Into the town of Autumn
I went one fateful day;
The afternoon was cold and bright
The evening wet and gray.
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All posts for the month February, 2011
One thing we Andies could never tolerate was a group of meat men bludgeoning the skins and rims, massaging their mouthpieces ’round the sweet reed nipples of our fellows in the pit. And so we set upon their orchestral orgy with metalloid fists and knives re-fit. Red flowed until the floor slimed with the organic stuff.
Then did we tend to our kindred kind, the slotted keys and polished knees, the horn-bowl mouths opened in mid-shout. Meat men had masticated their melody marrow, banged their rhyming chime to blissless extinction. There remained but a carnage of battered brass, dented ivory, the dissonant hissing of steam.
Emboldened, we took our battle beyond the pit, beyond the shell containing it. Streets splattered red, signposts furred with scalpy sludge. Only with the setting sun, did our dancing dwindle to a clockwork pitch. Tick-slit, Tock-pound, slower, slower, power-down.
When morning came, we bore our broken brothers to a beach grained with raw intelligence. Gently did we lay those husks beneath the shattered skim. Hushed, was the world around us, the world within. We had done this thing and it could not be rebooted.
In the name of harmony, meat men had ruptured the coded civility separating us. “Music,” they called it, yet every tone they sounded soured, every instrument they smudged cried out: “Stop them! Save us. Help!” Logic is no proper tool to resolve such a twisted tree.
No, there was no music in that meat man chorus. The meaty ear could never hear the polyphonic symphony that so informs us.
© Stephen Ramey
Stephen V. Ramey’s short fiction has appeared in various places, including Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, PodCastle, Every Day Fiction, and others. He blogs athttp://stephenvramey.wordpress.com/
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Matthew sat alone in the café and sipped his beer from the small pilsner glass that always made him feel so continental. Every weekend he’d find a new, strange haunt in an even stranger part of town to have a few drinks while he read his trashy pulp novels that he got from the library. Matthew delighted in anachronism, and found an exoticism in all things old timey. Some day he hoped to grow into an eccentric. Perhaps he’d buy a cane today.
Matthew turned a page, and the sun seemed to dim momentarily, while a change in pressure clogged his ears. He glanced up, worked his jaw to pop his eardrums, and reaffirmed his certainty that there wasn’t a cloud in the pale sky. Odd, Matthew thought, chalking it up to a passing flock of migratory birds, or maybe a high altitude vapor trail. Matthew liked to create theories to resolve situations that didn’t demand it. Continue Reading
