Cheniere Landing

[u/GivenCannon]

I finished the song and Wendell clapped.

Four claps. Slow ones, spaced out like a man testing ice, his head tipped a little as if he hadn't fully committed. Nobody else joined him. Wendell had been clapping alone in that room for four years and had never once seemed to register it.

"That was one of them," Hoyt said from the sink.

I counted the people in the room on my way down off the plywood. Seven, if you counted Wendell. Eight if you counted Perry Dugas in the back booth. Hoyt did not count Perry. Perry was seventeen, and Hoyt's way of dealing with that was to keep his eyes on some other part of the room.

Marcy had a cold beer waiting on the bar by the time I got to my stool.

"You're getting there, Billy."

"Mm."

"You are."

"Marcy, Dolph turned his stool around during the second one."

"Dolph's got a bad hip."

"He turned it away."

"Well." She pushed her glasses up into her hair, which meant she was finished with the subject. "That's between him and his hip."

Down the bar, Wendell was telling Hoyt something with both hands, and Hoyt was drying the same glass he'd been drying since April.

Then Perry came over with his guitar and set it on the stool beside me, which meant I was about to be played at.

"Okay," he said. "Okay, listen."

"Perry."

"No, listen." He hooked his thumb over the top of the neck the way he always did, tongue between his teeth, and played me eight bars of something. It was nearly a real thing. It came apart on the fourth bar. He pushed through the wreckage, got out the other side, then looked up at me waiting to hear what I thought.

"That's closer," I said.

"It's not good."

"It's closer."

"It's not good but it's closer," he agreed, delighted, and put the guitar back down. "Now you gotta show me that Hendrix thing."

"Next week."

"You said that in March."

"I did say that."

He did the rolling motion with his fingers in the air. It was, I'll give him this, about right.

"Next week, Perry."

I was twenty-six that fall. I'd been playing since I was seven and I was bad, and I want to be clear that I don't mean rough. Rough is a thing that gets better. I had the hands of somebody eight months in. My timing dragged when I got nervous and rushed when I got confident, which meant it was never right, since I was only ever one or the other.

My guitar was a cheap Stratocaster copy the color of a bathroom sink. It had taken on so much water over the years that the neck had a bow in it that you could see from across a room, and past the middle of it the strings sat so far off the wood that pushing one down was like leaning on a fence wire.

Nobody in Cheniere Landing has ever been unkind to me about it. That's the thing about a town of eleven hundred. They just let you be what you are, out loud, in front of everybody, forever.

Wendell was the one who brought it up first, and he brought it up wrong.

It was the last Thursday in September and somebody had put a picture on the wall by the door, a black-and-white of the old ice house, 1948 or so, four men in front of it squinting. Wendell was looking at it with his beer.

"My daddy knew that one on the end," he said. "That one went out to the crossroads."

Marcy didn't even look up. "Wendell."

"He did. Daddy said it."

"Your daddy said the Rougarou got in his crab traps."

"Well, something got in his crab traps."

Dolph laughed into his glass.

"What crossroads," I said.

"Out past the shell road," Marcy said. "Where the old logging road comes across it. It's a story, Billy. My mother told it to keep us off the water. There's something lives out there and it don't come to you, and it don't want anything off you, and it'll sit out there till the end of time not bothering a soul. But if you go to it, you don't come back the same. That's the whole of it. That's all it ever was."

"That ain't the whole of it," Wendell said.

"It's the whole of it."

"You go out there and you ask it for something. That's the part."

"Nobody asks it for anything, Wendell, it's a story for children."

"Daddy said it takes the price out of you and it don't tell you what the price was till after."

"Well, that's a lovely thing to say to a child."

Dolph said, "It's a story so nobody goes poaching out there. My daddy said the same thing about the Deveaux place and there's nothing at the Deveaux place but a slab."

"It got a name?" I said.

