my concern the procuring of words. The more unusual the better. I was always looking for more language. More shiny and useless words that wouldn’t even be heard when they were delivered by my scrammed, unnatural voice. But even if they were mostly ignored, and utterly useless, I still put a lot of thought into what words I used. They might be useless but they were the best we had I supposed. Besides, I liked to read. Snowy might have given me the business about my habit but whenever he stumbled upon some old tome or other piece of worded detritus scattered out in the Lowlands he’d bring it back to me. I’d find some of these books and what all myself sometimes when I was below the Blind River but I was never as good as Snowy at rustling them up. Of course Snowy was happy to hand them over seeing as he couldn’t read himself. Most of the Circus Kin were like that, they never saw much use in the practice, books being bound deceptions and so forth. I didn’t see it that way though. It wasn’t a deception if you agreed up front that it was all pretend, right? Besides, the world outside of books had just as much bound deceptions and agreed upon fictions with society and all its half-soaked restrictions as any other story you’d read. My favorite book I had in my possession was called The Dictionary. Took me a bit to figure out what the story was supposed to be but dog my cats if it didn’t give me plenty of colorful uselessness to put over my guitar. It was Snowy that found me that one of course.

            I made my way through all the eyes, affixed to me like they was afraid if they turned away I’d disappear. That’d be something, wouldn’t it? It was something I was mostly accustomed to but when the rag was taking me hard like this I’d forget not to notice. No one had enough sand to actually come and say something to me so I slummocked my way eventually to the center of the room where sat a great black piano. I stuffed myself behind it, hiding behind it like a raised fortress wall. I didn’t have any intention or desire to play, I just needed to get off my sticks. Standing up was becoming an intolerable labor. But sure enough some hushed voice speculated on whether or not the folksinger was going to play them a song. Then another rang in with their prediction. I didn’t look up to answer anyone. Because there was something worse than just the rag trying to hold me down. I could feel it starting to crawl all up my spine. The way it always did when it came for me. It was like I was running towards a light which blasted my shadow out behind me and made my own shape some stretched black beast that was doing the chasing. I knew I just needed to get to the light and knock it over so that the beast would be banished. But I never could reach it and the closer I got the larger the shadow grew.

I clutched onto my scarf hanging down over the black and white teeth of the piano. Looked like those two wore the same dress to the party. I decided then that I wasn’t gonna let that shadow get me. Not now, not this time. I concentrated, tried to settle myself down. I focused past the scarf and saw below it my shrinking, dissolving rag rebozo. Sometimes the rag was good at keeping the shadow from getting me. So I tried to think on only that. But the shadow was still there. Then I heard someone say that the folksinger was too warbled on rag to stand let alone play the piano. Well, seemed like that was just the sort of perceptive critique to bring me back from where I was headed. Before I could hurl out a rejoinder to thank them for keeping me from falling in with the shadow someone else shouted something else in general agreement. Then yet another voice laughed. One woman said they’d seen me forget half the words to one of my very own compositions just last month ago at a performance. I was just impressed that she could tell. For sure though, I could remember that performance, but I was still foggy on some of the song in question’s words. Voices kept churning up now. They were getting loud, no one the least bit afraid that I might hear ‘em. I suppose they suspected me too far gone to hear or they simply didn’t care if I did? There was a ragdoll with a particularly loud voice and he said rather matter-of-factly that I had made my last good song nearly a year prior. I don’t need to tell you but that brought my head up right quick. Not that it deterred anyone. Another argued it had been two years since I put out a record of merit. That was the word they used too, merit. One especially boisterous voice challenged that I hadn’t made any work of worth since my first. I wish I could say that this was greatly disagreed with but it wasn’t. I was about to risk the calamity of standing up on my own two feet so I could tell these scram to have a suck on a Banapple but then a voice said, “When was the last time she made a record period?”

This was a voice I knew. I had heard it every imaginable variance. Every conceivable permutation, if you’d permit the bafflegab. It didn’t matter what it was saying ‘cause it always sounded the same. It was finely crafted, every syllable measured carefully and exact. It was educated, arrogant and sharpened to a point through years of never being told the word “no” when it asked for a thing. But when it sang none of that mattered, because it was louder and darker than a black waterfall.

