Excerpt from the story Opening Acts:

…For ten minutes or so they just played around, fumbling really, trying to find a bit of harmony, until Shirley yelled over from the bar: “Why don’t youz find yourselves a song in all that noise.”

“Ok, well, that sounds like a request to me,” Martin said, “follow along with me and give us some lyrics, would ya’ son?”

It was only a few minutes after that when they were chiming like church bells, and Bryan was singing:

And I heard ye now/

come calling to me/

from the abbey ground/

beyond the sea/

and the companion cries/

of the wailing shes/

who’d lost their loves/

in the troubled eighties.

–Danny Grosso

In the depths of it she could barely breathe, and even her shallow respiration sounded ominous, as if a small elderly man had fallen asleep in her chest and was snoring. In the depths of it she was all dark, and she was in the depths of it mostly always. Her appendages would morph, her arms heavy hammers a’swinging, her fingers fragile glass tubes. Her eyes were burning embers, her hair a swaying anemone, tentacles black and greasy with the ink of the sea.

In the depths of it she was unapproachable at the times when she needed affection most, and even as the pressure enveloped her with its own estimation of care, she realized it was a poor substitute for a human touch. Yet, as she contemplated the possibility of reaching out, and of someone reaching in, she invariably felt her arms too short to reach the surface, and others’ empathy to shallow to retrieve her. She waited in this purgatory for the end, but though her will was already gone, she was not, and would not be. She feared that this was all she knew now, and because of this, she would know nothing else in death. She sank deeper and deeper, sleepwalking through her days and nights, praying for the fatigue, and the fog, and all the water to clear, for a night terror, or a slap in the face, that would wake her and send her chasing after the sun.

–Danny Grosso