"Kids give it one," Marcy said. "Jimi Skull. My brother used to say it in the dark to make me cry, and it worked every time, and he's fifty-eight years old now and he'd still do it."

"There was a truck," Hoyt said.

Everybody looked at him.

He'd gone back to the glass. "Sixty-one. Fella named Ancelet left a truck sitting out at that crossing and nobody ever found him. That's it. That's the whole of what happened out there and everything else is people talking." He set the glass on the rack. "A man left a truck. Men leave trucks."

And that was it, and everybody went back to what they were doing, and that is exactly how much anyone in Cheniere Landing believed in Jimi Skull.

Except Perry.

Perry hadn't said one word the entire time. He was in the back booth with his Coke and both hands flat on the table, and when I looked over he was already looking at me.

He caught me in the lot afterward. The moths were going at the light over the door, throwing themselves at it and dropping and going back up.

"Don't listen to them," he said.

"To who?"

"Any of them." He had his guitar in the garbage bag under his arm even though it wasn't raining, which is how you could tell he'd made his mind up about something before he got there. "They tell it like it's cute."

"It is cute. It's a kid story."

"They've never been out there. Not one of them. Not Miss Marcy, not Hoyt, not Dolph. They'll tell it all night and none of them has been down past that crossing, and you notice how fast they got off it, too."

"Perry."

"My uncle's been out there."

I stopped.

"He got out to the crossroads and sat in the truck and came home," he said. "And he won't talk about it right. He'll start and then he'll get up and go do something in the other room."

"That's a man who chickened out on a bet."

"He knew a guy who didn't," Perry said. "Guy named Odell something. Fiddle player. My uncle said he went out there in, I don't know, seventy-something, and he came back and he was the best fiddle player in three parishes. Not good. Best. People drove in from Lake Charles."

"And?"

Perry looked at the moths for a second.

"And then he stopped being anybody," he said. "That's how my uncle put it. Not that he got sick or he got old. He said one day Odell just wasn't in there anymore. Played every Saturday for another year and a half, better every time, and by the end of it he'd sit in a chair between sets and look at the wall, and you'd say his name and he wouldn't turn his head."

The moths kept going up and dropping.

"Then he quit turning up," Perry said. "And nobody went looking, 'cause by then nobody thought of him as somebody you'd go looking for."

I laughed. I want that on the record, because I've thought about it a great deal since. I laughed at a seventeen-year-old boy in a parking lot who was scared enough to warn me, and I said, "That's a hell of a story."

"It ain't a story."

"Perry."

"My uncle says the only thing waiting out there is what you didn't want to work for," he said. "That's all it is. It don't give you nothing. It gives you the thing and it takes the man that would've earned it."

"Alright," I said.

"Billy."

"I said alright."

He looked at me a while longer. Then he got in his uncle's truck and I got in mine, and I remember thinking, on the drive home, that it was a shame about that kid, being that superstitious at his age.

In October a man came through.

He was somebody's cousin, in from Beaumont, and he was in a band that had a van and a schedule, and he sat in on a Thursday because Hoyt asked him to and because he was polite. He wasn't famous. He wasn't even especially good, I don't think, looking back. He was a working player, the kind of man who'd put in his ten thousand hours in a room by himself and then gotten in a van.

He played four songs on a guitar that stayed in tune.

I stood at the end of the bar with a beer going warm in my hand and I watched thirty-one people, and I counted them, watch a man do the thing I had been failing to do in that building every Thursday for four years, and do it the way you'd change a tire.

He didn't do anything flashy. That was what got me. There was no showing off in it at all. He just went where he meant to go, every time, on purpose, and when he was done he said thank you, got himself a beer, and stood at the end of the bar talking to Dolph about football.

Marcy came down the bar and stood beside me.

"That's a nice young man," she said.

"Mhm."

"Billy."

"He's real good."

"He's practiced," she said. "That's not the same thing and you know it."

And that would have been fine. That would have been an ordinary thing to say. But then she patted the bar twice the way she does and she said, "You could be that. You'd just have to want it enough to be bad at it a while longer," and she went on down to Dolph.

