Photo by Donny Jiang on Unsplash
by Jess Golden
Over at The Elephant, ten dollar entrance fee, floor sticky as a gumdrop, a basementful of people are nursing beer bottles, swaying and nodding in the blue neon dark, and I wonder if they’re here because they like the music, if they’re into this band that’s given itself a chaotic description on the sign out front—blues rock & ska punk fusion, or something like that—or if, like me, they just need somewhere to be. They’re all dancing pretty stiffly, mouths held in straight lines. No pleasure-closed eyes in sight. Of course, there’s a chance no one here is the expressive sort, but I’d rather think we’re all in this together. Even the band’s drummer is staring steadily at the back wall, arms and feet jabbing as if they were separate from him, and the bassist is keeping her eyes down, ignoring the crowd wobbling like kelp in front of her. She and I both watch her fingers pluck and push, and I wonder if she’s doing this because she needs to get out of the house more, and while I’m at it, I wonder if the house she might be trying to get out of is actually an apartment that mirrors my own, because maybe her place is also the kind of quiet that’s audible even over the neighbors on the other side of the wall, a young couple who seem to always have people over, guests with loud voices and big laughs who stay late into the night as if they know exactly where they want to be, and it’s where they already are.
Jess Golden’s stories have appeared in Pithead Chapel, Passages North, Maudlin House, Wigleaf‘s Top 50, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Germany with her partner.
