Two Stories

1. Music Class

At the end of my first day as a senior, I report to the band room for music class.

Standing in the doorway, my music teacher greets me with a chainsaw grin and ushers me inside with a bow. After locating the large, u-shaped table labeled with a severe misspelling of my name, I loosen my silk black business tie, drape my white suit jacket over the back of my chair, and sit down with an exhausted groan.

The bell rings. Ten minutes pass. No other students arrive. When I raise my hand and ask my music teacher where the rest of the class is, she doesn’t answer. Instead, she makes a mark in her attendance book, leads me up the band room stairs, and ushers me into the storage closet in the back corner of the room. There, among the spiral-bound workbooks of staff paper and the whale-like carcasses of hardshell cello cases, she commands me to remove my clothes and to drop to my knees. She tells me to compress my underpants into a sphere and to stuff them into her pocket. She orders me to crawl to the bass xylophone on my right and to grasp the rubber-tipped mallets in my fists.

Without a protest, I comply. Who am I to disobey my teacher? Also, I do not wish to disobey. This is the most exhilarating event that has occurred in my forty-four years of life in this school. So for the next three hours, I stare at the carpet as my music teacher hums a strange, atonal tune and kneads the sphere of my underpants in her pocket. I listen in rapt attention as she teeters forward very slowly and makes sticky smacking sounds with her lobsterine lips. I crush the mallets in my wet hands and try to decipher the time signature of my crazed and thudding heart.

2. A Mournful Lullaby

At home I’m sitting in my car in the driveway. It’s 10:25 in the morning. The sky is the color of a sheet of stainless steel. For the past five hours it had been forty-three degrees inside the house. So I grabbed a handful of loose keys from the jar of grape jam in the cupboard and clomped out the front door to the car. There I mashed key after sticky key into the ignition until I found the one that turned. The engine screeched like an injured bird. Insufferable Christmas music scratched through the damaged sound system. The heater blew cold air into my watering eye sockets. 

Things like this never used to happen to me when I was a young man. But in middle age, I suffer these indignities on a daily basis.

Two minutes later, a pair of strange men with shining yellow teeth and skin of black latex climb into the backseat of my car. Before I can say a word, the first man vomits a paragraph of word salad into the glass pane of his closed window. The second man plays a skronking, discordant melody on a gleaming silver trumpet. But I do not turn around. Instead, I carefully watch the men in the rear-view mirror. I draw a quiet breath to calm my thudding heart. I reach for the plastic handle connected to the door on my left.

Moments before my fingers arrive at their destination, a bronze bulb of fire bursts through the front window of my house. Seeing this, I blow a defeated sigh and stare into the crackling flames. 

While the column of sooty smoke churns into the sky, the babbling figure in the backseat rests his sharp chin on my shoulder. He whispers a monologue of nonsense with the tenderness and care of a parent. He slides his arm between the seats and places a frigid hand on my upper thigh. As the heat drains from my body, the second figure plays a slow, melancholic melody on his trumpet. 

I close my eyes. I relax the tense muscles in my shoulders. I listen to the mournful lullaby and slowly drift off to sleep.