by Unknown
She took my heart for her own sweet self,
And done rain all over me.
And he drove. Fast.
“Never been here before,” he said. Even his words fell into her, helpless, trailing stresses and vowels like kite tails. He saw her trees and fields, breathed her impossibly fresh air. The road was long and smooth and he purred.
“What brings you here?” She was sunshine in the dark.
“Soulfinger,” he said.
She nodded. “You won’t be the same after tonight, sugar.”
“Maybe.” He gripped the wheel and rolled down the windows. She streamed through his hair and over his skin. “Where did all these people come from? Is there a back entrance?”
The waitress smiled and turned away. The horizon disappeared. He felt the cold rain of reality slapping on his shoulders.
“One way in,” she said. “One way out.”
“I need to go,” he said.
“Baby,” she said. “You ain’t going nowhere.”
The overseer’s name is Mr. Pride, long in the arms and thick in the neck, his meanness equalled only by his accuracy with the whip. He has a way of taking Abram to the very edge of everything; the edge of life and death; light and dark; pain and numbness. There is a moment in all such things — a sliver of almost nothing at all — where they cease to exist; a turning point, that scintilla between what was, and what is yet to be. This is where Mr. Pride takes Abram. This is the doorway for the Hoodoo Man.
He lies, clutching dusk’s ankles, his eyes somewhere between open and closed. The breeze whispers across his lacerated back, but he doesn’t feel it. Blood trickles down his arms, down his sides … he doesn’t feel it. The darkness flickers, as if it is made of gauzy cloth, twitching in the breeze. Abram knows what that flicker means, but he cannot shudder, cannot scream. The Hoodoo Man is coming, opening the darkness like a doorway, and stepping through.
Abram cannot close his eyes, or move at all. He bleeds. He waits.
White — not like the Massa or Mr. Pride, but like the moon, or the smooth, sun-bleached stones that glimmer in the shallows of the Sipsey. He shines, the Hoodoo Man, and Abram always thinks he should leave incandescent puddles behind him when he walks. But there is nothing, not even a scuff of dust. He steps lightly, carrying his guitar, and stops by the whipping post. Thin as birch, slender shoulders, long fingers. Red flames dance in the window of his face. The Hoodoo Man gathers the guitar to his chest, places his fingers on the fretboard, and strums a most melancholy chord.
D-minor: MoRe paIn, ABRam?
He coughs. Dust flowers in his eyes, clinging to the moisture on his lashes. “Yessir.”
A-major to G: You kNow I can helP you wITh thAt.
Abram manages to shake his head. His fingers scrape in the dirt. “Yo is nuthin’ but bad. Kep away, Hoodoo Man.”
He plays a six note scale: No MOre paiN, my friEnd. Mr. PriDE can neVer hurT You agaIn. No onE will huRT you. All you Will feEl iS bLISs.
Abram shakes his head, but he is tempted. Tears squeeze from his eyes and he listens to the Hoodoo Man play. An inexplicable melody, like earth elementals in musical form: euphony like water; resonance like fire. His heart pounds on the threshold of living. His soul unravels. It falls.
“No, puh-leeeze.” He pulls Charity’s face into his mind and tries to cradle it there, needing to feel her strength, but the Hoodoo Man plays and he surrenders to the minor key. His wife cries through his mind, like a shooting star, and is gone.
“I cain’t. Lawd hep me.”
E-minor: No paIN, AbrAm. IMAginE.
Abram is lifted to his knees and begins to crawl toward the Hoodoo Man, soul-stretched, piece by piece, like cottons bolls plucked from the shrub.
A7 to D: ThaT’s it. COMe to ME. A pentatonic scale in E: NO moRe paiN.
“Yessir, but no mo’ love.”
The same scale, but with a diminished note — the blues note — offering a different intonation. No moRe paIN.
Abram falls at the Hoodoo Man’s feet, crying and bleeding and breathing the last few moments of his mortal life. The Hoodoo Man (the devil … he must surely be the devil) continues to play his guitar, making sounds like birds’ wings and flowing water. There is a bottle in his left hand, and he slides the neck up and down the fretboard, finding all the right notes. The bottle is brown, like Abram’s skin. The label is red, like his blood.
