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.

 

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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.

Tracy Morin

I could always feel when I was about to die. Like a lit sparkler in my chest. It had happened to me before, twice, but they always revived me. Narcan is a hell of an invention, but I was too old for this foolishness anymore.

This time, I woke up alone. Hopped the highway from my hotel room, looking for the pope of Paris. Stuff he sold me wasn’t right. I heard the pope lived over by the junk store but not where exactly.

It was a day you get out the air conditioning and break a sweat right off. A hundred in the shade. Pulled over some country road, house with a trampoline in the front yard, man outside trimming hedges. His lady on the porch swing by the front door, cutoff jeans, meaty thighs browned and sweaty like hot dogs. For a second, they looked like the legs of my old lady, LaRhonda, but she been gone thirteen months now. I couldn’t save her that last time. I couldn’t make out the woman’s face, but no way she could be as pretty.

Man clicked off the trimmer, walked to me with eyes slit, suspicious like.

Talked fast before he could think bad about me. “Y’all know where I can find the pope?”

The man looked up the road like he might see some sign there tell him what to say. He wiped his face, then his pants. “Well,” the man said. “Now. If you turn around, get yourself back on the highway going to town, make a left at that next sign up there—gonna say business district—that’ll get you into Paris proper. Reckon you should find him around there.”

“Do you—”

“That’s ’bout close as I can get you. He like to be somewhere down that way.”

Man turned back to his hedges, trimmers roared up again. His woman waved bye to me, or maybe it was hello. A wasp landed on the outside mirror and I quick rolled up the window. Moved straight ahead down the street, U-turned in a gravel driveway, crunched and skidded away, back where I come from. Couldn’t see the driveway’s house where I turned, it was so far back from the road.

When I passed where the man had stood, he wasn’t nowhere to be seen, and the way the sun’s angle hit his yard, I coulda sworn his hedges were all blazing fire.

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Drove damn near an hour south down the highway, thinking of LaRhonda’s glittery eyelids the last time I saw them flutter closed. Turned at the sign like the man told me, and ’bout a half mile down got to looking like Paris proper. Wasn’t much—little catfish place down at the railroad crossing, junk store with a cracked front window, a dusty old ice cream sign—but the most action I seen for miles.

A little kid, couldn’t been more than ten years old, swung his legs off a bench outside the fish fry. He looked familiar to me, but sitting in the shade under the overhang, hard to tell. The sun bounced off my Caddy, bouncing a blade of light across his face as I passed. He held a brown paper bag, stared straight ahead, didn’t move.

I shook my head. “Mm. Young boy like that, drinking alcohol,” I said to the dashboard. “Damn shame.” I tried to follow his shape in the rearview, but he was gone. The street swung open behind me like a barroom door, empty now. Ahead, a gray cat curled under a magnolia in the church yard, past the tracks. Cruised through the stop sign.

It was Sunday but no cars in the lot. I forgot my watch somewhere. Maybe church got out already. Parked in the lot, a mix of dry dirt, pebbles, green-yellow grass patches. Little white building: peeling paint, a few bent steps to the entrance, cross nailed over the doorway.

I touched the door soft and it creaked open. Pope gotta be somewhere ’round here, I told myself.

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Inside the church smelled like burning paper and candle wax. One old lady in the third pew, alone, had an open songbook in her lap. Dressed in a royal blue suit, big-brim feathered hat, red lipstick.

She turned to me. “You looking for the pope?”

How she know?

“He gone,” she said before I could answer.

I took off my hat and sat across the aisle from her, but one pew behind.

“He gone to the motel down Highway 7. Bought some bad stuff, you know? They been selling it here. Don’t know what you get no more on these streets.” She shook her head back and forth. “They gonna bring him back here when he’s ready.”

I looked at her, blinking. Sweat salted my eyes. “Are you saying—”

“I’m telling you.” She turned away from me and faced the altar. “Dead.”

A crash came from the parking lot, a sound like metal elephants. The lady acted like she didn’t hear, put her face down to the hymns. She started singing so quiet I couldn’t make out the words. A feather from her hat drifted to the ground. I brought my hat to my chest and hustled to the church door, looked out past the creaking hinges. A hearse buried into my Caddy’s side right there in the parking lot.

I’m never gonna get mine back on the pope now. And how I’m gonna get home like this?

The pope came out the back door of the hearse, walked to the bottom of the front steps. I just watched him, frozen like. He looked up at the sun. “I had a feeling we’d find each other over here,” he said.

Behind me, the woman banged out the church door, and looking back I saw her for the first time. LaRhonda. Those glittery eyelids, like lit sparklers shining my way. I could almost feel my heart stop all over again.

 

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TRACY MORIN is a Mississippi-based writer and editor who has been a hand model, rock-and-roll drummer and boxing ringside reporter. Her work has previously appeared in The Rumpus, Necessary Fiction, Bending Genres and elsewhere. Find her writing and photography at www.tracymorin.com.