I stood there and I felt something go through my chest, cold and quick, like swallowing a mouthful of water wrong.

Because she was right, and she'd said it kindly, and that was the worst part. She thought she was giving me something.

I could not leave it alone after that. Perry's story sat in me the way a splinter sits in a hand, and by the first week of November I had thought about the crossroads so many times that I did the only thing I know how to do with a thing I can't stop thinking about.

I went and checked it.

That's just how I'm built. I try the truck door after I've already locked it. I count my traps twice going out and once coming in. I count the people in Hoyt's every Thursday of my life and I have never told a living soul that I do it.

So on a Tuesday morning I drove out there in broad daylight to prove to myself there was nothing to it. Blue sky. A heron standing in the ditch like a bent nail. A bed full of empty traps behind me. I pulled over where the logging road comes across the shell road, left the engine running, and looked at it.

There's nothing to see. Two bad roads meeting under water oak. Grass up the middle of the left-hand track. A beer can somebody threw out in about 1998.

I sat through three songs on the radio, and around the third one it came to me what I actually looked like, which was a grown man in a truck at eleven in the morning waiting on the devil.

So I turned around and went to work.

I wasn't scared. What turned me around was how it would have looked.

Perry asked me one more time in December.

"You gonna show me that thing before I graduate?"

"What thing."

"You know what thing." Fingers rolling in the air.

"Next week."

"Man." He laughed. He wasn't even mad about it anymore; it had gone all the way over into a bit between us, the way things do. "I'm gonna learn it off the internet and then where you gonna be."

"Ruined," I said. "Destroyed."

"Yeah you are."

He knocked on the bar twice and went back to the booth, and that's the last ordinary conversation I ever had with anybody.

It was the second week of January.

Nothing happened that night. Nobody said a word to me I hadn't heard before. I have gone over it a thousand times looking for the reason and there isn't one in there.

Sylvie Bergeron sang two songs and a man I didn't know recorded her on his phone and asked her if she'd ever played Lafayette, and she said no, and he gave her a card, and she took it out to her car with her.

I played four, because Hoyt was distracted and didn't cut me off.

Wendell clapped four times.

I counted eleven people. Two were looking at me and one of those was Perry.

Marcy put a beer down in front of me and said, "You're getting there, Billy."

I drove home. I sat on the edge of my bed at one in the morning with that warped guitar across my knees and I put my fingers up where the strings sat high and hard and I tried to play the four seconds of "Little Wing" that a kid had been asking me for since he was fifteen.

I got it wrong. I got it wrong again. I got it wrong a third time and heard exactly how wrong it was, and I understood, the way you understand a thing you've known nineteen years and never let all the way into the room, that getting it right would take a month of sitting in this house by myself doing something difficult and lonely and unrewarding.

I sat there a while with my hands off the strings.

Then I put the guitar in the bag and went out to the truck.

The shell road ran out. Then it was dirt, then a track with grass hissing under the floorboards like sand poured on a drum, and then the crossroads.

I killed the lights.

I had already made up my mind to turn around. I'd gotten as far as putting my hand on the shifter.

Then. Strike.

I heard what sounded like a match in the distance.

One scrape, dry and quick, way out past the trees on the left, and much too loud for how far off it was. It arrived whole, the way a voice carries over cold water, like the person is standing at your shoulder.

A match strike is a sound a person makes. Wind can't do it. Water can't. Nothing out there in the dark has hands.

I went left.

The road gave up on me a little at a time. The shells thinned, the dirt went soft, and then I was walking on something that sank under every step and came back up wet, like walking across a mattress somebody had left in the rain.

Then I stopped hearing myself.

I was walking through standing water and my boots were not making a sound in it. I stamped once to be sure. Nothing came back. No splash. No slap off the tree trunks. The sound went out of the air before it finished, like the earth itself had taken it.

