Mary’s watery demise was the beginning of a lunar cycle that set the occult tribes to happy riot. In a grander scheme of things than that pegged in the pale splattering of stars that gathered Heights Guitar to the garden of the Ale House to the dope-dealt corners of Market Square to the busybee loneliness of Isabella Street, the sotto voce bubble of Effingham’s final performance may well have been laughable. A tiny Ophelia the size of a matchstick, puddled in a gob of spit on the top floor of a fourth grade’s model of the Globe Theatre. As for Dion … well, following his girlish going to pieces, he milked those happenings as though they were the drama he had been waiting for all his life. Events which had occurred within the margins of a single year took on the cast of epic hagiography, epic adventure, epic (if chastely vague) romance. The True Account Of One Who Was Witness To A Ministry Of Miracles ; How I Swam The Length Of The Ganges And Of The Myriad Hardships Which Befell Me Ere I Sat Picknicking Upon The Roof Of The World ; Loving Mary: a compilation of statistical tables. A three-paragraph obituary appeared on page three of Der Gesellschaftnuze. Leaving no one the wiser as to the dimensions of what was alternately tragedy, farce, or just another white cross among the bluebonnets lining Snakeland Boulevard. The obit bore the byline of ‘Melusine’, had been penned by a sob-exhausted and fantastically drunk Dion, and despite the pitiless pruning of Aquinas’s undertaker’s shears, retained the aggrandizement of quotes from Neil Young, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Christina Rossetti, one per para. No one was willing to choose between the photos provided by an anonymous documentarian (M giving the camera the finger outside of Numbers ; M adjusting her stocking two steps offstage at the ConArts Warehouse ; M asleep at the wheel of someone’s Econoline van). And so they opted for a tasteful shot of a Strat, collaged out of a mail order catalog.
-Bummer, said Charlemagne, hot guitarist but what a fuck-up.
-I wonder, mused Aquinas, whether Dionysius is so upset because he managed to nail her and now she’s history, or because she skipped away unnailed and now he’ll never know?
-We’re dropping like flies, said Shiva, to no one in particular, waiting for the man at the corner of Caroline and Rosalee and sharing a bottle of Boone’s Farm with a beaten-up sex object named Xaxa, whose braces glittered in the slow headlights moving towards them.