The Mad Days

Guitar strings broke, spiraled up and needled into eyes. The wild chorus of feedback fed like lightning into our ears. Vibrations shook the room, the empty bleachers, the stage. Monitors skittered across the wood. Lightbulbs shattered, sparked above us, a premature light show, and cords wound black smooth sides around our feet as we hung breathlessly onto the curtains that hung on with half their rings. The stage spilt into two jagged islands and we slid toward the center, tangled in the curtains that we had hoped to be held up by. Amps, guitars, drums, went sliding towards the rift, bruising us as they ran by. We caught our hands in a groove of wood and hung there as the world slid everywhere. Then, the lights went and the sound died into nothing. Shakily we crawled out of the wreckage and into the stairwell. All was quiet, but nothing was still.

All was changed.

So began the mad days.



Alone, with no audience, with no stage, with no instruments, we dragged ourselves up to the fire escape. Our splintered hands left blood marks on the walls, our bruises swelled and grew like mushroom clouds, purpling our skin like fruit. Broken water pipelines dripped echoing dark water down in the blacked-out halls, forming pools on the cracked linoleum. The silence from the city so quickly broken breathed on our necks, crackling down our spines.

All was fallen, but he was coming.