Radiance

“What happened to you down there?” Percival Unck pleads. “I have to know.”

“Please, Rinny.” Erasmo looks up at her, hurt and lost and full of an ache like a bullet lodged in a bone.

“The lights went out,” whispers Severin. “The dark tasted like milk. My heart turned into a photograph of a heart.”

“I don’t understand you, darling,” Erasmo says.

Anchises sits down at the gleaming grand piano in the corner of the Myrtle Lounge. He plays a flourish on the keys. Severin walks across the room. She shrugs off her aviator jacket, musses her hair. She slides up to the top of the black grand and lies across it. As she does so, her flickering black-and-white skin flushes into colour, her dress turns a throbbing shade of deep green, her shoes bright gold, her lips redder than Mars.

“How’s your night going, Miss S?” Anchises asks, sliding into the old, comforting patter of a lounge act, his fingers coaxing the keys.

“Oh, not too bad, Mr A,” Severin croons. “I was dead for a little while, but I got over it.”

“Glad to hear it. You got a song for all these lonelyhearts?”

“I just might. It’s called ‘The Quantum Stability Axis Blues.’ You wanna hear it?”

“I’m dying to hear it.”

And so Severin Unck begins to sing, in a thick, low voice like bourbon pouring into a wooden cup.

I met my honey way down under the sea

Where the sun never goes so nobody can see

What my honey,

Oh, what my honey

does to me

Severin rolls onto her back, green sequins pulsing with light.

My honey put the moon on my finger

My honey put the stars on my plate

My papa told me good girls don’t linger

When a honey comes

Oh, when a honey comes

a-rattlin’ her gate

“I never said such a thing,” Percy grumbles.

“I know, Daddy, it’s a song,” whispers Severin, putting her finger over her red lips. Shhh.

My honey he was dyin’ without me

His heart was all locked up but I was the key

I said I should go,

but my honey said no,

Oh, no, no, no,