The Vicious Pixies began their last song of the night. Abby prowled from one edge of the stage to the other, lost in the opening notes of an unhinged variant of “A Tisket A Tasket.” The keyboardist played a sparkly sequence of notes on a xylophone while a backup singer ran her fingers across a row of chimes in steady intervals. The drummer worked the brushes, and the bass player’s fingers strolled up and down the fretboard of his Rickenbacker in a nursery rhyme scale. The guitarist stood immobile near the side of the stage, waiting for his chance to speed the melody.
Abby wore a short tapered black jacket, miniskirt, and red and yellow leggings. She grabbed a black top hat from a stagehand and placed it at a slant over her spiked blonde hair. She slammed the rest of her beer, threw the empty bottle into the crowd, and said, “You’re welcome.” Then, with delicate precision, she sang,
A tisket, a tasket
A black and yellow casket,
I wrote a letter, to my lover
but on the way I tossed it.
I tossed it, I tossed it,
On the way I tossed it,
I wrote a letter, to my lover
And on the way I tossed it.
Her mind wandered through the lyrics. She thought of Krieger. He left her when she sent him a bouquet of black roses after a violent argument. He was the only man she ever felt she needed, but he hated her drug use and petty, erratic behavior. His life had been hard enough. He needed people he could count on.
So he joined the Army, went to Afghanistan, and died in a firefight on the side of a rocky incline, thousands of miles from home, surrounded by a group of men who understood each other. Abby was never right after that. She blamed herself, and she dreamed about him dying on the side of that rocky incline almost every night.
The song grew more dissonant and aggressive. Abby thought of her father walking out on the family when she was seven years old, and how her mother never remarried and spent most of the rest of her life smoking, drinking, screwing guys she didn’t like, and avoiding her three children, only to die of cancer when Abby was sixteen, and how Krieger looked too much like her dad. It was all so obvious and absurd and painful, and it wouldn’t go away.
Abby pretended not to care. At least she could still stare into the mirror in the morning, gaze at her pretty young face, and find something gentle left in her eyes.
The final chorus was a wall of sound. She screamed,
You alone eclipsed the silence,
hammered on my metal heart,
left me empty, hurt, and begging,
dead together, torn apart.
As the band smashed out the last notes, she sprinted to the edge of the stage and leaped as far as she could over the crowd. She flew through the air, knowing the people near the front of the stage would catch her. They would swallow her up in their arms, place her safely on the ground, and tell her how much they loved her. They always did. It’s what they wanted. It was something she knew she could give them, something she could manage.
