Cellist v. CEO

The Cellist wakes to sunlight over the mountains to the far east.

Rising, she realizes that one of the two pistols is missing. She pads her person, looks under the table, looks around the base of the oak, jumps and catches a quick look inside the hole in the oak. Nothing. Gone.

Then she remembers the previous night: an argument from inside the shack. Shouting, yelling, the sound of a door slam shut. She fell asleep soon after, back to the oak, one pistol in hand a and the other tucked in her coat pocket. But when? And how could she have slept through the theft?

She breaks and trembles. Thinking, irrationally fearing that the caretakers are somewhere nearby, now armed. A profound, unreasonably vulnerability sweeps across her. Then, moments later, guilt, as if some mortal duty had been neglected. Without both pistols there stood a terrifying variable—and there she cowered, the cause of that variable.

Just then—the splinter of gunfire. One shot.

Soon after: wailing.

From the shack to the north.

She gently cracks the top catch of the revolver, checks the rounds, locks the catch, and crouches against the oak.

Pepple emerges soon after, pistol in hand, drained. The wailing continues from within. Pepple walks across the newly turned field. He walks past the posts that formed the fence, and past the mass grave. He walks across the field, and—just feet from the oak—he meets the Cellist, pistol out and hammer back, aimed at Pepple’s chest.

Pepple looks at her with slate blue eyes. He blinks. With gentle motion, he tosses the pistol on the grass between them. Then turns and walks back to the shack.

She watches as he nears the shack and watches as a haggard woman emerges, crying, beating Pepple’s chest. Pepple pulls her off him by her hair, and she falls to the earth. Pepple enters the shack. The woman lies motionless.

The CEO arrives in high spirits.

There’s nothing like the innocence of nature to align the moral compass, he says with ebullience, stretching his arms wide, taking in the spring air.

The Cellist doesn’t move from her crouch.

Said by Emerson, I believe—Emerson or Thoreau. Emerson or Thoreau or Whitman. Or Frost. Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Frost or Charles Kuralt, I forget.

They raise their guns. Their guns go off.

Cellist v. Censor

The Cellist wakes to the low rumble of a diesel engine. She looks to the north and sees a tractor. It trundles along, plowing under the tall weeds of early spring. Inside, a Farmer wearing a plaid jacket and long-brimmed cap sits, face obscured.

It's a beautiful morning. Crisp air, the first in months not soured by the smell of human rot. Light blue sky overhead. The oak's branches birth light green buds. The forest in the distance takes the start of a dark, verdant hue. Daffodils rise from the base of the posts past the mass grave, demarcating the border between the grounds and the field.

The hideous shack is still hideous, but now stands sturdier. Gaps during late winter had been filled by boards or plastic or corrugated tin. If the Farmer has any issue with the shack and the motor by the shack, he doesn't show it. He plows around the home and the well, leaving ample space.

The Censor, who arrives a few hours after the Cellist wakes, is dressed for the season: a bright yellow sweater, brown slacks, a pink collared shirt, sports jacket. He greets the Cellist warmly. They soon fall into pleasant discussion.

I can't think of anything more rewarding, says the Censor, the creation of art that all can enjoy. And the music you perform as a cellist does just that.

The Cellist thanks him.

I love art without smut, he continues. Nothing in my opinion mars expression more than, say, an off-color joke or potty humor, or things that ordinary, decent people - Ohioans for example - would find morally offensive.

The Cellist admits that even if she wanted to perform a smutty piece on her cello, there's probably very little chance she could.

That's because the cello is, in essence, I think, a - ah, profoundly moral instrument.

The Cellist isn't sure whether to agree or disagree, so she smiles. The tractor rumbles by the north posts.

They raise their guns. Their guns go off.

Cashier v. Cellist

It's a world of strife and change, of connection and classification. The Cashier, by no means of her own, has developed--through acceptance of a handful of parameters established by unseen institutions--a myopic vision of reality in which greater value is attributed to reality television than, say, the reality of her own mortality.

I can't make a call from up here, she says, shaking her cell phone. I've got no bars, y'all.

The caretakers heave the Carver's body into the pit.

How I gonna know who won Dance Dance Dance: Dance Party Dance-Off? Because you know I voted for Luaman.

The Cellist arrives.

You, says the Cashier, pointing. The Cellist looks behind her. You, says the Cashier. Who won Dance Dance Dance: Dance Party Dance-Off?

The Cellist informs her that Luaman won the contest.

The Cashier squeals with delight. Ooh, Brandi's gonna be so pissed, ya'll. She voted for Lo'train.

Oh, I think Lowanan would beat Lo'train any day, says the Cellist.

That's I what said, girl!

Thus a bond is formed between these women based almost entirely on the gyrations of several competing, meretricious personalities in an hermetically sealed, well-lit enclosure two thousand miles away.

They raise their guns. Their guns go off.