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We think the lag in the zoom calls we play on from our three strangely lit separate rooms
makes our music sound scarier. Better.
It makes us feel like we’re leaving
our curated outposts in enemy territory, in attics and basements of our parents’ houses
floating into the silent sky where the stars never fully show, my bass and her keys and his
Voice and his ibanez so out of sync and getting worse in troughs at times but if you focus hard you can hear that all the notes are in their place, singing to each other across the canyons of the seconds.
We think that we should be the ones to kill the man who lives over the hill that breaks behind the shed in her tiny backyard, which we found hard to believe, we marveled on discord that they can be touched, can be seen.
We mapped his house, which has no kids. Just him, all alone. A caricature, with salt and pepper hair and vests and plastic surgery and stretching empty rooms. What does he do in his palace that’s lit from the outside more than the in?
His living room sits dark and still at nearly every hour, and his dogs look lost and terrified on the scratched up grey-wood plains. He seems to always be leaving, in different cars and helicopters, and when he’s there he pours martinis and burns steaks and restlessly watches the news on a several-inch screen.
Most nights he’s home he’s mostly on his phone and when he sleeps he sleepwalks every time and does his waking actions just the same. Phone. TV. Spilling liquor on the countertops. Inevitably he trips over the dogs and shatters a glass and returns to his room-sized bed to roll around til 5. We lured the dogs outside with treats
and they both seemed relieved.
He was sleepwalking when we crept in there, on January 9th, in through the window, out from the cold, with flushed cheeks pale as three young ghosts, and he woke up and he looked at us, which was not what we planned. In his half-dream state of softness he became flesh in his home there built on death.
Nothing much good to tell about became of us after that
We had a gun that we were scared to use.
We empathized against ourselves. He correctly called out that we loved each other, the three of us, which we had never said, but he saw it in us or he maybe took a lucky guess, and either way he asked us why we’d soil our love with blood. He’d buy us out. He’d set us up with brand new lives, the three of us together, on his dime.
We took it, the fake deal, and we walked out and no one had to pull the trigger. We felt darkness eating us the second we hit driveway and we tried to stop it with our newfound love and nervous laughter but it wasn’t anywhere close to enough.
We ran away into the woods to see each other with new eyes and then before we knew it flashlights, dogs and balding guys were tearing through the trees and we were ripped apart just as our songs synced up.
I remember both their eyes flashing at me blue and red and some other color I couldn’t express in the back of the car and remember how beautiful they both were, and I knew that we blew it. We only got one chance and it was gone. Only one?
Dozens of years later as I shuffled to my place behind a counter with my lovers lost somewhere similar
Forever far away from me, to bear the eyes of strangers for another chunk of life
I knew our stained glass world should have been different
I knew I’d somehow lost something that was made to be mine.