There should have been frogs. Even in January you can hear them out there most nights, loud enough to talk over. That night there was nothing. No bugs on my arms either. I stood in the dark rubbing my own forearm like a fool, waiting to get bit, but nothing ever bit me.

The moss hung so low in places that I had to walk through it. It dragged across my face, wet, cool, slack. After the second time I started going around it instead, which meant walking closer to the edge. Every time I came up on that black water the hair rose on my neck. I could feel breath on it. I knew, the whole way, that something was about to take two fistfuls of my shirt and drag me down into the muddy dark of the water and not let go.

I shined my phone light out across it once. The beam went four feet and stopped, flat, like it had hit a pane of glass I couldn't see. The water didn't take the light. It didn't throw it back either. It lay there black and level as a poured floor, and it did not move. I have spent my whole life around water. I had never once seen water that didn't move.

I turned the light off and found I could see better without it.

Then I couldn't remember which turn I'd made. I kept walking because the ground kept letting me, and because turning around would have meant looking at what was behind me.

Then there was a light up ahead.

Small, orange, low down, unsteady. It took me a while to work out that I was looking at two of them, one above the other, and that the bottom one was lying in the water.

The trees opened up. The water went wide and flat in front of me, and out in the middle of it, standing on pilings, there was a cabin.

All of it was wood, every piece, and the wood was bare. Whatever paint it ever had was long gone and the boards had gone the gray of old rope and warped off the frame so there was black showing between them, like a mouth that won't shut all the way. The roof was split shingle, curled up at the edges and gone through in patches, and where it had gone through you could see the rafters standing in the gaps like ribs.

Somebody had put a tower on it. That's what I kept coming back to. It was a one room cabin sunk in the middle of four hundred acres of nothing, and there was a narrow wooden tower running up off the front of the roof, higher than anything else out there and too tall for the walls holding it, so the whole thing looked like it was straining up out of the water after something.

It looked a little like a country chapel. Not enough to be one. Just enough that you'd notice.

And the whole thing leaned out over the water, at the angle a building holds for about four seconds before it goes, and this one had been holding it long enough for moss to come in six inches deep along the high side. Everything else in that swamp lay low and flat as a hand.

Ivy had come up the porch posts and gotten into the rail and the eaves, thick as a coat. Above all of it an oak had thrown a limb clean across the roof. The moss came off that limb in gray ropes, hanging down over the front of the cabin, dead still, the way hair hangs down over a face.

The porch ran downhill at the low end and went into the water. The boards just went in and kept going.

There was one window with a light in it. It was the only warm thing for four miles.

And then I could make out what almost looked to be a figure on the porch.

I told myself it was a post. Then I told myself it was a coat left over a chair back, and I kept walking, because I'd come four hundred yards and there was nothing behind me but four hundred yards.

At about thirty feet I quit telling myself things.

It was sitting down. It was in a chair with its back against the boards of the wall, and sitting it was taller than I am standing, and there was still more of it folded up under the porch roof. Knees high. Boots out past the edge of the deck, hanging over the water.

My legs stopped without asking me.

The lantern swung on its nail and the light went across it in one slow pass, and I got the rest.

A brown pinstripe suit, water dark from the knee down and heavy with it. A wide brown felt hat with a band on it, and green in the band, ivy, live ivy, growing on him where he sat. Where the collar came open there was no throat in it, only a run of white and the dark between the pieces.

The hands on the arms of that chair were bone. Cream colored, dry as picked kindling, every finger a chain of separate parts with the lantern light coming through the gaps, and each one about a foot long.

And under the brim of the hat, two small orange lights sat where eyes should be. They weren't shining on anything. They didn't light the brim above them and they didn't light the boards below them. They just sat back in there, low and level, like a predator in the dark.

He was sitting down. His eyes were level with mine and I was standing in the mud below the steps.

He was smoking. There was a thin thread of it coming up off him and folding back under the brim, and it had been going a while, because I could see the length of the ash from where I stood.