            I looked and there was Calliope Slade, looking just like her record cover. The crowd parted for her like she was on fire. The heels on her boots made her taller than she really was, taller than everyone else in the room. The stones of her eyes looked almost black in the candlelight. “What do you say, Leatherberry? When was the last time you wrote a song?” She had a smirk like not having one would have caused her to fall ill.

            “I believe the last songs I wrote were all the songs that you sang on your last record.” Now I was the one smirking. “So I guess it stands to ask you, when was the last time you wrote a song?” The crowd started murmuring like crowds like this always did. So I pressed on, “I mean have you ever even written a song? Now that I’m not writing ‘em who you got scribbling their lines out for you? Tell me it ain’t Karlin? Now, she won’t admit it to me but I suspect she has some hand behind your new material.”

            “You know as well as I that we wrote those songs together. That is, you and I.”

            The ragdolls around us were all gawking. “Example of writing process,” I said. “Calliope: Mal, I’d like a song in this key.” I tapped a tooth of the piano. “Mal: Here’s that key. Calliope: Now what should I sing about? Mal: Never mind that, here’s a finished song, I’ll sing it for you and then you can just follow what I done, only make sure you suck out any of the sand, soul and other intangibles that make the song my song and fill it instead with that big, pretty, empty opera house voice of yours.”

            Calliope didn’t look upset, she never looked upset. She just put a hand on her hip and held her chin up. “So I suppose we’re not going to be singing a duet together now for these people then?”

            “That why you’re here?”

            “No. You’re in no state to sing, especially with me.” She tilted her head toward the crowd. “Besides, I hear you don’t have much memory for the words to the songs you sing, even the ones you purportedly pen.” The crowd started up again, someone asked for her to sing something all by herself. She gave a little grin but shook her head. “Sorry dears, no music tonight.” And with that they dispersed, groveling some as they retreated to the corners of the room and some back out to the larger rooms where all the prerecorded Mal Leatherberries were happy to pluck a tune for them no matter their state. Calliope took advantage of what passed for privacy for us and she slinked over to the piano bench and leaned down to me. She spoke quietly, not softly. “I’m here because we need to talk. I got something, something big that I want you to be a part of.”

            I showed some teeth. “That makes two of us.”

            “Oh, please. In what world are you living?” Her hand was on my shoulder now, voice back to being that whisper of hers. “Get serious, sugar. Something big is happening and you’re going to have to decide how far you’re willing to go to win this.”

            “Who said I wanted to win?”

            Her hand was off my shoulder. “I’ve forgotten how needlessly tiresome you can make things.” I was happy then to find that my quirley was still lit and in my possession, so I took a last drag from what little was left of it then dropped it down to squash beneath my boot. Calliope mistook my clear disinterest as a plea for her to keep talking. People are always doing that. I’ve even been told I’m a great listener, though I don’t recall who exactly by. “Listen, you,” she told me. “You showed me the way…the truth. About how it is and even who I am.” She paused after this like an actor was supposed to and then she sat down on the bench with me. Past her shoulder I could squiz some of the others still stealing their looks and exchanging whispering amongst themselves. But I also caught sight of someone new giving me the look over. This was a tall woman with a very serious face standing in the doorway at the corner of the room. She sent me a stare of unrivaled hatred. Not much I could do with that so I took out my reticule, pulled from it three pinches of ragweed that smelled like cinnamon and citrus – fresh rag – and then I took out a malnourished looking copy of the Holy Liber. I opened to the Fourth Book, verse six, and then I tore out the silver-gilded page and set to rolling a new quirley. Calliope took the page from my hand and I was set to protest but then saw she was just commandeering the rolling of it. Like she used to. So I put away my holy book and set the reticule back into my frock coat and just sat back and admired the show. Calliope didn’t disappoint, she rolled the quirley good and tight then took her tongue across the length of it so as to seal it. “Tell me if that’s wet enough for you?” She looked at me in a certain way, the little actress.

            When she stuck it my mouth I played my part, told her, “Oh, I surely will.” I watched over Calliope’s shoulder as my admirer with the serious face caught sight of that scene and left the room in an uncommon hurry. “Who’s that, she’s new.”

