After a bit of feedback, here's the (current) updated and complete version of the story (see here for the first draft). I don't have to post it until the 1st, so I might still fiddle with it a bit. It still has a few rough bits, but considering what it's for (and the other work that's piling up, it's probably about as done as it is going to be). It wound up close to 4000 words. I'm quite liking the characters. I wish I had more time with them.
If I hadn't mentioned it before, this story was written because of a yearly bet I have with a few other authors (Catherine Ryan Hyde and Brian Farrey + some others over the years) around the Kentucky Derby. I lost again, as I do every year, and thus had to write a story with a title given to me by someone else. The story from two years ago wound up turning into a book that's currently out for consideration with a big publisher. I wouldn't mind if this one turned into something bigger, though it's gotta wait in the queue. There's at least two other things I need to finish first.
Anyway, I'd been working on two different fantasy books (one middle grade and one YA) so I thought it would be nice to do something different and go real world for once. Let's be honest; I can generally only write realistic fiction in short bursts. I prefer fantasy and paranormal, though I do tend to at least ground the YA in the real world. So, the title led me to thinking about what audible magic would be and I immediately thought of music. Because music is life. Heck, music was an important part of my fourth book and also the YA I'm working on now. And, since I like to twist things around and approach things backwards/widdershins/sideways...
Audible Magic
I’ve known Becky
since I was seven. She’s been talking me into things for fifteen years. Things
like moving to the city without finding a job first, dying my hair purple, and
that very ill-advised tattoo of a twerking penguin that I will never, ever let
my dad see.
She knew me back
when I played tuba in our middle school band, back when I thought I was the
coolest girl on the block for being able to dah
dah dah dum da da dum da da dum out a recognizable version of the Imperial
Death March. Back when you couldn’t find me without my Beats on. A lifetime
ago.
We’d gone to our
first concert together when we were thirteen. All the other girls were mad over
One Direction but not us—we were above
that. No big box stadium shows for us. No boy bands. No, we snuck into some
dive of a bar to listen to a band so bad that they wound up splitting up on
stage because the bass player was falling down drunk and was, apparently,
sleeping with both the lead singer and the drummer. I can still remember the
smell of the beer and the sweat of the crowd. The smell of doing something you
weren’t supposed to.
Yeah, Bec can talk
me into anything. She can even talk me into things like going to a concert I have
no desire to go to.
But she was right.
I had promised. And the tequila had definitely had something to do with it, but
also the twinkle in her eye whenever she talked about Tom. Bec had incredibly
bad taste in men and the jury was still out on him, at least as far as I was
concerned. Sure, she’d met him at the grocery store instead of on Tinder, but
he wore his baseball cap backwards and he worked in finance. It wasn’t
promising. He’d been there buying avocados and granary bread.
Bec was only
fifteen minutes late picking me up, which didn’t leave her any time to make me
change out of my most comfortable pair of jeans and a plain t-shirt. She was
wearing a little black dress and some thigh-high boots. She eye-rolled hard at
me, swiped some heavy ombre eyeliner along my eyes, and twenty minutes later
she was pushing me to the front of the line at some club I’d never heard of. Clubs
weren’t my thing. Too dark to see who you’re with. Too many people. Too much.
The bouncer was
huge, with a nose like a potato. He held up a hand to stop Bec’s full frontal
assault and pointed at first us and then somewhere in the vicinity of the back
of the line. It snaked down the block. I couldn’t even see the end of it.
Bec just smiled at
him and pulled two lanyards with passes out of her bag. She threw one around my
neck and put one on her own. No telling how she’d managed to pull those. It was
nearly always better not to ask. I wasn’t the only one that Bec could talk into
things.
The guy that had
been first in line didn’t look very happy with us. I smiled at him and gave the
universal shrug of sorry dude, what can
you do, amiright?
The bouncer poked
me in the shoulder and I jumped.
