Unsung Melody

Anyone who has ever been in a lonely bar at midnight knows this story.

A room filled with smoke. It’s like a scene out of some sultry blues tune, this room that smells like smoke and cheap perfume. There’s a woman with painted lips in the corner, eyeing her prey as they stumble in and drink whiskey that tastes like gasoline. It’s still early in the evening, but there’s already an old soul drowning himself in gin at the bar. The barkeep looks like he could use a good night’s sleep, or like he’d rather be anywhere else as he slides up and down the counter top ignoring patrons. It’s always the same, different people, but the scenario is the same. The air always weighs heavy with disjointed sorrow. When I first started working here, I thought it odd, how it was the same night after night, day after day, but now I’m used to it. It has a certain solidarity to it that I can always count on.

I sit at my piano and croon a mournful tune into a microphone that smells like it’s been dipped in alcohol. It’s a fine balance, what I do. I have to play unobtrusive enough that I don’t intrude on the soft melancholy of the drinkers, but conspicuously enough that my tip jar sees more than dust. I resist the urge to strike up a song that fits the room perfectly… everyone plays that song when there’s a lull in the evening and I am not that type musician.
The woman with the painted lips catches my eye with a question, and I answer her with the ghost of a smile. Yes, I play the shadowy broken musician better and better every day. I inhale deeply, breathing in the human condition and exhale the amplification of it. I turn my attention away from the painted lips to the painted eyes, and stop. Painted eyes are common here, but not like these.

The color is unremarkable, just ordinary brown, but they’re so out of place. These eyes have known unspeakable things and seen unknowable phenomenon. The depth pulls me in like a fish on a line and as I round off a song, I get lost in the disinterest of those deep brown eyes. She doesn’t care for me, she’s seen my kind before, I can tell that, but she watches me still. Perhaps she sees in me the same familiarity that I find in the smoky room and finds comfort in it. The thought intrigues me and I want to know more about her, but I have to finish my set of aching clichés.
So I pull out a few that have gathered dust in the corner for a while and let them spread out across the bar. I have the attention of a few drinkers who are feeling particularly sorry for themselves. I let the music take me away and with every bar that falls from my hands onto the black and white keys, the world grows opaque.

The smoke draws close around me and obscures reality. I am a creature of sorrow, and the world is my poetically pathetic muse. I give voice to the distress that deep down, everyone feels. Three songs later, the world has cleared a bit and my shift at the grand mistress is over. I stand from the piano and exit the stage to gather my things.

I consider going to find those deep eyes for a moment before I slip out the back door and into the damp night. I decide that those brown eyes are a song I would rather not sing tonight and light up a cigarette in the alley. The first few puffs calm my blood and I set off in the direction of my home. I turn a corner and suddenly, there she is.

Those eyes, with the song in their depths pulls me in. She is playing a song she knows by heart. I have played it once or twice, I know the chorus, but I still can’t sing along to the bridge. Perhaps I’ll let her teach it to me… or maybe not… who knows where the music will take us.

Reviews

[Mifa]

Once again, this is great. i admire how you pull off the narrative with no dialogue and still give it that enthralling feel that my senses are becoming accustomed to with every read line of your work. I think there so much more in this piece to go a longer way as a lengthy work. So, you might want to keep that in mind.

Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, stop writing.