            Calliope didn’t even turn around. “She is new, that is she’s no cuttooth but she’s new to me. She’s alright, she’s just a bit…”

            “Serious.”

            “Yes, serious as a sermon.” Calliope was a still a cuttooth herself, so her deciding on who is and ain’t was a laugh but I didn’t call her on it. Spoonies like her always thought they were the authority on whatever new lifestyle they tried on at the moment. “Now I want to tell you about this thing I’m working on. This is it, this is the one.”

            “Slade, I got enough people putting the squeeze on me to write new material for my own records. You understand? Even if I wanted to write for you, which I don’t, I can’t do it.”

            She didn’t ask permission – just like a spoony – and she reached into my coat and found my reticule before I could accuse her of getting fresh. Then took from it a long match and struck it against the side of the piano. She gave my quirley some torch and then blew out the flame in her choreographed sort of way. “I’m talking about something bigger than music.”

            “Blasphemer.”

            “I want you to be a part of this,” she said, ignoring me. “This could be what we’ve all been waiting for. Word true.”

            “Heard that song before, recently matter of fact, Karlin’s got these notions. You seen her? She’s chasing me too. Tell me, how am I supposed to compose these great pieces of propaganda when I can’t be let alone long enough to even strum a guitar or sit down to a piano without being solicited to revolution myself.”

            “Karlin?” Calliope laughed. “Karlin doesn’t even–” I blew some red smoke over Calliope’s face on accident but pretended it was my intention. I was tired, I looked past the opera singer and the room had returned to its previous state of dreadful revelry. Calliope was still talking of course. Nothing in the Good Lands or the Low could stop that, but I was occupying myself watching the menagerie have their fun. I even spotted the scram with his ass hanging out trying to persuade the bucket girl to come down off her perch and join him in pleasures lower than her position suggested her capable of currently enjoying. He wasn’t being pushy about it or such, just whiny like most drunk pantless men were when they weren’t being pushy. Bucket girl told him something that turned him around and curled his face and I decided she didn’t need any of my interfering. “You want to change the world, right?” Calliope whispered, she must have gotten tired of being ignored at some point ‘cause her face was close enough to mine that our noses brushed.

            I took the quirley from my lip, waited a beat then told her, “Oh, you’re serious?” I could be an actor too when I wanted. “I want to change the world? Whatever put that half-soaked notion into your head.”

            Calliope pulled back. “You did. If you think this is all such a laugh then what are you even doing any of this for?”

            I returned the quirley to its rightful place. “…I think you might have caught yourself some of that seriousness that’s been afflicting your friend what was watching us earlier.”

            Calliope stood. “I thought I missed you, Leatherberry, you believe that?”

            “Careful, I hear that serious sickness can travel through the sluice, better not lick your fingers as you’re regularly inclined to. Pity, I know.”

            “But now I think I just missed your songs.”

“Now that I believe.”

“Even if you never meant a word of them they meant the world to me.” She smiled and looked around the room. “Them too.” They were watching us again now. Calliope got up from the piano. “You should write again, Leatherberry, you really should.” She smiled down at me. “But if you don’t – or can’t, you should have the decency to die while your death could still mean something.”

I don’t need to tell you but she was still smiling as she turned and left me there at my piano.

As she was going Anika Karlin was walking into the room. They shared some sort of brief exchange that I couldn’t quite make out but then they went their separate trajectories: Calliope out of the room and Karlin straight for me. I crooked my head to look for possible escape routes but Karlin marched right up to me and my piano before I could get crawling. She had me, there was no way I was getting out of here alive. With my fate decided I turned and started tapping on the keys of the piano absently. The blood in my ears was chugging at an uncommon decibel and I could feel myself falling into the rag more. Which wasn’t ideal but it suited me better than that old shadow which was still lurking off in the corners of my brain. No, I wouldn’t give it no mind. That’s how it got you. So I let myself slip further into the rag and when I looked up all the faces in the room they were webbed together in some grotesque tapestry. The walls surrounding swelled, the ground below crawled. By the time Karlin loomed over to speak at me I was getting sick all over the keys of the piano. And for some reason I kept playing through my own mess, hitting the keys in a particularly jolly sounding if not truly melodious manner. The music itself punctuated by the sloppy wet sound my fingers made working through all the muck. I was lost to the rag and I got sick again when Karlin pulled me on off the bench. When I looked up I saw that Snowy was there now too. All the people in the room were chattering amongst themselves at the sight of me in this state which made it hard to hear but I made out Karlin telling Snowy to take me out of there. Which is what he did.

