Acoustics Maddi Chilton
The cigarette smoke gives the ceiling a thin grey patina, muting the sharper colors of the spiderwebbed water stains. They crawl from the crown molding by the bathroom to above Len’s head, fracturing into smaller and smaller branches until they become too thin to focus on. They don’t reach the corners of the room, but Margot’s got mold in her alcove, brownish and dry enough that Len’s not worried yet. They don’t pay for comfort. That’s why the bed’s so bad, Len thinks. She rolls her tight neck. Ten thousand sweaty bodies have fucked on this thing, battering the box springs into the uncomfortable reluctant bend she can feel under her back. It’s probably messing with her spine, making her tense when she drums and when she drives. Margot doesn’t mind it. Margot’d sleep on the floor if she had to. Sometimes she does anyway, when they crash at houses with smallcouches and Len isn’t smart enough to stay awake. It’s not good for her, but most things aren’t. A note echoes off the walls, dulled by a hand held flat. Len tries to imagine. Margot singing to it. She’s playing the guitar. Alright, not playing — she’s plucking at it, using the tips of her fingernails, making a tinny crack against the strings. Any melody is in her head alone. It fills the grey empty room like the throb of a heart monitor, wavering out of tune. Len breathes in. Her throat is as dry as the Sahara. She can feel the caught air rattling in her chest, shaking against its confinement and searching for a way out. In—Imbecilic— It’s lost. There’s a word she’s been looking for. Harsher than stupid, dull, dumb cunt can’t keep her act together, did this to herself you know — but academic, a learned level of idiocy, vapid, vacuous, dense as a fucking rock you are — No. She raises a numb hand to her forehead and pushes her hair out of her eyes, feels sweat beneath her fingers. It’s — she’s fine, she’s got it, she’ll get it. Thick, she thinks, but that sounds like someone else’s slang, a word to be spit out with an accent she doesn’t have. Ignorant, but that implies innocence. The pulse of the guitar is robbing her of breath. She keeps timing her inhalation against Margot’s fingers on
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the strings, waiting out the patternless pauses until Margot plucks again, off-key. There are heady, feathered gaps in her concentration. The lyrics sheet lies crumpled under her fist, balled around a Sharpie old enough that it’s lost its scent. Margot should stop playing. It’s the only way she’ll finish the song. She tries to say it and gets distracted, tonguing the cracks in the skin of her bottom lip. It’s well past the point where smiling makes it bleed — she tests it. “What are you smiling at,” Margot says. Her voice is still crawling back, rough with a cold she never quite kicked. Len told her she shouldn’t be singing and she told her to fuck off. Len thinks, moronic. Too clumsy. Margot repeats it: “What are you smiling at.” Flat. A question, but you’d never tell from her tone. She stops dancing around the bones of her song and the room shivers into silence, the last twang of the guitar echoing. Len regrets wanting her to stop. “Nothing,” Len ends up getting out. “I lost a word.” “What word?” Len exhales, exasperated. “I don’t know.” Margot resumes plucking. A song Len knows, now. She wrote it for her when they first met. The calendar can’t map the years that have passed since then. Len turns her head. “Stop,” she says to the figure in the corner, hunched over the beat-to-shit guitar. Margot’s fingers still. A curtain of hair hangs over her face, blocking her from view. Her hand curls like a claw around the fretboard — she’d let Len paint her nails a while back and it hasn’t fully chipped off yet, the drugstore blue still clinging on. Sitting on her ankles like that, she looks like a kid. There had been a time when Len could look at her without cataloging her inching deficiencies, her tight joints, her thin fingers. At the beginning she had seemed so effortless. Len knows her better now. It’s strange to think about. Sometimes she’s not convinced that her life didn’t begin in the bar where they met, her fake