they were busy forming words out of letters while we wrung our hands in despair. there were noises coming through the wall and through the ceiling and no one knew what to make of it. then they took notes and formed them into phrases strung out on lined paper so we fumbled through the chords but there was no life in it. the words were the same, set neatly together in row after row, page after page—one could nestle down quite comfortably within them yet still feel a pea poking one’s back through the width of several paragraphs. no one felt compelled to point it out but it was still there and we all had a bad night’s sleep because of it. upon waking i stated ‘i don’t know how much more of this i can take’ staring out at the grey sheets of icy rain forever falling on the piles of rubble we used to call our world. so one of us picked up the busted banjo and plucked out a few notes because, really, there was nothing else to do about it. soon another raised a quavering voice in answer to the twang. i made coffee for the third time from old grounds and we all drank from our tin cups, choking down the bitter fluid and listening as it hit the hard pans of our empty stomachs. it was hard to believe it had come to this but at the same time it had happened over such a long expanse of time that it actually wasn’t that hard to believe after all. a certain percentage of us had left and these few had stayed behind. the decision to leave or stay felt arbitrary and so i failed to make it thus by default staying for it required the least effort. when it got cold we burned all the books and i grew giddy at their destruction. the liberation of all those free-floating letters wrangled into words, corralled onto pages, bound into covers and set to gather dust on shelves that we used to board up the windows. sure i used to read them but what was the point. there was never any point. they never told us anything we didn’t already know if we only looked close enough. that was the problem. it was just a way to fill the empty hours, a way to put off facing ourselves. at least burning them warmed our bodies for a night. and as we sat there with the one strumming the banjo and the other’s voice rising til it cracked and all our feet tapping without us even knowing i thought it was only ever this sort of thing that came anywhere close to describing what was scrawled across those inner walls and perhaps we do have what it takes to save ourselves. so i took another swig of that vile black liquid no one in their right mind could dare call coffee and raised my own broken voice to the roofless upper stories. sure i knew i couldn’t sing myself out of this nightmare but tomorrow in all likelihood i’d wake again and that was something. who knows it might not even be raining.

*with a nod to tim hecker