“Hey, man,” said
Bec, signing to me at the same time, “don’t get handsy. She didn’t hear you.
She’s deaf.” She turned to me and signed I.D.
show.
I nodded and pulled
my driver’s license out of my pocket and held it out to him. He tilted his head
to the side as he looked at it, then said something to Bec that I couldn’t
catch any of.
She pursed her lips
at him, signing her answer at the same time. “Yeah, she can drive. She’s deaf,
not blind.” I hoped she hadn’t also said the idiot she’d added onto what she’d signed to me. He was way too
large to insult.
He bent over to
peer at me like I was a bug under microscope. “Can you read my lips?” he asked.
That phrase right
there is one of the only ones I can consistently lip read from a stranger, but
only because I’ve been asked so many times.
“No,” I said. I can
lip read Bec a good deal of the time, since I knew her so well, though I don’t
have to since she’s been signing with me for years. She learned it along with
me. Half the time I know what she’s going to say before she says it. But other
people? Not so much. Especially since the hipster trend took over and every
other guy out there had a porcupine growing on his chin or a handlebar mustache
that belonged back in the Wild West.
He stared at me,
processing that. I got the feeling his job didn’t normally require him to do
much thinking. And he probably didn’t get a lot of deaf people coming to shows,
not at a club like this. The chance of a place this size having an interpreter
was slim to none. He finally spoke. “_____ how ___ ___ know what __ ____ ____?”
That was all I got from his lips, but I could guess what the rest of it was.
“Because everyone
asks me that,” I said. Seriously. If I had a dollar…
I could even guess
what he was going to say next, but this time he turned his attention back to
Bec like I wasn’t even there.
Now she was
starting to look pissed and I was starting to regret that she’d talked me into
coming. “And what exactly are deaf people supposed
to sound like?” she told him. Yeah, he’d asked what I thought he would. I
wasn’t sure why she was getting so wound up about it though. I’d had this
conversation about a million times before and she’d been there for many of
them. It was annoying, but it was normal.
“Bec,” I said
sweetly, “Tom’s already in there waiting, right? Can we go in now?” I smiled up
at the bouncer. Full charm. Lots of teeth. I wasn’t going to go into the full
story for his benefit. How I’d lost my hearing when I was a teenager. How I
could still remember what the sound of my voice was like. I remembered how it
felt to speak, the feel of my tongue against my teeth, the breath in my lungs,
the movement of my lips. How I practiced enunciating every word now. How people
told me I sounded more like a news announcer than like I’d used to.
I’d gone deaf, not
stupid. I could do anything the big dumb bohunk could do, other than hear. And
throw people across a room. I wasn’t really sized for that.
Some of what I was
thinking must have come through, because he shuffled uncomfortably out of our
way and waved us in. I grabbed Bec and pulled her through the door and into
Hell.
At least, that’s
what it felt like. The cool night air, gone, replaced by a stagnant, almost
antiseptic smell layered over with perfume and alcohol. It was dimly lit, tiny
puddles of reddish light from uselessly artsy light fixtures around the outside
edge, while the center of the large room pulsed with flashing strobe lights.
There was a bar at one end of the space and a stage at the other. Clusters of
tables and booths on one side, but not nearly enough for the number of people
that were already inside. How were they going to fit the rest of the people in
line? How were we going to find Tom? Why
had I let her talk me into coming? She knew I hated crowded spaces filled with
strangers.
One of my questions
was answered almost immediately. Bec made a beeline across the room, dragging
me with her. Her guy-dar was on full throttle. She’d spotted Tom all the way
across the room standing near one side of the stage. At least he wasn’t wearing
the baseball cap today.
He was two-handed
with drinks, sipping something whiskey-brown out of a glass in one hand and
holding a blue martini with a plethora of fruit sticking out of it in the
other. It looked like a Bec kind of drink. She was surprisingly frou-frou. The
more things poking out of it, the better. He handed the concoction to her with
a smile as we came up to him.
