Our band, Spoken Not Stirred, had brought down the Thelonius Room. When I smiled, permission was granted, and they clapped all right. Even in the few silent seconds after I stopped, when most singers would worry that they’d lost the audience, I knew I hadn’t they just needed permission to applaud. When I opened my eyes in the dark club, I knew I had them every one of them stared at me as if I had just ripped out their souls, put them in envelopes, and sent them back to their mothers, COD. Even after Harry stopped strumming and Gabby’s keyboard softened to silence, I croaked out the last tearful strain as if gripping the edge of a precipice. I drew that last note out for everything it was worth, pulling from deep inside my diaphragm, feeling the song rattle the bones of my rib cage, sweat pouring down my face.

Same as the last note of our last song, and I held it like a stranger was pleasuring me on a nonexistent piano. The song didn’t have words, but I knew them well, and as the strange man with his head between my legs licked me, I sang harder and harder until I woke up with an arched back and soaked sheets, hanging on to a middle C for dear life. Customers drank their thirty-dollar drinks and watched as I sang. My knees were spread farther apart than physically possible. The fact that the real hotel didn’t have a piano on the roof notwithstanding, I was on it and naked from the waist down, propped on my elbows. I was on top of a grand piano on the rooftop bar of Hotel K.

At the height of singing the last note, when my lungs were still full and I was switching from pure physical power to emotional thrust, I was blindsided by last night’s dream.

Beg by cd reiss