Snowy and me were in the grain silo now outside the barn. There wasn’t any grain in it which made it a good place to record. Reverb in the place was something else. I had Snowy fetch the recording gramophone for me and he had the horn pointed my way. Snowy was good in that way. I had told him after he dragged me out of the barn that I wanted to make some music. I informed him of this intention while not being able to stand under my own power unless he held me up. But he agreed. He told me that I had a gruesome smear of red rag sick splayed across my mouth like a clown’s maw but I had managed to roll myself a new quirley. I puffed on it even if it wasn’t actually lit and he took one look and knew I was in the proper condition to make a Mal Leatherberry recording.

            I sat there with my back against the wall and my guitar in my lap. Snowy had removed the last of my rebozo and buttoned up my frock coat for me to keep my dignity. He was fiddling with the gramophone, muttering cuss under his breath at something not being to his liking. “Come on, you scram, let’s make another masterpiece,” I shouted for encouragement.

            “…You’re not going to play that guitar. I know it and you know it. You’re just gonna yammer and blow bate.”

“That’s bloviate – but good word either way.”

“And then you’ll lose your thoughts and I’m just gonna sit here with you until you pass out instead of with some of those ragdolls that had been giving me the business earlier this evening. That’s all.”

            “That all?”

            “That’s all it ever is anymore.”

            I scratched at the corners of my eyes like it was big important for me to do it. “Everybody’s always on me to record something new and then when I set to doing it they don’t want me to?”

            “Okay, Mal.” He stood up then hunched over to start the device. “Let’s record, I assume we’re going to begin with some words?”

            “That’s not a bad notion. Just give me the signal.” He started the machine up then pointed at me. I vomited almost on cue. Snowy had a good ear for melody and promptly stopped the recording.

            “Gazzits, man,” he shouted.

            “…Did we get it?”

            “Find this funny, do you?” He kicked at my boot.

            “Alright.” I took the edge of my sleeves and started wiping away the bits of fresh sick stuck to my face.

            And Snowy left me to it. Which is what I deserved of course. The only help he offered was mild suggestion. “Just use your scarf.”

            “Don’t fucking touch my scarf.” I didn’t mean to snarl like that at him but it just happened that way.

            “I wasn’t touching, I was just offering up the idea is all.”

            I should have told him it wasn’t his fault but instead I said, “I’m not yet so desperate for an idea as to start stealing them from the likes of you.” I gave him a grin so as to let him know that we were square and he returned it to let me know it was so. I went to take off my dark sunglasses but then realized they had already been removed so I took a puff off my unlit quirley and Snowy started up the gramophone once more. He gave me the signal and I held the ends of my scarf in my fingertips and for the second time that night I felt that shadow calling to me. I ignored it as best I could.

            I saw Snowy mouthing to me without sound, “Words? Words!”

It was time to sing. “Words, right. They want a word for everything… See words are useless if you want them to show any truth. For truth you need music.” I ran a thumb over my guitar strings – it didn’t sound so bad for a guitar full of vomit. I strummed a bit, finding my way but then hit a poor note and just let the instrument drop. Before Snowy could turn off the machine I held my hand up. “And I can’t seem to make music anymore. As you can hear for yourself. Word true, it’s been a miserable stretch since last I could. And even if it’s what corked me up to begin with… I can understand all your expectations.” I watched the black vinyl circle making its way around while my words were cut into its skin in rippled rolling grooves like what stone skipping over water makes. “What does the audience expect? The audience expects everything like it’s already theirs and hell, maybe it is? They want you to tell them how they feel better than they can themselves. They want you to take apart their heart and split open their mind with your own and they want you to do it with delicacy and like you weren’t trying.” All this sorta lurched out of me and for a moment there I forgot about my shadow and fooled myself into thinking I was about to say something important. Something someone needed to hear. Me most of all. “The audience wants more than they expected. They want a communion with something more than themselves. And not in that cheap way that the Church offers it. Man made god after his own image but damn it if he don’t like to linger too long at the reflection. But I already said that before… Audience doesn’t want to hear that, they want something new. No, they want something real. Something sacred and if you can manage it, they’d like it under four minutes. So hurry up and get to the chorus… Infinity is singing and they want you to show them their words so they can sing along.” Sounded like I knew what I was talking about didn’t it? At the time I remember being fairly satisfied with it. I even reached into my coat, pulled out my reticule, took out a match and lit up my quirley and took a long, heroic drag.