The Hoodoo Man strums one last time. His face is a galaxy.
DriNK witH Me, AbrAM. He holds out the bottle.
Soul-shattered, already dead, Abram takes the bottle — so like his own body. He takes it gratefully. He drinks.
I seen that mojo bag,
I seen him laying down tricks,
But Lord he just a heartbreaker.
“Drink with me, brother.” The bartender poured another shot of Jim Beam and placed it in front of Peter. “On the house.”
“I really have to go.”
“Too late. Soulfinger will be here soon.” The bartender’s eyes flicked to the glass. “You may as well enjoy the time you have left.”
“I intend to,” Peter said, moving away from the bar. “But it won’t be in this dive; I’m easing on down the road, brother.”
“Is that what you think?”
“Watch me.” He turned toward the door, less than ten feet away. Bodies crowded the floor. Peter tried to push through them but was pressed back. He felt a tremor of anxiety in the pit of his stomach. A skin of sweat had caused his shirt to cling to his shoulder blades. “Excuse me … I’m trying — hey, I’m trying to get through here!” He pushed harder, using his arms to try to widen the gaps between bodies. Nobody looked at him; their dark faces were fixed on the stage, the empty stool. Peter recognized something eerily familiar about their blank expressions. He pressed forward, stumbled, picked himself up, and found himself further from the exit.
The bartender’s voice, cutting through the confusion, the music scratching on the juke: “How about that drink, Mr. Rolling Stone?”
He was exasperated. His heart rolled in his chest like a clumsy shape, bouncing off his ribcage, booming. Tears gathered in the corners of his eyes. “I just want to leave,” he said, and thought of the old man at the bar, who was still at the bar, and still mumbling along to the juke. Boy, I’m always here.
Always here.
Baby, you ain’t going nowhere.
He looked at the picture of Soulfinger, at the mosaic of black faces watching him play. He looked at them carefully, studying every one. He looked around The Smokestack and saw the same faces now. Blank and dead. And there, the tall man in back … the clothes were different, but the sleepy, hound dog eyes were the same.
“So how old are you?” he asked the bartender.
“One hundred and eighty-three.” The bartender smiled and nodded. “And still so handsome.”
Peter wiped his eyes and looked at the picture again, scanning the faces until he found who he was looking for: a young woman with pronounced cheekbones and a heavy mouth. She was standing at the far left of the frame, clapping her hands, the moonlight trapped in her highway-eyes.
“Impossible.” He wanted to suspect some trickery, but a deep, moaning measure of his heart screamed that it was real. Everything was real: the picture; Soulfinger; even the Hoodoo Man.
Especially the Hoodoo Man.
“You see, brother…” The bartender leaned across the bar. Peter could smell the age on his breath. “There are things in this world that lie beyond explanation.”
“Magic and miracles,” Peter agreed.
“God’s work,” the old man added.
“Or the devil’s.” It was the waitress. She looped her arm through his and turned him to face her. He took immediately to her highway, racing pell-mell for the mysterious, distant line that was her horizon. He inhaled her, felt her, let his tires roll over her slick black surface. She touched his face and he sensed her endless skies. She opened her heavy mouth: improbable teeth, too long, curved
to points. Bones shimmered in her arid landscape. Her face was the moon.
His engine screamed.
She spoke — only three words, but they rumbled in his soul and brought rain. Her voice was the storm.
“Soulfinger is coming,” she said.
She hears him approach, dragging his feet, and she lifts a hand to her trembling mouth. The bucket is in the corner, upside down, where she sits sometimes to patch the holes in their clothes. She knows she will have to take it to the well and pump fresh water to ease his wounds. Mr. Pride has been heavy with the rawhide again. She can tell from Abram’s poorly step, his bare feet scuffing in the dirt.
“Oh, Lawd,” she implores, brown eyes turned to the ceiling. “Heah me now. Kep him strong, Lawd. I’s pleadin’ yo. Hep him so.”