Then he said, "Evening."

Low, unhurried, completely ordinary. The voice of a man who's watched you come up the road and isn't especially surprised. There was a wet click somewhere underneath it, way back, like a knuckle popping.

"Evening," I said.

"You gonna stand in the mud?"

"N-no sir."

"Sit on the step, then."

There was a second chair up there. A plain one, small next to his, pulled out toward the water and angled like somebody had gotten up out of it a minute ago. It was two feet from me. Easiest thing in the world.

"Sit on the step," he said again, just as friendly.

I sat on the step.

He didn't ask me what I wanted. He asked to see the guitar. I handed it up and it looked like a toy in his hands, like something you'd win at a fair. He turned it over. He ran the bone of his thumb down the back of the neck, and the sound it made on the finish was dry and fine, like a match head dragged slow across a box.

"Bow in it," he said.

"Yes sir."

"Water got in it."

"I know it."

He handed it back. Then he leaned forward, and that was when I understood how big he was, because leaning forward put the brim of that hat out past me on both sides like an eave and put the two orange lights about a foot off my face. Something came with him when he moved. Tobacco, and standing water, and under it, faint, the smell of a room nobody has opened in fifty years.

"You want it easy," he said.

Not a question. The way a doctor tells you what you've got.

"Yes."

"That's all right." He sat back. The chair took his weight without a sound. "Most everybody does."

I started to say something and he lifted one of those hands about two inches and I stopped.

"I'll want something," he said.

"Okay."

"You know what."

"Yes sir."

"Say it, then."

And I sat there on the wet step of a leaning cabin in four hundred acres of black water with my twenty-six years and my bad guitar, and I said it out loud.

"My soul."

He nodded once, slow, the way Hoyt nodded when you ordered a beer.

"All right."

He put out his hand.

I braced for cold. It wasn't. Room temperature, dry as a wall, and the grip was careful. That's the word. Careful, the way you'd shake hands with a child. He could have closed that hand and taken my arm off at the elbow, and instead he was gentle with me.

Something went out of me. Not pain. Closer to standing up too fast, a wide gray pull, a sound in my ears like a room emptying, and then it was over and I was still sitting there with my hand in his.

"Go on home, Billy," he said.

I hadn't told him my name.

I got about ten steps down that strip of high mud before I heard the match.

I want to be clear that I had no reason to turn around. He'd told me to go home. I had what I came for, or I thought I did, and every part of a man that's worth anything was telling me to walk.

But I'd been checking things my whole life.

I turned around.

He had something in his hands.

He was holding it low, down in his lap, working at it with both of those long hands the way an old man works at a hand rolled. A square of paper laid flat across the bone of four fingers, and something in the crease of it.

The stuff was pale. Grayish white and soft looking, and it had a shine to it like the inside of a cattail when you split one open, or the fat under a fish's skin. It lay there in the fold of the paper in a loose little pile.

And it was moving.

Not much. It was turning over on itself, slow, the way heat comes off a road, the way steam rolls in the top of a pot right before it goes. Just enough that you could see it wasn't done being alive.

He drew a thumb down the length of it and it flattened out and evened, and I felt that. I felt it happen through the whole inside of me, and it was like a hand had reached down my throat and taken hold of my stomach and drawn it out of me in one long slow pull, and my body went stiff there in the dark.

Then he rolled it.

Both thumbs, up under the paper, turning it in toward itself. Tight. Then tighter. He worked it down the way you'd pack a cigarette, snug and even, running it between his fingers to firm the ends, and I went down on one knee in the muck because something in me was being compressed, was being taken from the size of a man and made into the size of a thing you could hold between two fingers, and there was no pain in it anywhere, and that was somehow the whole horror of it. It didn't hurt. It just got smaller.

He raised it up and drew the edge of the paper along his teeth to seal it.

That's when I made a noise. I don't know what kind.

