The drugs were beginning to set in as she sat on the short bench in front of the piano. The air was heavy and space small, enclosed, stinking with memories and meaning and obvious molecules. There was dirt everywhere, though it seemed as if every cigarette butt, every crumbled paper belonged where it lay. Philipp ripped his rolling paper because the crumbled paper lay on the ground; he had to smoke another one and put the butt out on the table. The couch and chair frayed their threads because people liked to come here and sit, especially on weekends, holidays, times of celebration or sacrificial offering. And the people came because there were chairs and couches. That's just the way it lay. You didn't want to leave because the doors and window jammed; rust built up because nobody ever really left, or tried.

It was an old piano in the middle of the far wall; dark, wooden, some keys would stick, others didn't work at all. PJ didn't know what the notes were called, but she knew they all made different sounds; each like, yet completely unlike the other. She had heard all of these notes before and for a moment as she lay her fingers upon the white plastic, she thought maybe the piano would play because her fingers wanted to. Smile at the thought; sedimentary drug smile. There was such a hideous feeling of love in her; like Mother Mary must have felt, growing her own personal Jesus somewhere deep inside. Making her love sick. She felt like one of the cigarette butts on the floor; such a feeling of belonging, placement, clear-headed understanding and acceptance. No more fitful smashings or spasmodic flashings, well-planned crashings or fish caught thrashings. No more lustful, lipsticked, lackluster love, and stomping, stomping, stomping on the eternal and blameless void. No.

Slowly and with intent, PJ had the first note fingered. It was too hot, the second too cold, the third was just right so she played it again to complete the circle. Each key had a colour, a number, a scratch-n-smell to it. Each vibration triggered an eon of little fish and their struggle with the wild, washing waters. "I was put here to love you baby!" she began to wail, "put ere to tell you your eyes are the void!/ to tell you your mouth is the wind-a-rolling!/ and that none of it matters!" She sang off key and on time; for ears only she could own up to. "I was put here to tell you i love you/ and that love's like god/ and he's never on time!" And off and on and off and on she went, Eve's apple a-rolling. "God's out-a time/ God's out-a time/ and He's Old, Man!"

It was like a gospel choir rehersing for a funeral, except the voice boxes of all the singers had been replaced with miniature lawn-mower engines and the pianist was 8th in line for a 10-part finger transplant. The choir voices cracked and cackled, gving way to insidious holy messages, giving way to low, low laughter. She threw her head back with the ectasy of it all; bashing of hands, stamping of foot, crying of mouth. Her neck craned further and further back into an acute angle, nostrals skyward, lips akimbo. It was as if she were straining to see from beneath that thin, thin streached skin.

Then suddenly, it split, mid-trachia, a hair-line cracked horizontal; no drips or runs, but blood red to show she was human. Pupil peaking now, fresh, black and fish-eggy, until the quivering eye proptosis, bulging and black, hung singular from mid-throat. The skin around it, though suggestive of an eye-lid, did not blink, but stared. It stared at the piano before it, just above the black and white keys, at the sheet music ledge. The wood grain began to warp; first concave, then convex, as if something were being sucked out by ever increasingly deep draws of breath. First concave, then convex.