“You remember
Callie?” she said to him and gave him a very unsubtle elbow in the side. He
smiled and waved at me and managed to sign a passable how are you to me. Okay, he had potential. More than Bec’s normal
picks, anyway. The last guy she’d dated wouldn’t even make eye contact with me.
Good I signed back, saying it out loud at the same time. I didn’t
want to make him work too hard.
“Great spot,” Bec
said, nodding at the stage. “Right, Callie?”
“Perfect.”
Whatever. I pointedly spent some time looking at the instruments on the stage
as she got down to greeting him in a more personal manner. There was a well-loved
bass guitar on a stand right in front of us, a couple of faded stickers
decorating it. Drum kit, center stage towards the back. A red guitar on the
other side. A single microphone down front, another guitar next to it. Huge
black speakers on either side on stands. No fancy set dressing. Just the
instruments. Well, you couldn’t say we’d changed much since we were young,
though this club was both better and worse than that dive bar we’d gone to for
our first foray into live music. I’d bet the drinks were a lot more expensive
here, that was for sure.
The house lights
flashed. I looked around and saw that the room had filled up even more. It was
a wall of people behind us, undulating like a beast, like they were one body
with many arms and legs and mouths. It was even hotter now, like a wave of heat
washing over me. Hell. Seventh level.
I looked at Bec,
ready to make a face at her but she was smiling at me, so happy. I couldn’t do
it. “Showtime!” she said. Love you
she signed to me. Ready? Dance you me. She
pointed to the stage and then flung an arm around Tom’s waist, hips already
ready to go. No one loved to dance as much as Bec.
I turned back to the stage, putting the crowd
at my back, trying to pretend they weren’t there. The band was coming out. All
guys. But there was no way they were a boy band; not unless boy bands had gone
sexy and dangerous since I’d paid any attention to them. Harry Styles eat your
heart out.
The bass player was
dressed like me, t-shirt and jeans, though somehow, they managed to not look
basic on him. Maybe it was the hair. It was long-ish and tied back in a
ponytail. No facial hair, unlike the lead singer, who was sporting a full-on hipster
beard. I wouldn’t be lip-reading him. The drummer was tattooed and shirtless.
The guitar player had on tight leather pants and some shiny shirt. Silk? God,
he had to be melting in the heat.
I could feel the
crowd behind me now as they clapped and shouted and stomped. Like a heartbeat. A
drum beat. No, that was the drum
beat. The drummer had started playing. And the bassist too. A line, a thread…it
vibrated inside me, a drawn out thrumming I could feel in my chest. In my
bones. Boom. Boom. Boom. The speakers
were quivering. So was I.
Boom. Bah Bah Boom. Like a race car had suddenly let loose
inside my veins, gone screaming through the bends of my heart and come out the
other side. I could feel the music.
It was there. Like I could reach out and touch it. Cradle it. Take it inside
me, but I didn’t need to. It was already there.
I put my hands on
the stage in front of me, near one of the speakers and closed my eyes. Yes. There it was, the pulse of the
song. I stayed that way, nodding my head in time to the music, feeling it all
the way down to my toes, like I was inside
the song. A minute, forever, too long, not enough, I wasn’t sure and then the
song was over. I opened my eyes as the thrumming left me. The singer was
talking. I didn’t know about what. I didn’t care. He should shut up and sing.
I tapped Bec on the
arm. “I was in the song,” I said but she shook her head and cupped her hand to
her ear. The crowd was too loud. She couldn’t hear me. Song I signed. Music I am.
Was I making sense? Beautiful! I
didn’t care. Feel music inside. Boom. Boom. My hand to my chest. She smiled
at me and laughed. Good good she
signed. Did she get it? Did she understand?
We could talk about
it later. Another song was starting.
I
closed my eyes and this time I leaned into the stage, wishing I could take my
shoes off and feel it even more, from the soles of my feet up. I didn’t know
what the song was, but I did at the same time. It felt like I remembered. It felt
like music and freedom and doing something you shouldn’t but you oh-so-should.
