Silk

“Well, the girl who said that’s a dweeb, anyway,” and then he was quiet. Robin smiled a wicked-mean grin, and Spyder kissed her on the forehead.

The band entered from a door poorly hidden behind the stage, taking their places on the rough platform of plywood and railroad ties: drummer first, ski

The band opened gently with a cover of the Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes Again,” spooky lilt and punched up just a little, but still as much a lie, as much an act of misdirection, as the hushed moments before a tornado. Last verse, and Byron turned and she caught him looking at her, his face more than its usual pinched, and he looked immediately away again.

Yeah, you’re losing him, and she took a bigger sip from her drink, pretending it wasn’t true, watching Stiff Kitten across the writhing dark of Dr. Jekyll’s. The spotlights stabbed down from the cramped balcony, borrowing definition from the smoke, blue and red, too much like something toward the end of any one of her nightmares.

Only if you let him go.

Daria Parker was building a mournful, droning bridge with her strings, segueing into their own “Imperfect.” Spyder knew the titles to a few of the songs because she’d bought their demo tape a few months back, five tracks and a grainy black-and-white photocopied snapshot for the cover, snapshot of a very run-over cat.

Up there, her lips pressed to the microphone, muscle-taut fingers locked in their brutal tarantism, Daria drove her words like nails. And Spyder tried not to think about anything else, nothing but the sneer and tremble of Daria’s lips and words.

‘I always meant, always meant to open up,’ my skin starts to tear, my skin starts to tear, my skin starts to tear…

Down in the pit, bodies slammed together, meat stones pounding themselves for some sympathetic spark, some uglier echo or answer, and from where Spyder sat, the moshers looked more like the condemned souls from a Gustave Doré illustration.

…and what’s inside pours itself out, pours itself out, ink into your arms.

Daria wheeled suddenly away from the mike, yielding to the guitarist, set her back to the crowd, and played now to black building-block stacks of amps. Under the gels, Keith Barry’s red Fender looked bruised, damaged by his hurried, certain hands. He was left-handed and played left-handed, and Spyder always felt like she was watching him through a mirror, reversed. Then Daria was back, managing to sound bitter and i

You see there’s nothing else left for you in there, nothing that you’d want to fuck, nothing you could steal…

Her fingers released the steel strings, drawing sudden silence from the bass, and Keith Barry and the drummer were on their own for the last furious, rushing beats. At the end, after the end, the fading whine of the guitarist’s final, angry chord, alone for the brief and empty space before the applause. And Robin’s hand, like a hungry child’s, at Spyder’s breast.

3.

“It doesn’t snow down here, does it?” Theo asked, hugging herself tightly, stomping her feet loudly on the sidewalk.

“I don’t know,” answered Niki, and Theo nodded her head.

“I keep forgetting you’re not from around here, either.”

Niki looked up at the low sky, the baby-aspirin clouds hanging closer than before the show, pearly and swollen with reflected city light.

“Well, I think it’s go

They were waiting for Keith, who was supposed to be bringing the van around, had been waiting for almost ten minutes now, for Mort and Daria still inside the club. Shivering caryatids bracketing what Niki supposed you’d call the stage door, standing guard over the amps and cases of sound equipment stacked up beside the curb. This door was wider and the same black as the wall, no handle on the outside so it would be almost invisible when closed.

“I’ve never really seen snow,” Niki said.

In the big parking lot across the street, there were still people lingering around cars, stalling, wringing the last dregs from a Saturday night already gone well over to Sunday morning. Smoking and getting sick drunk on cheap wine and beer. The back edge of the lot ran all the way to the railroad tracks, and Niki noticed a few of the goths there, clustered around an old brown car, Spyder Baxter sitting on the hood, still the center of their attention. And the green-haired girl so close she could pass for a Siamese twin.

“Come on, guys…” and the door swung immediately open, as if Theo had commanded it, open sesame, but really just Daria kicking the door wide, trying to brace it open with one shoulder. Niki caught it, held it open while Theo hugged herself and Daria and Mort wrestled the last of the equipment through.

“So, where the hell is he?” and Daria still sounded every bit the queen bitch, but Niki could feel how much of her tension had drained away during the show, through the show. Up there, she’d slipped around the diffusion somehow, wrapped herself in soothing rhythm and feedback, electricity and discord sedation. She wore a fresh Band-Aid on her right index finger, and her hair was plastered flat with the dried sweat of two long sets and the beer that someone down front had drenched her with halfway through the last song.

“First guess don’t count, right?” and Theo laughed, only half to herself, then began to whistle the chorus of “Let It Snow.” Niki was amazed; Theo even managed to whistle sarcastically.

“Fuck,” resigned and weary moan from Daria, and she helped Mort roll the cumbersome flight case the last couple of feet to wait with everything else, one wheel missing and so it tipped and wobbled like a drunken monolith. Mort had painted the band’s undead mascot on one side of the scraped and dented black box in his most careful acrylic. The zombie kitten leered hungrily at Niki, broken fangs, one eye rolled back in its rotting skull, the other dangling by gooey optic nerves.

“Shit, it’s cold out here,” Mort said, pulling Theo close to cop what little body heat she might have to spare.

“That’s ’cause it’s go

Mort grumbled something rude and unintelligible through his steaming breath. And then, one thunder-crack backfire, shotgun loud in the brittle air, and Niki jumped, felt her heart lurch and skip inside her chest. The van rumbled around the corner of Dr. Jekyll’s, pulled out of the side lot and bounced down onto the cobblestones, cough and blat of a muffler shot like a coal miner’s lungs. Keith pulled in too close and the right front wheel scrunched against the curb; the wind caught white puffs of the Ford’s exhaust, blew acrid warm and choking gusts into their faces. The van idled, and Keith stepped around the side, unlocked the rear doors and opened them like the wings of a giant albino scarab.

“Okay, boys and girls. Time to feed the shitmobile,” Mort said, mock glee, and Niki stepped back, out of the way, feeling useless and uncertain, feeling outside. They moved like this chore, too, had been choreographed and rehearsed, performed a thousand times, as practiced as their music. They filled the caged-in back of the van while she watched, attentive, just in case someone asked for her help.