It was a shitty little black-and-brown joint squeezed into the leftover space between a sports bar and a gun store. People called it a hole in the wall. It was more like a hole in the ground, one you stumbled into by accident and then had to crawl your way out of. And even when you left, you never quite got all of it off you. Something about it stuck and kept sticking, pulled at your hair and whispered, “Didn’t you forget something?” and told you to hurry on back. Everyone, eventually, did, and wound up getting even stucker.
They called it the Coffin.
“The countdown’s at four minutes.”
“Okay? And?” Shiv said. “Quit bugging me with that. I’m trying to focus.” She was tuning her guitar.
Bram stared at her a moment longer, like he wanted to say something else, but he didn’t. He just lumbered back to his drums and sat.
Shiv was stuck. She was the stuckest person you’d ever seen. She had to peel herself off the walls, scrape herself into a bucket, and slosh it onto the sidewalk to get out of the Coffin each morning, and she spent every sunlit hour thereafter just waiting for 8:30, for those little black doors to reopen so she could crawl inside and offer herself back up to the stick. Right now it was 10:00 and they had a gig on the Coffin’s little square stage, a gig she’d spent six months wheedling the owner into giving them. “Come on, Peter,” she’d said, “I’ve bought enough drinks here to sell out the house anyway.” Which was true, if you didn’t count the bottles and glasses and bones she’d broken in that same time, which Peter hadn’t, so here they were.
It was quiet in the Coffin. It was 10:00 and it was quiet, which was strange, except it was normal for things to be strange just then, given what was happening outside. It was empty, too, except for the three of them.
A phone rang.
“It’s my mom,” Vichy said.
“Too bad,” said Shiv, “We got a show to play.”
Vichy looked out over the empty room, dimly lit. Warped, stained floorboards glittered with the glassy remnants of a thousand broken bottles. The black doors stood dark and shut against the far wall. Behind them, sirens, swinging their ponderous tunes from high to low and back again. WEEE-WOOOOAHWEEE-WOOOOAH. The highways were probably packed with traffic right now, packed with people who’d left their cars in the crush and decided they’d make it farther on foot, people who’d just now started to realize it didn’t matter either way, that there just wasn’t a way out of this.
“It’s my mom,” Vichy said.
“Fuck your mom.”
“You wish.” But she hung up and slung her bass over her shoulder and stood up.
Shiv stood too. The microphone greeted her with a whine of feedback that briefly harmonized with the lowing sirens outside. She wanted to wait, just a moment, just in case someone showed up. But she didn’t have a moment to spare, and nobody was coming.
“Okay then,” she said. She counted them in.
All at once, the Coffin stopped being quiet. Sound burst from their instruments like water from a broken dam, went flying out at 343 meters per second and crashed into the walls, the ceiling, the floor, ricocheted back into their hands and heads and chests. It was a rough sound — metallic and coarse, like sandpaper on a chalkboard. The exact sort of sound it might take six months to convince someone to let you play in their bar.
Shiv shut her eyes and pressed her mouth to the microphone like it was her lover’s groin. As she sang, the Coffin fell away. Every warped floorboard, every table, every crumbling tile in the ceiling, every syrupy glob of spilled vodka fell into a darkening void. She was floating, alone, a thousand stars of broken glass twinkling in the twilight. Somewhere above her, there was a heat. She could feel it on her scalp, on her neck, getting hotter by the moment. But Shiv paid it no mind. She was all song and sound, now, all song and sound and nothing else. She was unstuck. She was unstuck, and she was singing, a song metallic and coarse, like a siren or a scream, and nobody in the world could hear her. But, for an instant, as the heat rose to a boil and the thunder roared, they all sang along just the same. Right as they started the second chorus, the missiles hit.
Brett Bailey is an LA writer of prose and screenplays. He works in film & television, and enjoys overlong books, Dungeons & Dragons, and Mexican Sprite.
Patreon makes Every Day Fiction possible.