I kept trying to
explain it to Bec between songs, but I wasn’t sure she could understand. I feel too she signed. Band good. Song good.
It wasn’t good. It
was amazing. It was magic.
Bec touched my arm.
Last song. Too soon. I wasn’t ready
for it to be over. Next band half hour
she continued. I felt like I could stand here all night, so long as the music
kept going. A half hour felt like forever away. Drink?
Okay, I signed. Bar you me
drinks. But not yet. Not until after the last song. Shut up. Feel-me-need. I pointed to the stage. Words weren’t
enough. She laughed and nodded and went back to Tom. He was doing the white man
dance and I didn’t even care.
The last song began
and this time I kept my eyes open, wanting to take it all in. The drummer,
sweat shining on him, making his tattoos glisten in the lights. The guitar
player, down on his knees, head thrown back. The lead singer, cradling the
microphone like a lover. I wished I knew what the words were. Man, I didn’t
even know what kind of music this was. It felt like rock. It could be punk. It
could be anything. It didn’t matter. It was music. I’d ask Bec later.
And the bassist—I
looked up at him to find him staring down at me with his dark eyes like he’d
been waiting for me to notice him. He smiled as our eyes caught. He took a step
or two toward me and then knelt down right in front of me, still playing. He
nodded at me. Nodded at my hands pressed to the stage. What? What did he want?
Was I in the way? Crap. I lifted my hands and would have pulled them back, but
without missing a beat he grabbed one of my hands with one of his and put it
flat against the bass. Then he went on playing, nodding his head in time with
the music, his eyes still on mine.
Oh.
My fingers thrummed. Buzzed. Hummed. I felt like it was in time with my heart
or maybe it was the other way around. I smiled up at him. He had no idea. He was
making magic and I—I was feeling it. Buh
buh buh bum ba bum
He stayed on his
knees in front of me until the end of the song, watching me, like he was
playing just for me. I knew I was smiling like a loon, like an idiot, but I
couldn’t help it. I’d never thought I could feel the music again. It wasn’t the
same, of course, but it was in all
the right ways. It was the feeling of it, that bubble that builds up inside you
as the music takes you and grows and grows until you overflow.
And then it was
over. I didn’t take my hand off the bass until it was gone. Done. No more hum,
no more vibrations, no more music. “Thank you,” I said to him, not sure if he
could hear me over the crowd or not. I would have said more, had more words on the
tip of my tongue, but Bec pounced and wrapped me up in a hug. She let me go,
signing fast and furious. Amazing! How
feel? Good? Love? Fingers out in horns, smile on her face. You rock!
Tom, behind her
back, smiled at me too. He mimed drinking something and pointed at the bar. I
nodded. I needed something. I felt drained. Alive, maybe more alive than I had
felt in years, but like I’d run a race.
He pushed through
the crowd, making a path. Bec took my hand and pulled me after her. I looked
back toward the stage but the bassist was gone already. I let her pull me along
through the crowd. I should have said more to him. Something. Anything. Thank
you wasn’t enough.
Tom was a paragon.
He found us a spot right at the corner of the bar. Definite talents. I was
liking him more and more for Bec, especially without the baseball cap. They
were a matched pair, working in tandem. She insinuated herself into the line up
at the bar with a sneaky hip and pulled me in next to her.
Usual? she signed.
Please, I signed back.
She held up a hand
to get the bartender’s attention when someone tapped both of us on the
shoulder. I turned around, ready to be annoyed, but it was the bassist. He was
tall and lean and some bits of hair had escaped his ponytail to curl around his
ears.
“May I?” it looked
like he said, looking first at me and then at Bec.
“Yeah!” she said,
with a huge grin. “Gin and tonic for my girl here,” she told him. “I’ll just be…over
there…” She signed an added Go, girl
at me. Then she grabbed Tom by the collar and disappeared, swallowed up by the
crowd before I could even get my thoughts together.
