Carried

[bairnsidhe]

 Content Warning: Death, grieving, mention of plans for emergency ending of life, drinking as self medication.  Mind your headspace.

Jane carried her guitar from bar to bar, trading in songs and horrible puns.  The guitar she named Othello, for the shiny black wood from which it was made, and the speed at which it turned on her if she wasn’t careful in her tuning.  At a roadside pit with sawdust on the floor and a list of health code violations that would never see the light of day, a picture hung over the old fashioned upright piano.  Jane was in that picture with the men and women she loved the best.

Ed the Piano Man sat at the upright, his love stationary but his suspicious nature carried in a pocket on his boot.  He’d purchased a few less than legal things when he was released from the prison of social services, a few years older than he went in, a few dozen pounds lighter, and carrying pain he couldn’t name.  Between the pills on his left and the switchblade on his right, Ed carried death with him, his own and others.

Toni carried very little, not even a gender.  The bar had appeared to them as a dusty pit stop on the trail to hell, the first place found after getting the diagnosis that started with C.  What began as a pain-killing bender, chemotherapy on the rocks, turned into the place to unload what was carried. To give away the things that couldn’t be taken on the final journey, tell the stories no one else knew.  The photograph showed Toni sitting on the upright’s lid, feet kicking and face raised to an unseen sunlight in song.

The heads of people not on the stage could be seen, the photo having been taken from the bar.  Each head present for Toni’s last song came back. They carried pictures and gloves, for hands that had always been cold, stories and paper flowers that would never die.  They carried songs of their past, songs made simple, made to be sung by the drunk and the tune deaf. They carried an urn that carried no ashes, the body that had carried their friend being left unto science.

Jane stood beside the piano, Othello in her hands, and failed to find words for what she carried.

“Just play,” Ed advised.  “Lay down the beat, the pain’ll go with it.”