Simone

The voice wafted to her ears as the door closed behind. The bar was littered with sporadic life, compressed shoulders and hunched backs, all unaware of her or each other or of the voice which seemed to be all around them. All were drowning in their own life streams, or damming up the tributaries. Whichever.

As she moved to the bar a melody warbled about her and strains of music followed along with it. She caught the bartender's attention and a glass was set before her. She made it disappear and ordered another. She was aware of the voice once again. It was lilting, effervescent, describing words which wound into unbroken sound. She supposed it was music; turned to find it.

The dimly lit stage lay beyond the skeletons of empty tables. A figure was seated there, at the piano, and she could discern the movement of arms as hands fingered the teeth of the detuned beast. She clutched her freshly filled glass and walked to the stage. The tables surrounding it were devoid of life and sat haplessly barren. The regulars at the bar regarded her as she weaved between that emptiness. The notes from the cavities of the beast became clearer and her mind comprised an image of knuckled fingers tickling ivory, handling, relinquishing, fingertips sculpting a circle of fifths into a hendecagon of sevenths.

She sat at a table nearest the pianist and the words wafting from his straightened back were muffled still but she would catch a syllable here, there, delivered in what seemed to be a reoccurring pattern of cryptic significance. She sipped the fire in her glass and it settled into an uneasy existence.

The figure was dressed in a very nondescript way so that she could not determine whether it was man or woman. The voice itself, contralto? Countertenor? It alluded to neither, an ambiguous form conveying what could be described as music for it could not be described as anything else.

And there was those syllables congealing together, alone and repetitive and the notes of the piano like a thousand twinkling instruments, cascading around the androgynous voice. The song persisted, seemed to have no end, was reluctant to transition, determined to explore the intricacies of a single theme.

She didn't seem to mind for, repetitive though it was, the melody grew on her, summoned feelings in her long since forgotten. Her glass now empty, her fingers traced the grain of the table with absent-minded intent. Her turquoise flats upon the floor, she massaged the back of a calf with a foot, up and down, backward and forward, perhaps in time with the music, perhaps to the beat of her heart.

She closed her eyes as all eyes at the bar quietly regarded her. The pianist didn't turn, didn't deviate from its purpose, its arms moved as hands fingered the teeth of the detuned beast. The notes rose and fell the same as they always had, effortlessly, eternally.

Her fingers traced labyrinthine routes upon the grain, her head softly bobbed, her skin felt a world apart, an article of clothing, disconnected, malleable. The melody caressed her, the words were soft as if whispered, the image in her mind regarded the stage from the bar and the figure which hardly moved but moved the world. She listened to the melody and that languid two syllable word contorted and vocalised in every way. She heard it clearly now but could not remember its meaning or if this was music at all. What was music? The things around her lost significance, were merely things relating to another world, another layer beyond perspective.

The pianist continued the strain, never deviating, never tiring, the hypnotic movement of the arms, the slight glimpse of knuckled fingers, the impossibly straight back, the timeless attire. She watched the stage as the others watched. The bartender refilled their drinks when needed no longer needing to ask what they preferred.

"Hair of the dog," she thought, as a glass was set before her, but what was dog? What was hair? This glass of fire fitting embers in her middle. The stage, so far away, surrounded by tables, all of them empty, all but the one nearest the stage where someone had discarded a pair of turquoise flats. She turned to the others at the bar, they also found this amusing.