Andrea DeAngelis
I sing of death but who sings for me?
When I sing, I transcend. Hitting that special note, there’s a ripping in my throat, torn fissures of bloodied sound. At the crescendo, I am hoarse and depleted but come my next performance, I’m ready to howl and wail again.
I’ve never had an orgasm, but I imagine it is as elusive as those upper registers of my voice. I feel an ebbing and crashing ecstasy as I approach the hairbreadth crescendo of tone and power.
“You have the voice of the drowned at sea,” a wino slumped over the bar once slurred.
I’ll put that in my promo pack once I get an album together. Some leave the room when I emote and there aren’t many people to begin with in this dive bar in Yorkville. But Dusty, the owner, lets me do my thing and really, I’m mourning for everyone who is about to die. In high school, I predicted that Jimmy Priddy was going to bite it. No one believed me until he didn’t hear the train coming, drunk and high, doing his own off-key crooning on the railroad track.
The premonitions start as dreams. The other side scratches me. One of my former friends, Hui, used to joke, “Moria has night vision.” But he didn’t like it when I dreamed of him, when I told him to stop taking chances and driving backwards three times at midnight on the devil road in the pine barrens. It was only going to summon Mother Leeds’ spawn. Hui didn’t listen. It was for his podcast. So he kept traveling on that winder. A spooky environs of pitch, pine and pain, orchids and carnivorous fauna that would consume you if they could. The shrieks of night birds cry out as warnings. My friend was subsumed by his obsession. I don’t know if Hui ever found the devil or the devil found him. The obliteration was the same. Some parts of him were never found like his heart or his eyes or even his skin. I didn’t see the last taking. I just saw the smear of him and night screaming.
“Go to the devil in your voice!” Debra catcalled from the meager audience.
And now tonight, this guy came up to me speaking in what I thought was a stutter but turned out to be his weird Welsh accent saying that what I do is historical. I thought he said hysterical which pissed me off. But he babbled on saying it’s called keening, and did I want to sing in his band? This is how I fulfill my destiny. Reviews in Pitchfork and opening for an indie wunderkind can’t be far behind.
Those in the audience won’t know who I’m singing for. It could be you or someone close holding your hand while in the other a sweaty beer as you shiver and death opens a door.
ANDREA DEANGELIS (she/her/hers) is at times a poet, writer, shutterbug and musician living in New York City. She tries not to disturb her neighbors by putting her guitar amp in the closet. Her writing has recently appeared in Molotov Cocktail and Rawhead.