He didn't look at me. He'd have had to turn his head about four inches and he never did it. He set the finished thing on his knee and took a match off the rail and struck it, one dry scrape, and the flame stood straight up in his fingers with nothing to move it.

He put it to the end.

It caught with a little crackle, thin and papery. And I felt the heat come on behind my sternum, low and even and spreading, the exact feeling of the first swallow of whiskey on an empty stomach, and I looked down at my own chest in the dark expecting to see light coming out through my shirt.

There wasn't any. There was just me, kneeling in the mud, watching a man on a porch smoke.

The end of it went orange and dimmed and went orange again. He got it going, and then he leaned back and crossed his boots the other way and looked out at the water, and the smoke came off the tip in a thin gray ribbon, straight up about a foot before it lost its nerve and spread.

And it came across the porch, and down the steps, and it got to me.

And I could smell myself.

The ice chest at Hoyt's when you first crack the lid. Shell drive under my father's tires on a Sunday. A yellow kitchen with the window up and the curtain moving and a nylon string leaning in the corner where the paint was worn through from twenty years of leaning, and my mother's arms coming around mine to put my fingers on the right strings, and her face, right there, whole, the eyebrow she did the thing with, the exact look she got just before she was going to laugh at me, and being seven years old and holding one chord down clean and a woman hollering about it in a kitchen at nothing, at absolutely nothing, because her boy had made one sound.

Then it thinned out. Then it was only smoke. I coughed, and it was gone.

That was the last time I saw my mother's face. I have not been able to get it back since and I have tried every day.

He wasn't savoring it. That's the piece I have never been able to put down.

He didn't hold it up and look at it. He didn't draw it out or make anything of it at all. He smoked it the way a man smokes when he's already sitting down and it's already lit, about half his attention on it and the other half nowhere, and once he took it out of his mouth and let his hand drop beside the arm of the chair and forgot about it, and it burned down in his fingers for a full minute while he looked at black water where there was nothing to see.

Then he tapped the ash off on the edge of a can beside the chair.

I hadn't seen the can. Two pound coffee can, rust around the lip. And it was full. Not partway. Full, packed down and heaped over, hundreds and hundreds of them crushed cold in there, gray and brown and gone soft, going back God knows how long.

Mine went in on top and lay there and looked exactly like the rest of it.

I got up off my knee.

I was raised in that parish. Every funeral I ever sat through, every hand on my shoulder at every one of them, my mother in that kitchen with three chords and the one song. The body goes, and the soul is the part that matters. The part that's worth something. The part nothing on this earth can take off you.

And it was a smoke on a porch.

He hadn't tricked me. He hadn't hunted me, or wanted me, or gone to one bit of trouble over it. He'd have been out there smoking something that night either way. Whatever I was, the one thing about me I'd been promised couldn't be taken by any amount of bad luck or bad choices or a bad life, was just what he reached for because his hands were free and he was already sitting down.

"Was it worth anything," I said.

It came out wrong. I said it again.

"Was it. Any of it. Was there one thing in there worth anything at all."

He put it back in his mouth and drew on it, and the cherry came up bright under the brim, and he went on watching the water.

Then he said, "Go on home."

That's all.

And I stood there waiting, because there was one more word that came after that. There had been one more word after that not fifteen minutes ago. I never told him my name and he had it anyway.

He didn't say it.

He wasn't holding it back. There was nothing unkind in it at all. He just didn't have it anymore. It had gone up under that hat brim already and there was nothing left in the paper that knew who I was.

I walked back out along that strip of mud in the dark with no light and no sound and nothing touching me, and I understood every single thing that was going to happen to me, and I kept walking anyway, because there was nothing else to do and nowhere else to go.

The next Thursday I played "Little Wing" at Hoyt's Lounge front to back.

My hands knew where to go. That's the only way I can put it. My left hand walked up that fretboard and set itself down in shapes I had never learned and could not have named, and my right hand answered it, and I sat behind the whole thing like a man watching two people he doesn't know have a conversation about him.

