Amplified & Sustained

Flash Fiction

She remembered grief distorting her face like a bank robber’s nylon mask, the mirror in the small diner bathroom showing all the mascara despair but none of the rage, the rage at the unfairness of it all.

An embolism sounded like a percussion instrument, not something that snuffed out the life of a nineteen-year-old.

They had rehearsed and composed and shoved thousands of fliers under windshield wipers in parking lots where they were welcome and streets where they were not, and there was no way-no way-she was going to let the other girls down.

The tears kept masking the rage and someone, anyone, kept catching her fist when she tried to punch inanimate foes.

She would stand on that stage and they would look out at the crowd and no, she couldn’t do it, but she couldn’t not do it.

In a moment of lucidity that cut through the anguish like a booted foot off the Fort Street bridge and into the water of the river on a dare, she decided on an alien mask.

She had made it herself, so it was one of a kind, like the manboy she loved who departed the space rock without warning, without a chance.

And it stayed, stayed on her face, it became her face for every performance thereafter, his name in flowing cursive on her arm for the whole room to see as she held the neck of her bass, and who the fuck breaks bass strings, but she did that first night, and attempted to every show she played because she played every show with that same rage.

There were no tears under the mask anymore, though she couldn’t tell you when they stopped or why. Time had strangled the liquid, but not the anger, not the loss.

There were other lovers who came through and were discarded like paint samples and Christmas cards, while the band went from hobby to job with none of the passion dissipating.

She remembered that original reflected distortion when her face contorted again, when the man (or was he really a boy?) told her they would like her to perform without the mask.

She refused.

They persisted.

She knew there was only one language in which she could fight back.

She shouted in that language, and they understood, and now, she stood on stage, looking down at a sea of fans, many of them wearing the mask, and she cried once more behind hers, knowing damn well that for many reasons, some of the faces behind the masks shared her rage.

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