Tangled Legs: Story No. 7

The azure voice of the singer slid up and down my pant leg. I coughed and shifted my weight against the wooden arms of the old-fashioned bar stool.

The Palace of Forgotten Arts: Story No. 6

The conductor's momentary lapse of attention passed under the radar of every last player in the orchestral group. This little-known fact would have shocked the impeccable sensibilities of one audience member, who liked to think of himself as the lowest paid but highest valued member of the nationally acclaimed music review editorial staff at Nashville's illustrious Daily Courier.

However, that tiny breath of indecision lead way to the revolutionary shiver that ran down the make-shift aisle of the Havana PakBel Blues Cubby Room. A touch of magic seeped from the conductor's pen, which waved wand-like through the air and momentarily vanished. A blank stare came over bespectacled eyes that had been darting from sheets of staff to soprano sax, from trumpeting phone to crunching time clock, from creshendoing closing of doors to bass line accounting. Before the weight of the gold-plated pen clicked back into view, it had whispered its spurious hint that misled each contract artist headlong into a floating chaos. Swimming in the abyss of mindless meter, they forgot their inculcated drive. Forsaking the path to uprighteous citizenship, they gave way to a little toe-hold of free association among qwerty keys and headset snap and gave utter artistic license to a collective id.

To the instruments of their daily demise, this liberation went all but unnoticed.