My Rockstar Romance

Adult Contemporary Romance with Magical Realism

Faces. Beaming, awaiting, heads bobbing up and down to the beat. Eyes scanning. A sea of eyes, a sea of faces. Dim overhead lights as scant illumination, dangling feebly from the ceiling. The dark and dampened hues swam from the outer lip of the stage, with its criss-crossed snakes of wires, nearly all the way to the end of the venue, a lullaby sea. The lone mic stood like a solitary tree at center stage. The excitement was palpable. They could feel it, they always have. He’d felt it in his too-small in the trailer park, all those years ago when he was a boy with nothing to look forward to, staring up at the leaky ceiling while cicadas hummed outside, hands crossed over his chest. It was there then. Faintly. A prelude. It beckoned. It was in all the empty parking lots, the abandoned buildings, the borrowed garages. The feeling had always been there. The big beating crimson heart had always thrummed this way. 

The slightly stinging liquid in the flask, undiluted vodka, would make a mess of things, but only ever so slightly, a putrid cherry on a swirling slice of cake. Swaying on his feet, not ever fully being in one place, feeling as though he were slightly levitating, the mic he gripped his only lifeline. Smirnoff and Mary Jane danced a fantastic waltz in his bloodstream and made a splendid mess. Having known destruction, he had a tolerance for messes. He took a long swig from The Tank—his decade-old flask—and tucked it in the back of his jeans pocket. 

The audience whooped and hollered and cheered as Clark and the rest of Deck Lucid filed into place. Clark could not suppress his boyish grin. His quick-beating heart synced up with the big crimson pulsating heart—the waltz had run its course. Hysterical girls jumped up and down in the front. Pseudo-stoic males smiled close-lipped smiles and nodded. There were few things like performing before a crowd. He would choose this in every lifetime. 

“Thanks for coming out tonight,” Clark said, narrowing his gaze at the thick black microphone. “We’re gonna start off with a song no one fuckin’ knows.”

The crowd cheered again. Clark’s heart may have swelled then, just a little. He appreciated the proof of life. It’s still there. 

She was leaning against the building’s stone wall, her face against it, chest rising and falling sharply and erratically.

“Valentine,” Clark walked up to her and put his hands on her shoulders. “Hey. Hey, talk to me.”

Tears streamed down her face, and his heart lurched. She licked her lips, reddened and swollen from the exertion, and took a series of deep breaths to regain her composure. 

“That was incredibly stressful and I feel like I ruined your night and then you got upset with me, and—and…” Her words wobbled. She put her face in her hands once more. 

“Hey, I’m sorry I got worked up.” He pulled her close.

“I know it’s a big event for you, too,” she said, slowly leaning away. “And I feel like I made it all about myself. And maybe I am now. But I really just needed to take a break and I felt smothered. I went about it quietly and gracefully and it’s not my fault it was blown out of proportion like that.” 

Being in the wrong was not something Clark usually contended with or liked to contend with and he had seen how they’d both been in the wrong—was it unreasonable to want her to enjoy herself at his event?—but the authentic tears, never crocodilian, for she knew not how to be phony, knew not how to even attempt it, the authentic tears and the glossy eyes, shiny like a forgotten stuffed animal from childhood, Hiccup was its name, his little bear, holding on by a thread, eventually discarded on an innocuous day and never seen again, this final childhood relic, maybe he hadn’t been so willing to let go? the tears and the trembling lip and the collapsed form, sunken shoulders and nervous hands, did him in and he thought about how affection was torture and it made your heart lurch and perhaps that was telepathy on earth and hearts lurched in synchronicity. 

“I should’ve just gone home,” she continued. “I don’t know why I’m still here.”

“Come here.” 

She shook her head. 

“Please? I’m sorry. I really and truly am.” 

And he meant it and when he had her aching, trembling form in his arms he knew would not let her pull away and he wished to hold onto her forever as the final lifeline that she was. 

“What do you suppose the ethics of aquariums are? I presume you care. About animal welfare.”

“Animal welfare and animal warfare are my greatest concerns.”

“As expected.”

“Honestly?” 

“Yes. Honestly.”

“I think aquariums are alright. You can keep fish in tanks because fish don’t have any feelings.”

“Good one.”

“Thanks.”

The fish without feelings swam overhead in the buzzing blue waters, to and fro, endless conquering, swirling and swaying with or against the grain of a well-formed mass. A shark’s anthropomorphic face—like a confused vampire’s, with the eyes all startled—flashed overhead as its lithe body maneuvered through the water. 

Valentine hoped that the ethics of aquariums were not skewed at all and that she was not committing a moral impasse, for there were few atmospheres in the world as calming as this faux-sea and its countless performers. She had written off zoos ages ago in a moment of stark and premature lucidity, when it occurred to her that the third grade class field trip would be like a sad movie on an endlessly looping reel: suffering over and over, the sun an undue cruelty. How are you to defend yourself, proud, good creature, when you have no hands with which to swat at flies, when your eyes do not speak of the same indignity a human would suffer when looked upon by a thousand new spectators each day? In the Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera posits the following: when God allotted mankind dominion over the animal kingdom, was it with the intent to subjugate it, as we have done, or was this decree instead a failed incitement to protect these beings? Dance monkey dance. Forever. For me. 

“Aquariums are rehabilitation tanks. I think. You don’t have to stress about it.”

“I’m not.”

“You are. I can tell.”

“How so?”

“The thing you’re doing with your sleeve.”

Contradicitons were the ghouls plaguing Valentine’s spring-breeze spirit. The infinity of any choice, a looping eight, an unsolvable narrative. A morality that shall never be universal. The vegetarianism that had once been pescatarianism. Because fish did not have feelings back then and then they suddenly did. And now they plow through stale water. Or maybe now they’re alive and well, with regulated nervous systems, because these sharks don’t plan the same hunts that other swimming creatures do and movement is free and untaxed and maybe synthetic universes are not so bad after all. 

“What’s the worst thing to ever happen to you?”

“Worst thing to ever happen to me?”

The fradulent deus ex machina of human intervention: we have saved Nature from herself. Then the forgotten universal law emerges: when you extract the volatility from a being, it rots all over. 

“Yes.”

“Your questions never fail to catch me off guard.”

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s fine. I like that about you. I’ll answer.”

Why was a school of fish called that, a school? A mass of students, scaled and chromatic, a singular limb. Billowing through the water, a music-note of a gesture, as if sound waves had been resigned to the pseudo-sea. A thought, swimming and swimming. Synapses in motion. A bobbing Adam’s apple, eyes cast upward, aglow in the hazy neon blue light—the sensations are stuck, aren’t they? Will you permit them to exit the void?

“You don’t have to answer. Or you can answer with something bad but not necessarily the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.”

Male seahorse lore – no paternal care, eating fry if food is scarce. morbid curiosity.

Children tend to be wide-eyed, do they not? As if the world becomes greater when swallowed whole. You cannot help but establish such a stronghold with your incredulous eyes. The innocence, the moral dilemma. These children passed by, either holding a hand or permitted to roam free. Though not too far, my dear.

Unconditional positive regard/some other psych thing here

“I was molested as a child.”

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