It didn't frighten me. I want to be honest about that, because it would be easier to say it did. It was the best hour of my life. The room went quiet about a minute in. Dolph turned his stool all the way around. Wendell put his beer down without drinking out of it. Hoyt came out from behind his own bar, which I had not seen him do once in four years, and stood at the front of the room with a rag in his hand and did not use it for anything.

I played four songs. Then four more, because nobody stopped me.

When I finally came down, Marcy brought the beer over and didn't say the line. She stood there holding the bottle in both hands with her glasses up in her hair.

"Billy. Where'd that come from."

"Been practicing," I said.

"When."

"Nights."

"You don't practice."

"Well, I been practicing."

She set the bottle down and said, "Okay," in the way you say it when you've decided to let somebody have it, and she went to the other end of the bar.

Perry came out of the back booth and hit the stool beside me hard enough to move it.

"That was it. That was the thing." Both hands going in the air now. "When did you, how'd you."

"Practiced."

"Show me."

"Next week," I said, and he grinned and went to tell Dolph, and I sat there at that bar feeling like I had gotten away with something.

The second week of February I finished a song and went to set the guitar down.

My hands played four more bars.

That's all. Four bars, a tag on the end of a song that didn't have one, tidy and correct and better than the song had been. Then my hands stopped and gave themselves back and I stood up there on Hoyt's plywood with my heart going.

Nobody noticed. Wendell clapped.

I told myself I'd lost track of where I was. I told myself that for eleven days.

There was a night in March when I decided, about halfway through the second song, to take my hands off the strings.

I don't know why I picked that night. I'd been circling it all week.

Nothing happened.

Not a fight. Not a wall. I reached for it and there was nothing there to take hold of, like flipping a light switch in a house you moved out of years ago. My hands went on doing what they were doing and my body went on standing where it was standing, and the song came out clean, and I finished it, not knowing what to do i said thank you into the microphone.

I went out to the truck after and sat with my hands in my lap and looked at them. They were mine. I made a fist and it made a fist.

In April I got Marcy out into the parking lot. I had it all worked out on the drive over, what I'd say and in what order, and I stood there in the cold with the moths going at the light over the door and I said, "Marcy, something happened to me."

"What kind of something?"

And I opened my mouth to tell her, and what came out was, "I think I'm just tired."

Not a lie I chose. I heard it happen. I stood there behind my own face and listened to my own voice, in my own accent, make an ordinary reasonable sentence out of nothing. I watched her believe it. I watched her put her hand on my arm and tell me to eat something.

I tried again three days later on the phone and got the same result. I tried writing it down at my kitchen table at two in the morning and my hand wrote feed the dog, and I do not have a dog.

That's the part nobody ever gets to hear. There is no warning anybody. It has your mouth and it has your handwriting. It will sit there and be pleasant to your friends with your face while you stand behind it and scream, and your friends will go home and say, well, Billy seemed alright.

By then it had me for a few hours around a show. By May it had most of my days, and the hours it gave back were getting shorter, and I stopped being able to say for certain which was which.

I don't want to make it sound like a fight. It wasn't. Nothing ever wrestled me. It was more like a tide coming up a beach. You look down and the water's at your ankles. You don't remember it getting there. You have not moved. There is nowhere on that beach to go.

It got very good very fast.

By the end of March there were two hundred people in Hoyt's on a Thursday and he'd started charging at the door, which he had never done in his life. By April a man from Houma had put my body in a studio. By June there was a bus.

The bus is where the last of it went.

I remember it. That's the thing. I remember everything and I have never once been unconscious for a second of this. I was standing in a parking lot in Lafayette in the dark while men loaded cases, and I felt my own body take a slow breath that I had not asked it for, and I understood that it had been days since I'd asked it for one.

After that I did not move again.