            But I sensed that my shadow was still there. Waiting for me, right at the base of my spine. And it was losing its patience. I kept on talking. “But sometimes, when I had too much rag and soaked up too much smoke between my ears, I think what the audience – what anyone  –  really wants – is just to see me fail.” I put a hand to my hair, lost some of the fingers as I adjusted the coif. “Hokum and horseshit, heresy and hearsay, I sometimes suspect that people like the idea of me better than the reality. Suppose that’s the same for most things though. I wonder if they got a word for that yet?” I took a less heroic drag from the quirley, sighed. “You get all that?” I asked Snowy.

            “No,” he said. “I turned it off about the time you started feeling sorry for yourself.”

            I showed teeth. “So in other words you didn’t get any of it?”

            I had me a laugh but Snowy didn’t join in. He picked up that scrammed horn of his and set to leave and I to trying to persuade him otherwise. “Come on, Snow. Where you going? You really going to leave me in here by myself? I know, go fetch some of them ragdolls you were plotting over early. I’ll talk you up right, me too. Make ‘em think the both of us were proper tatterdemalions. Snow, what do you say? Snowy?”

            He was already to the door. “You can’t even stand.” I wiggled one of my sticks to prove his point for him. “Look, it’s late and we have a big day ahead of us. Best be getting us both some rest. I can carry you to a bed if you like?”

            My shadow started its climb. “I don’t want anyone seeing me when…like I am.”

            “I didn’t think so. Look, I’ll come by in the morning, first thing.”

            It was like a spider was crawling up my back, between my shoulders and now it was sitting on my scalp, legs tapping, waiting to dig its way in. “Snowy, there’s something…something’s coming for me. I know it.”

            “Mal, what are you talking about?” I had never told him about it…this shadow of mine. Never told anyone.

            “It’s like a drip into my head but it ain’t like it too…it’s different and it’s always the same and it’s horrible and I can’t stop it.”

            “Come on, that’s too much rag. Got you paranoid, delusional, conjuring up all sorts of scary bogens and devils. Next you’ll be saying you’ve seen visions of scratch witches and the like.”

            “It’s real, you scram.” I clutched at Snowy’s leg. “It’s him, the black minister. Always him. He’s coming for me.”

            At the mention of his name Snowy’s expression changed, but only for a second. Then he kept on like before. “Of course he is. But he ain’t here now. If he were I’d run him through with my sword, word true. Now get some rest, Mal. And lay off the rag. It’s got you talking like some cuttooth just arrived south of the Blind River. Honestly, you’re worrying me.” He wrestled his leg out from my grip. I was still too warbled to make another grab.

            “You should be worried. I’m not making this up. It’s my curse. The black minister… I have a window in my mind that makes me see him there at times. The things he does… And I’m trapped there in these thoughts, stuck like a lamb in the brambles. Made to watch while he revels in his work. I have to watch him as he–”

            But Snowy was closing the door. I screamed out to no use, just let my strange voice fill the silo. It sounded like a bunch of animals on some killing floor howling in grim assessment of their newly discovered part in the proceedings. The shadow had me now. Like in the old story, the one about the boy who would never die but whose shadow had slipped away from him. And the girl who stitched it back on for him and then for reward he took her with him to the land of never. Only for me the story was all turned around. And I couldn't rip these stitches out fast enough and my shadow was the one chasing after me. Taking me with it to different lands of never. Places I never wanted to be taken. Places I was afraid that from which I'd never return.