Fiction River: Hex in the City (17 page)

Jeremy held his cello in front of him like a shield. For a stark moment he considered setting the instrument down and walking away.

Far away, to a place where music didn’t matter. Where his soul could shrink and shrivel into normalcy. Where the stuff of nightmares didn’t stalk through the shadows of the subway tunnels, or whisper from the corners of alleyways.

The stuff of nightmares.

And dreams. Dark and light entwined, like the night-brilliant lord standing before him, and all his dancing, dreadful court.

Jeremy took a deep, ragged breath flavored with the scent of the sea. Gran would have wanted him to choose the magic that ran in their shared blood. This was his heritage, his very soul. Clamping his fingers hard around his cello, he met the elf-lord’s fathomless gaze.

“I will play for you,” Jeremy said. “I will give you my music. Just—don’t take me away with you.”

He couldn’t simply disappear on his parents. It would break them beyond repair.

Something shivered over the assembled fair folk, relief and avarice mixed together in the sweet feral eyes turned upon him.

“I accept,” the lord said, his voice resonant with triumph. “You may remain in the mortal world. For now. But each new moon the fair folk will come for you, Jemmy Cahill, to be our bard until the sunrise ends our feasting. Be ready.”

“I will.”

Dear God, what had he just done?

Cold air pressed his skin, then heat. Sound returned—the screech of train brakes nearly deafening in the brightly lit station. Jeremy swayed, the taste of starlight and ashes on his tongue.

The crowd, the blessedly human crowd, surged out of the train and headed for the stairs. They brushed past Jeremy, heads bent to screens and phones, heedless.

“You okay, man?” A guy about his age paused and caught his elbow. “You might want to get your instrument out of the way.”

Blinking hard, Jeremy scooted back into the shelter of his corner. He settled on his stool, then toed his upside-down fedora a few inches out. Glancing down at his cello, he caught his breath at the smooth, unmarred surface.

Not everything could be mended by magic, but that wouldn’t stop him from trying.

Setting his bow on the strings, he began to play.

Introduction to “
The Sound of My Own Voice”

Dayle A. Dermatis, an Amazon Princess through and through, is having more fun than you are; at least that’s the impression I get when I read anything she writes. In “The Sound of My Own Voice,” I’m sure she’s the lead character, and this is her real life, and it needs to be a novel because I would read it in one sitting and beg for a sequel.

Dayle’s short fantasy has been called “funny (and rather ingenious),” “something new and something fresh,” and “really, really good!” Under various pseudonyms (and sometimes with coauthors), she’s sold several novels and more than 100 short stories in multiple genres. She lives and works in California within scent of the ocean, and in her spare time follows Styx around the country and travels the world, all of which inspires her writing. To find out where she is today, check out www.DayleDermatis.com. About this story, Dayle writes:

“Years ago a humor blogger relayed a tale about drunkenly singing karaoke with friends, to the point of rolling around on the stage. Sadly, there’s no logical progression to how my brain forms ideas—it’s rather like the Underpants Gnomes on
South Park
(Phase 1: Collect Underpants. Phase 3: Profit). Here, it was Phase 1: Drunken Karaoke. Phase 3: Woman Who Has No Idea She's a Siren Because She’s Been Told Never to Sing Gets Drunk, Sings Karaoke, Then Hot Guy Stops Her, and Then Stuff Happens. I found the rest of the story as I wrote it.”

The Sound of My Own Voice

Dayle A. Dermatis

So my boyfriend of several years had just dumped me after we’d finished eating at a new pho restaurant, and when he left, he forgot his phone, which was unfortunate because his new girlfriend (surprise!) chose that time to sext him some naked pictures of herself.

I flagged down the Vietnamese waiter and asked for a refill on my iced tea. Then I dropped the phone in the tea, sloshing some on the table in the process, left a generous tip, and walked out.