Ah. And I hadn’t
brought my notepad. I usually carried a small one, just in case, but I hadn’t
bothered tonight. Hadn’t thought I’d need to talk to someone I didn’t know. Hadn’t
thought I’d want to.
He’d managed to
order some drinks before I got myself together enough to realize I should say
something.
“Um, hi,” I said. “I’m
Deaf.” I didn’t usually blurt it out like that. Jesus. I’d even pointed at my
ears, like he wouldn’t know what deaf meant.
He nodded. Opened
his mouth to say something, then shut it again. Then looked frantically around.
I pulled out my
iPhone and opened the Notes app. It would do in a pinch. I wasn’t sure how loud
the club was, but I didn’t want to shout, so I leaned over to him. “I’m Callie,”
I said. “What’s your name?” I held out my phone to him and mimed typing on it.
He took my phone.
My name is Jack.
Did you enjoy the show?
“I loved it!” I said and then I started
babbling about the music, all the things I’d been trying to tell Bec in between
songs, how I’d felt it, how it had run through my body, through my veins, how I
hadn’t known that it would be like that. That it could be like that. All the
while, my hands were talking too. I couldn’t have stopped them if I’d tried.
The drinks arrived
and he handed me mine with a smile. God, what a smile. I took a sip, if only to stop
myself from spewing words. What was I doing with this verbal diarrhoea?
“Sorry,” I said. “That
was a little much, wasn’t it?”
He shook his head
no and typed something out on my phone. He held it up for me to read while I
sipped, hoping the glass was hiding my face. I was pretty sure I’d gone red. Though
the gin probably wasn’t going to help with that.
I’m
happy you liked it.
I
don’t think I’ve ever seen someone enjoy our songs that much before.
Yeah, embarrassing.
I tried not to imagine what I’d looked like, my hands on the stage, my head
nodding in time, my eyes closed. Inside, I was still that dork playing the
Imperial Death March.
“I’ve missed music,”
I said.
I’m
glad you’ve found it again.
“Thanks,” I said.
Now was my chance. “I mean, really, thank you. Thank you for the music. For
helping me find it.”
You’re
welcome.
Awkward. So awkward.
He was probably thinking I was an idiot. But I hoped he understood what I was
saying because I did mean it. Every word.
I took another sip,
trying to think of what to say next that wouldn’t sound scatter-brained. I didn’t
even know what the name of his band was. Or any of their songs. I certainly
couldn’t ask, not now. I mean, hello, thanks for the show, enjoyed it, loved
it, who are you guys again? I couldn’t even ask him what kind of music he
liked. I didn’t know what kind he played!
I just knew how it
made me feel.
He handed me back
my phone, held up a single finger and smiled. One? One minute? One moment? One
what? Then he disappeared into the crowd, into the dimness of the club, the mad
heat. I’d lost track of the crush while we were talking, but now I felt it
again. People pressing against me on every side. An elbow in my back as someone
walked by, pushing me into the bar.
Oh, I’d done it. I’d
sounded like some kind of crackpot groupie. Where was Bec? I texted her but she
didn’t answer. She was probably off in a corner with Tom. I looked around, but
all I saw were nameless faces. A blur. Should I wait? Stay? I finished my
drink, debated ordering another. The high I’d felt from the music was nearly
gone now.
There was a soft
tap on my shoulder. He was back. Jack. His smile had gone a bit crooked. He
squared his shoulders and raised his hands and—signed. Date, two-of-us, go-to you want you?
I was so surprised
that I didn’t respond. Just gaped at him. Then I saw Bec over his shoulder,
beaming at me. He must have gone to find her. Asked her to show him the words.
My language.
He lightly touched
my forearm to bring my attention back to him, his head ducked down a bit, staring
me right in the eyes. Not looking away. Looking right at me. You I like, he signed slowly. Together music?
Together music, I signed back.
