NIC:
He sang from his heels, from the bottoms of his feet as he huddled over his guitar and wrecked it, strings ringing. His hair was drenched. his shirt. His face grew glossed, indefinite. They kept playing, and I lost track of the songs they rehearsed. Every song became a stranger, albeit one I knew by heart,. I didn’t care if the band was good, or great—though they were—just that they were alien. Finally, they just stopped, dropped whatever song they were playing without completion. The drummer shattered one of his sticks on the rim of his snare and Nic just—halted, standing there by the barn door, rocking on his boot heels. It was dusk. He stared down at the ground, as if at the lip of a crater. He unslung his guitar and walked towards the door of the barn. Dragging that 1961 cherry-red Epiphone Casino he’d been playing all afternoon out towards the truck. I took off my headphones and caught up with him. He looked at me, stunned. It was almost as though he didn’t recognize me at all.
“Hey!” I grabbed his arm. His muscles were trembling. How could anyone do that? How did they survive? “Hey! You’re bleeding!”
“Huh?”
Blood trickled just outside his right ear canal. A narrow drip of it seemed to come from the fleshy portion, his temple almost.
I tapped his shoulder, gestured up carefully towards the wound. We stood in the purple, moth-wild twilight by the door of the barn. “I think you burst an eardrum, or something. We gotta get you to a hospital.”
He reached up to where my finger was pointing. I could smell the midsummer vegetation, a field sweetness of mown hay. Out there in the distance the horizon line was a fiery orange. The sky looked flat like a scrim, the earth itself equally so as it raced out to meet it. Billy moved around behind us, the scraping clatter of him disassembling his kit the one true proof of distance just then. Nic couldn’t hear it, I realized. He brought his fingers down from his ear and stared at their red tips. I’ll never forget the look on his face then: it was the radical surprise of someone discovering that he, too, was real.
“Ha,” he murmured. “Well. How ‘bout that?”