Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [71]
…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 innocent in the same conflicting instant. Daria, mike stand pushed forward and teetering on the edge of the stage, head bowed, leaning out over the damned, leaning into herself. Her hair, washed red-violet in the lights, ripe plum tangle and spray of sweat, whipped side to side, her face a blurred snarl.
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 gonna snow,” Theo said.
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