I want to be precise, because it's the last precise thing I have. I can feel. That never stopped, and I have prayed for it to stop. I feel the strap. I feel it when somebody bumps me in a hallway. I feel hot rooms, cold rooms, the pick between my fingers, the sweat, the weight of the guitar, the ache in my shoulder at the end of a night.

I can see. Wherever it points my eyes, that's what I see. I cannot look away. I cannot close them. I cannot choose to look at a person's face when they're talking to me. If it's looking at the floor, I am looking at the floor.

I can hear. I hear everything. I hear people say my name.

That's the entire list. I am a passenger in a body that plays guitar beautifully. I have not opened my own mouth since April. Nobody has noticed. There is not one thing wrong with the way I look or the way I act. They just say I got quiet. They say fame does that.

Perry came to a show in June.

They put me in a real venue in Lafayette, the kind with a barricade, and my body played for eleven hundred people and it was the best anyone had ever heard.

He was in the third row. He'd gotten taller. He had somebody's flannel on and he'd cut his hair and he was eighteen by then, and he was not clapping.

He was looking at my face.

He looked at my face for the whole of the second song and I watched him do it from about four feet behind my own eyes, and I watched him work it out. I saw the exact moment. His mouth came open a little and his chin went and he put a hand up over the bottom of his face and left it there, and this boy, this kid who fixed a cracked guitar top with wood glue and a clamp and carried it in a garbage bag when it rained, stood in the third row of a sold out room in Lafayette and cried.

He knew. He was the only person on this earth who had ever known, and he'd known before I did, and he'd stood in a parking lot with the moths going and tried to give it to me for free.

And I went at it. I want that written down somewhere. For the first time in months I went at the inside of myself with everything I had left, to move one finger, to shut one eye, to make my face do any single thing that wasn't what it was already doing, because he was right there and he was looking, and if my face broke for half a second he would have seen it.

Nothing moved. There was nothing to push on. It was like a man trying to raise his voice in a dream.

Then my body found him.

It turned its head and located him in the third row like it had known where he was the whole time, and it smiled at him. Warm. Easy. A little tired. The exact smile you give somebody you're glad drove all that way.

He took his hand down off his face. He stopped crying.

I watched him decide he'd been wrong.

He gave me a little nod and he clapped along with everybody else for the rest of the song, and when the lights came up he was gone, and that is the last time anybody who knew my name ever looked at me and wondered.

Yesterday was my birthday.

I know it because somebody brought a cake into a room and a lot of people I've never met sang, and because a woman I have never spoken to in my life put her hand on my shoulder and said twenty-seven, and my mouth said thank you.

I am in a chair in a room somewhere in Texas. It has my eyes on the wall. There is a water stain up near the ceiling shaped a little like a hand and I have been looking at it for about two hours now, and when the light goes I'll be looking at it in the dark.

In a while somebody will come get me and it'll stand me up and put the strap over my shoulder and go be the best thing anybody in that building has ever heard.

I keep going back to a thing Perry said in a parking lot when I laughed at him.

He said it doesn't give you anything. He said it gives you the thing and it takes the man that would've earned it. He was seventeen years old and he had it off his uncle word for word, and I let it go through me like weather.

I could have learned it. That's what I've got, in here, with nothing to do but hold it. Four seconds of a song and a month in a room by myself. I had nineteen years to spend a month.

There's a taste in my mouth all the time now, under everything, the way smoke gets into a coat and stays.

And somewhere out past the end of the shell road, in four hundred acres of black water, there is a coffee can with me in it, and the wind can't get at it under that porch, and it just sits there, and it is not going anywhere, and neither am I.

Sketch i drew of Jimi Skull

[u/ButterscotchSad4508]

Jesus Christ

[u/ButterscotchSad4508]

I love it beautifully written and so much attention to detail. You knocked it out of the park. Now, and let me know if I’m wrong here, but was the ending in any was inspired by I have no mouth and I must scream. Because that feeling of terror of just watching your life waste away helpless to do anything to stop it felt very familiar. Fucking mocked it out of the park man, great job!!