Los Angeles on a sultry summer night. It wasn’t quite dark yet, the sky still showing a pinkish-yellow glow in the west. Except in downtown proper, there aren’t any high-rises (what with earthquakes and all), so except for the traffic, sometimes it didn’t feel as city-ish in places.

There’s always traffic, though. On a Saturday evening like tonight, it was bumper-to-bumper, but it was moving, unlike during rush hour.

I wasn’t ready to go home, especially since Randy had gone there to pack (and I couldn’t call to see if he was finished, because he no longer had a phone. Snicker.). I wanted to stomp around on the sidewalk for awhile, scowl, maybe kick the side of a building or two, and…

Hey, look, a bar!

I hadn’t thought about having a drink (or three) until now, but what a fabby idea. I would sit and drink and curse Randy’s name and flirt like hell.

Despite it being a few blocks from the apartment, I’d never been here; it wasn’t really my kind of place. It was downscale trying to be upscale, casual trying desperately to be hipster. Instead of traditional booths, there were padded benches along one wall with half-dividers between them, each bench with a table in front of it and stools on the other side of the table. The benches were high to match the stools, and they looked semi-impossible to climb onto. Everything was lacquered black wood except for the tabletops, which were glass. Because you want to see your friends’ feet when you’re pounding Jaeger shots or eating mozzarella sticks.

The stools at the black-lacquered bar were also covered in a sturdy upholstery fabric in a shade of green that was either retro or had been found in the back of a dusty fabric warehouse and sold for pennies. I surveyed the bottles of alcohol displayed in front of glass, spotlighted by round bulbs, like perfume in front of a makeup mirror.

I ordered a shot of whisky and a Blue Moon Belgian White, made short use of the whisky, and nursed the beer as the place filled up. A few guys hit on me, but it became quickly apparent that I was still too scowly and surly to flirt effectively.

I tipped the bartender, though. (Always tip your bartender.)

I brooded.

My first therapist—back when I was a teenager—said I had abandonment issues. Well, no shit, Sherlock.

My younger, half-sister is Ophelia. Yes,
that
Ophelia. The mega-million pop star, hottest thing since Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber (oh, c’mon, you’ve always thought it, too) combined.

My parents doted on her, leaving me to feel like the redheaded stepchild once Ophelia’s talent became obvious. While they were schlepping her to voice lessons and hiring her manager, I was redecorating my bedroom and teaching myself how to make Roman blinds. By the time I found out that I was the product of my mom’s first marriage (my real dad died before I was born), I already felt like an outsider.

The greater irony? I have a terrible voice. Can’t hold a tune, shouldn’t even try. At least, that’s what my parents told me from the time I first opened my little toddler mouth and burst forth in song. I learned early to never, ever, ever make a noise like that ever again.

So while I never sang except in the shower when nobody was around for miles, or in the car with the windows rolled up and the radio cranked, Ophelia sang like the fucking bluebird of happiness and was worshipped by millions.

I get that I don’t have talent. I’ve made peace with that. I’m good at what I do—interior design—and I love doing it, and I was in the works to have my own series on HGTV.

I just…really loved music.
Loved. It.
When I was younger, I stole my parents’ CDs (not that they’d ever have noticed) and immersed myself in the glitz and excess of the ’80s. A Hispanic nanny introduced me to Latin American and salsa, a high school teacher shared the joys of Zeppelin and Floyd, and I found show tunes from watching
The Sound of Music
eighteen million times. If you sang it, I probably knew it.

And I really, really loved to sing, and it made me sad that my voice was hideous. (I didn’t think it was hideous, mind you, but what parents lie to their two-year-old?)

And it made me even sadder that my parents had been all about Ophelia, and Ophelia had been all about Ophelia (and still was).

Now Randy had left me, too. Although that just pissed me off. My twenty-twenty hindsight was saying “Good riddance.” No doubt it would settle into my psyche and add to my abandonment issues at a later date.

