Song of New Orleans

For Scoot's Flash Fiction Friday

Song of New Orleans, in which wind instruments inhale and exhale the city’s briny breath:

Inhale:

River runs deep and fast with shadows

Erections of wood reflect our decay

Lake is watching like the waiting gallows

Our fair-weather container is brick and clay

All huff and puff expire with mercy

The Clefs on the Staff seek debauched attention

Sounds of our city are the bow and the curtsey

For the life coquette and impish intention

Come drink to the camels that house our good folk

Come celebrate the refuge of final resort

Come toast gossamer levees, hopeless, unspoke

And dance with rash subterranean consort

:Exhale

Only in New Orleans could blacks, whites, Mexicans, businessmen, burned out hippies, bikers, Yuppies, ne’er-do-wells, and politicians all get unreasonably drunk together and still act reasonable together.

Ye Olde Original Dungeon, in the 700 block of Toulouse St. in the French Quarter, a one-way in, same way out firetrap, had been maintaining that type of peace there since the 19th Century. Its history was based on a brutal slaying of a Turkish royal family who were drugging and stealing New Orleans women for harems back in Istanbul.

Its decor was S&M/Goth/Edward Scissorhands, and its interior was labyrinthine, with actual cages about the stairway landings where volunteer couples of any sexual persuasion began as wannabe performance artists but ultimately just got into it, doing their art for themselves, as it were. Clothing didn’t necessarily figure into their cage art, but otherwise, clothing included a lot of black, spikes, and Rocky Horror motifs, with plenty of pastel hair varieties.

Artsy nail gel anchored cigarettes at the end of many fingers. The music was so loud that besides a basilar skull fracture, it was the only other way to discover that your ears were bleeding. Drinks were so supersaturated that the firetrap liability giving pause became a cliché. The smoke was 100 cubic miles of L.A. troposphere concentrated into a few thousand cubic feet of Dungeon dance vibe.

And everyone liked it.

Rhea listened to the music of New Orleans’ song. It was a drinking song, but it was still friendly—like before a singer had too much to drink.

Like eyes can put together the world from the consortium of all the different shapes, colors, textures, sizes, and perspective, delivered by waves of photons and carried to the associative areas of the visual brain, so Rhea was able to put the whole world together in her mind through what she heard. Her mind reminded her that it was all vibrations, whether seeing or hearing, sight with electromagnetic frequency and hearing with sound perturbations of amplitude and strikes per second.

Her mind told her that if visual information were delivered into her auditory gray matter, and vice versa, one really could easily see thunder or hear lightning.

There were other phenomena—always—about.

For Rhea, her mind converted most of its processing to auditory perception and processing as quickly as a cuttlefish could change color. For someone who loved music, it was glory beyond imagination.

The symphony of life continued. There were largo, moderato, presto, and prestissimo. There were adagio, allargando, allegretto, and sostenuto. Vivace emerged. And then there sounded a strain, grave, which entered the opus. Rhea opened her eyes wide.

She didn’t like this new contribution. There was someone here who was not very nice. Who was discordant. She arose and began walking, searching for the place from where this sound grew stronger. It led her out of the entrance into the courtyard. There she saw him.

In the background, the song that was New Orleans added a Voodoo counterpoint, and a drummer in the band obediently added a backbeat. All the women on the floor dropped their drinks, a collapse of shattering glass and the firefly-like cigarettes that fell to the ground as well. Then, as if rehearsed, they all turned toward the source of the discordant overlay.

The discordant one was paralyzed. Rhea heard a melodic interval tightening into a perfect harmonic interval. Something in the women reached critical mass and they began moving slowly toward the source of disharmony. They didn’t like him, and the music of New Orleans didn’t like him either. In fact, the city’s music hated him, so the women hated him, too. He stood motionless, completely paralyzed, but completely entranced in hypnotic suggestion from the music, and this song now ruled his life.

Rhea felt safe. There were Maenads with her tonight, who lusted in a brutal assault. Harmony must prevail!

The performance, dedicated especially to discordant one, was twenty-three minutes of Phrygian fury. By the time the women were finished with him, he was nothing more than a mushy pulp and was pushed out to the courtyard and then thrown in several pieces over the brick fence onto an adjacent property, where the cockroaches would feed on him all night.

When all of the women were re-assembled and the music re-equilibrated with the real world, the women and men slowly reanimated seamlessly into the dancing that preluded the visit of the Maenads. There was glass all over the floor, and that seemed a complete mystery to everyone. And even stranger, the women wore blood all over their blouses, halters, and dress fronts.

Whatever tension remained in the song was dissipated by the music’s return to the home note, with a choreographed quadrasonic one-point crash landing. For the first time in Ye Olde Dungeon history, this place—the eye of the storm—closed before sunrise. No one knew why and no one cared. It just seemed like the right thing to do, like the path of least resistance was to just leave.

The source of the discordance, however, did not return home. To a home note or otherwise.

---

Submitted for Scoot’s Flash Fiction Friday, “Seasonality: Write About a City”

---

“Throw me somethin’” is a way to give a one-time tip. Or not.

---