But Charity doesn’t know that Abram and the Lord have turned their backs on each other, and that the devil was waiting. She steps to the corner and picks up the bucket, still praying, asking God to keep her strong while she eases her husband’s pain. The door swings open behind her and she turns. The bucket falls from her hands and hits the floor with a hollow sound. The prayer falls from her mouth in the same way, and makes a similar sound somewhere in her heart. She looks at Abram as he stands in the doorway — or what used to be Abram — and knows that praying is useless. God has been shamed and He is hiding somewhere, head down. God won’t help her now.
She backs into the corner. “Abram.” Her voice is dry cotton, too fragile to spin. “Yo got da devil in yo.”
His skin is a shade lighter, almost mulatto. His eyes are too big, and she can see all colours in them. Red and orange, purple and yellow. The colours of fire.
“No mo’ pain, honeychile,” he says. His voice clangs and rumbles, like Satan’s hammer. It hurts her inside — deep, where she loves and lives, because it’s not his voice at all. She takes another backward step but can go no further.
His upper body is naked, glistening with the blood from his wounds. It smears his shoulders and chest. It paints his arms. He stumbles closer and she can see more blood on his lips.
“I’s so thirsty,” he growls, although she believes he may have said soul-thirsty, and the thought of this makes her so cold. It blows through the vast rooms of her womanhood, banging windows and slamming doors.
“Oh, Abram,” she says, trying to squeeze her thin body into the angle where the two walls meet. The gas lamp flutters and his shadow flaps across the walls. The door — still open — creaks on its hinges. Charity looks at it … at the night beyond. Her heartbeat urges her to run.
As if this thought is reflected in her eyes, he says, and with terrible surety: “Honeychile, yo ain’t goin’ nowheres.”
“Abram…”
“He dead. He gawn.” The creature that has moved into her husband’s body shuffles across the room, but not toward her. He grabs the neck of his guitar and sits on the stool. His eyes dance. They make fire shapes.
Charity looks at the open door again. She has a clear run at it now. Nothing can stop her. She takes a single step toward it, heart slamming, and then another.
The devil flips the guitar onto his knee, printing streaks of blood across the body. Dull tones vibrate from the sound hole. Charity looks at him once, setting his fingers to make a barre chord. She can see the lash marks reaching over his shoulders, onto his upper arms. The blood on his lips is very bright.
Fresh, she thinks, and it is all she can take. She weeps for the man that was her lover and friend, and moves toward the open door. She doesn’t know where she will go; she may run through the darkness for hours, but she knows she has to get away from the monster that has taken her husband’s soul.
She reaches the threshold — feels the chill night air on her skin — but stops when she hears the guitar sing. A sweet and perfect sound that holds her in place. She feels it in her soul, and the thought that comes to mind is that it is like intercourse; her soul is being violated; pushed open; spread wide. Intense sensation. And the colours in his eyes … she can feel them in her body, flickering hot and tongue-like. She turns around, feeling her soul spool away.
Two staggering, helpless steps toward him and the cabin disappears. The plantation is gone. The world falls away. It is just the two of them, held in some rift of time and space with her soul shimmering in the air between them. She can almost see it: rainbow-coloured and woman-shaped. He plays his guitar and her soul dances, vulnerable, almost sad, like a flower in the sun.
C-major 7 and she goes to him.
A-minor and she falls to her knees.
D-minor to G and her soul is already lost.
He opens his mouth and Charity can see that his teeth, like his eyes, are too big. They are the devil’s teeth, inhuman, long and pointed. The part of her that should feel afraid is gone. She feels his hands on her body, his mouth on her heart.
He plays the blues. Her soul fades like smoke.
“Folla me, honeychile,” he says.
“Follow me, baby,” the waitress said. She took Peter’s hand and weaved him through the tangle of bodies crowding the floor. The anticipation was immense: an electric, violent thing that caused the walls to tremble, the pictures to shake. The audience buzzed, shoulder to shoulder, standing on tables and chairs, waiting for Soulfinger. They drank from their bottles, leaving petals of blood on their lips. Their eyes were flames. Their teeth were like needles.
Want … leave… Thoughts in his mind, like shadows. They faded. Gone. He slipped between bodies, moving to the front of the stage. The empty stool looked terrible. It was like a gallows or guillotine. It was doom.