I ordered another beer, thinking maybe I should start scaling back, and that’s when they took the cover off the karaoke machine.

I should have fled, but I didn’t really have anywhere to go. And that, my friends, is when it really all started to go downhill.

Long story short, I was drunk. I was not in control of my mental faculties. My mental faculties had drowned in the third (fourth?) whisky as it burned down my throat. So when the bartender (Ted, and he was cute but gay) leaned over the bar and asked if I were going to sing, I opened my mouth to say “Oh,
hell
no,” but what came out was “Oh, fuck it, why not?”

I staggered up to wait my turn, which gave me time to peruse the song list. There are a lot of breakup songs; you know that?

Then I was on stage, no more than a carpeted plywood frame a step up from the floor, and my stomach plummeted and somersaulted and protested the third (no, it was at least the fourth) whiskey, and I stared out at the bar patrons in abject and utter terror.

Don’t sing.

I can’t sing
.

My hand shook. I desperately needed to put down the microphone, get off the stage, run. The few people who were paying attention were watching me expectantly, and then the music started and my choices were throw up or make noise.

I don’t know how I did it. The first few words peeped out of my throat, the sound of a hungry kitten, but nobody cringed or covered their ears or threw beer bottles at me—which may have spoken to their own levels of inebriation, but it gave my booze-sodden self a shred more confidence.

It probably also helped that I’d chosen J. Geils Band’s “Love Stinks.”

I soldiered on, keeping my eyes firmly on the little black screen to read the amber lyrics as they scrolled by. When I got to the chorus, I sang the title words.

At the appropriate moment in the song, the entire bar shouted the words back at me.

I actually dropped the fucking microphone.

I scrabbled and picked it up and went on with the song. Now the patrons were singing along with me, and the only reason I could sing above them was that I had the microphone, and I was drunk, and the combination had emboldened me in a way that stripped away two decades of my parents telling me
for the love of all that’s holy, don’t sing
.

By the time I was finished, a row of beers and shots were lined up on the low stage in front of me, and they wouldn’t let me leave. They yelled for more.

So I gave them “You Oughta Know” (that Alanis Morissette, she knows how to write pain) and Cee Lo’s “Fuck You.” I howled my way through “Since U Been Gone” and it was probably the booze talking but I wailed it better than Kelly Clarkson herself. I honest to shit rolled around on the stage during “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” while everyone sang Taylor Swift’s words with me.

They were insane. More people kept coming in, and everyone was on their feet, crushed together as close to the stage as they could get. You couldn’t fit another person in that bar even if you had a truckload of lube.

Even my cute-but-gay bartender was one of the people
standing on the bar
.

This must be what it’s like for Ophelia, only on a smaller scale. I was too drunk to process it all. I went for my trump card: “I Will Survive.”

Best. Breakup Song. Ever. Am I right?

We were all dancing (insofar as anyone had room to dance) and I had my eyes closed and my arm in the air and—

—suddenly it was just me singing, no music, nothing.

I stopped so abruptly, I staggered and nearly tripped over my own feet.

The stage (if you could call it that) wasn’t high, but it was enough for me to see over the crowd, to the guy in a dark suit at the far door. The audience’s noise went from annoyed murmurs (at my lack of singing) to what sounded like angry shouts, the people closest to suit guy turning to direct their comments at him.

I didn’t know if he was a cop come to bust us for overcrowding or for criminal overuse of Axe body spray—I just knew it would behoove me to be elsewhere.

Happily, the back door was right behind me. I chose to make like a prom dress and take off.

The fire door dumped me in the alley behind the bar. I stopped to take a deep breath, trading spilled booze and BO for dumpster aroma and car exhaust.

Then I cut over to the next street and staggered (who knew that when you sang karaoke and people liked it, they bought you drinks?) towards home. I’d bought new boots for our date, knee-high brown ones with buckles at the ankles, and I had a blister the size of Montana on my left heel.