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NB: this is under flash fiction, but it’s really more of an unfinished short-story. I probably won’t finish it, so I’m posting as is. Feel fee to tell me where I can stick it and what I can do to it when it gets there.
…
The city blazed the night the bad friend left. She left him behind to burn with the sky, with his arms and legs and expectations, to be torn limb from unrealistic limb, for fire to eat his alabaster. She left when the city was red. The height and the heart of the summer.
The bad friend left while he was sleeping. She opened up the kitchen window and eased her ankles over the sill. The escape was almost entirely rust, and eaten through in places. But Bernie was light as a feather and she rode the thermals like a mote of dust, or so it seemed to her.
He’d accused her of all kinds of things, then gone to sleep it off, face down on the futon, flat out in the spare room. She had watched him slacken in to sleep, like somebody was letting the air out of him. Then she wiped her hands on the legs of her jeans. No more of this, she said. And she meant it.
The bad friend had stayed for twelve years. Half on account of his very pale body, and half on account of his beautiful mind. Which had been beautiful, then, before the rotting got it, like the red rust on the fire escape.
To the talkers he had been brilliant. Then brilliant but troubled. Then troubled. Then trouble. She fancied sometimes he had degenerated out of sympathy, with Ireland, with the world. But his temper had taken a turn for the fierce, and drink had drowned the non-singing parts of his person until he was a voice with a carcass attached and not a lot else.
He said that the songs had consumed him. That they ate him up from the inside out. A song is an animal you don’t so much tame as ride the wildness in to exhaustion. You can’t be too surprised, he said, if a bit of the roughness rubs off on you. You can’t be too surprised if you flip go native. A song is an uncivilising thing, comes at you with its passions.
The bad friend had known what to expect, but she wasn’t so sure what form it would take, and this one seemed so un-magnificent, unworthy of music. She would rather the brief flare than slow burn, that was the truth at the end of the day.
To hear him sing In The Old Way was something else. She could have forgiven him a lot for that. But not this, the gradual enfeeblement of sense and senses. And now that she thought about it, she had stayed so long not to save him from drink but to save her beloved music from him. He killed a part of all of them when the rubbished voice cracked and a difficult song died in the throat.
I am a bad friend, she figured, to him at least.
She hated the idea of the music he carried being buried alive in the gradually useless, eventually inert sack of shite that was Arlan. He said that it was too much, too much to contain, all the sadness and violence and hope and history, too much to make them remembered, too much to make them beautiful.
But the bad friend knew better. He should have been grateful. He should have understood how much the music meant.
The city blazed the night the bad friend left. The shepherd’s were well warned, the sky lit up like emergency, like Christmas. She danced down the avenue past the brown brick houses, hearing for the first time America’s music. The music of silence.
She took a taxi to the coast and she stayed in a motel. He listened to the radio. She did as she pleased.
------
The human race, the only race I know where everybody loses.
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