TONITE: SOULFINGER
And there he was, appearing from some dim rip in the darkness, suddenly there. The strength fell out of Peter’s legs and he dropped to one knee, still clutching the waitress’s hand, which was cold, synthetic. Soulfinger approached, carrying his guitar. Not old, or young; just a man, as ageless as plastic or a sheet of glass. His upper body was naked, dripping red. Peter could see the whip marks tattooed on his shoulders, still bleeding.
No more pain, he thought. But no more love. No healing.
Soulfinger stepped onto the stage, still dragging his feet. The audience cried for him. Their applause was blistering. Stomping. Cheering. They chinked bottles. Blood splashed from smooth brown necks, dripping on the floor.
Peter moaned. Thick tears rolled down his face.
Soulfinger sat on the stool. Somebody handed him a bottle and he drank, licked his lips.
“Who got da blues?” he whispered into the mic, and his followers responded. They howled and pushed, spilling blood, like animals.
Soulfinger smiled, showing his teeth. “And who got soul?”
The Smokestack hushed. The silence was immediate and terrifying. Peter felt everything fall on him, as if he had become the gravitational centre of Whispering Avenue. The waitress squeezed his hand. His heart was in fragments. He pulled himself to his feet and looked at Soulfinger.
“Me,” he whispered. “I got soul.”
Soulfinger nodded. He took another drink from his bottle and a thin line of blood trickled down his chin. He rested the guitar on his knee, placed his fingers on the fretboard, and looked at Peter.
“Dis one’s fo’ yo,” he said, and started to play.
Bend to Beautiful
By Bradley Somer
I sit on a wire stool and beside me is my companion in this foetal hour. He is an angel in the flesh, or so I thought upon first glance when I saw him in the soft glow of the wall lamp, standing near a scar carved into the drywall. Twenty-five years old, if I had to guess an age. He had a sad face, the half that wasn’t in shadow anyway, that didn’t belong in that underground space. A glass full of amber clutched in his long fingers, his knuckles bulged at the joints where fine bones met, and all I felt was hunger.
I bought him a drink. I talked to him, me eager and intrusive, him reserved and quiet. I invited him back to my apartment, my pulse pounding for fear he wouldn’t be with me. Without
consideration, he asked for a glass of wine, accepting my company for the evening.
My own angel followed silently from the taxi to an elevator that lifted us to the top of the building. My own angel in my apartment, twenty-eight stories above the dark, early morning street noise. It seemed like an inadequate cage for him, seemed too close to the ugly asphalt and concrete of the city.
With a glass of wine at hand, he sat down, hunched his shoulders and leaned on the counter, fiddling with a lighter like there was something he wanted to tell me. His chestnut hair, cropped short, hugged the arc of his skull. His skin was smooth, which betrayed his thousand-year existence. He looked young, which betrayed his thousand-year wisdom.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. I would tolerate anything to taste him.
“You seem like a nice man,” he said.
“And that’s a problem?” I prompted.
He smiled. A car horn sounded in the darkness. The noise climbed the building and slipped through the open window, which also admitted the cool night air.
“Yes,” he said finally. “I have seen too many nice men in my time.”
“It’s okay,” I said reaching out a hand and cupping the back of his head for a moment before letting my hand fall again. I needed a connection so desperately. I never used to know why. I know now. I am old and lonely.
He smiled what seemed to be a patient smile and said, “I’m tired.”
“You’re avoiding my question,” I said.
“I am,” he replied, took my cigarette pack from where it lay on the counter. He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.
I lit one of my own.
He looked around my apartment and sneered. “You have some beautiful baubles and trinkets in here.”
I adjusted the crystal ashtray on the counter, sliding it between us. Crafted in some Austrian hamlet, its only imperfection was a small fault-line along the rim, just to one side of the smooth indents meant to cradle cigarettes. The ashtray refracted the light, bending it into something beautiful where two feathers had been etched into either side with such expertise they seemed to be falling through the air from a great height. A fingerprint obscured one of the feathers. On the counter, beside the ashtray, lay a small pile of ash.