Jove knew the rules. He knew the upper limits.
The wood of the screen door cracked as Large Margaret slammed it open with all her bulk. A forceful tirade bubbled up inside. The air tasted of sulphur; an eruption quivered on her pincer-like lips. Jove urged his guitar to wail a high, mournful blues.
BLIND FISH BY SAMUEL DAMON 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 103
The notes from Jove’s guitar zipped like daisy-cutters across the hairy back lawn. The Stratocaster’s strings writhed in his fingers, bluesy syrup, gospel in the throat of the leader of the choir rolling in the hay with God himself. Banks of leviathan amplifiers surrounded the rough-hewn rocker in which Jove crouched. Glasses with lenses a centimeter thick perched on his nose. A dainty French-tickler growing from his lower lip dangled merrily as he sang the lyrics. One leg, clad in hacked dungarees, twitched. While the other leg, a grass-stained sneaker worked the pedal of a phase shifter. With two string-callused fingers, he gently nudged the volume control.
Inside the house Jove’s sister, Large Margaret, worked. Covered in flour dust, she angrily rolled out dumplings. It had been Margaret’s command that exiled the guitars and amplifiers to the screened sleeping porch. Musician’s crap. Useless, jobless, dreamer’s trash. Stuck with the nearly blind chowder-head for life. Margaret’s anger threatened to turn the profuse sweat of her brow to steam.
Jove knew the rules. He knew the upper limits, the decibels that Margaret could tolerate. Yet every day by noon, one o’clock at the latest, the dial would be cranked just a smidgen above Margaret’s threshold. She tightened her apron strings with a fervor of a Valkyrie strapping on the breastplate of battle. Sure, he’d smile. His monstrous, magnified eyes would roll and sink and finally glaze. Nothing would get through.
Margaret reared back and bellowed a great “God Damn” into the howling din. Sitting in the womb of tweeters and woofers Jove heard the characteristic house-quake of her coming.
The wood of the screen door cracked as Large Margaret slammed it open with all her bulk. A forceful tirade bubbled up inside. The air tasted of sulphur; an eruption quivered on her pincer-like lips. Jove urged his guitar to wail a high, mournful blues.