He should’ve been a sound engineer. Should’ve spent his days and especially his late late nights engineering sound.
The board’s in front of him, lights flashing. He sits there and traces circles with his mouse across the screen while the singer argues gently with the DJ for them to splice this bit with that bit and not this other bit to reach the other-worldly state of musical perfection that they’ve both been hankering after, like an orgasm but better because there are horns and synths and maybe a didgeridoo. The on-screen scribbles dip endlessly up and down as though they’re looking at a seismograph or a lie detector test and really that wouldn’t be too far off because the currency they’re dealing in as they listen and splice, listen and splice is truth.
But in reality they pass him by sometime between dawn and dusk and if he sees them with the bulk of their headphones loose around their necks he beckons--Coffee, sir?--and the path they take into the building with Styrofoam steaming in their grip is the closest any of him gets to the inside of the place.
Greasy doughnuts. Caribbean roast. Splice splice splice.
Suzanne Marie Hopcroft
www.suzannemariewrites.com
The Book of Night Women
Marlon James
The board’s in front of him, lights flashing. He sits there and traces circles with his mouse across the screen while the singer argues gently with the DJ for them to splice this bit with that bit and not this other bit to reach the other-worldly state of musical perfection that they’ve both been hankering after, like an orgasm but better because there are horns and synths and maybe a didgeridoo. The on-screen scribbles dip endlessly up and down as though they’re looking at a seismograph or a lie detector test and really that wouldn’t be too far off because the currency they’re dealing in as they listen and splice, listen and splice is truth.
But in reality they pass him by sometime between dawn and dusk and if he sees them with the bulk of their headphones loose around their necks he beckons--Coffee, sir?--and the path they take into the building with Styrofoam steaming in their grip is the closest any of him gets to the inside of the place.
Greasy doughnuts. Caribbean roast. Splice splice splice.
Suzanne Marie Hopcroft
www.suzannemariewrites.com
The Book of Night Women
Marlon James