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| Feedback The first thing I think about is the pain. Wires digging into skin. Each note killing a nerve in the point of the finger. Yet, he plays on, fingers racing, blurry to the eye. As his solo begins, his left index finger pins the E-string at the thirteenth fret and he tilts his head back, eyes shut by sweat stinging like needles. I think about the days and nights of practice sounding in that one rising and arcing note, the hours spent chasing scales across the finger board, catching and wrapping them in cutting steel wire, the thousands times he must have missed that fret, strangled the note, doing it again and again, over and over, until the pain was just right, practicing the same sequence, the same pattern across the rail lines of frets until he felt only a sparkling numbness. When the song ends and the last ringing cymbal quiets, a spattering of applause rises from the blue smoke in the bar and the guitarist fades into black as the stage lights go down. Then, from somewhere, a pinching scream escapes from the speakers. Slowly and softly at first, then clear and biting it flies from the amplifiers like some arrow flung to pierce skin. Everyone turns, listening in silence, until the scream stops all by itself leaving only the hum of a waiting electrical flow. |
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| duende2112 Arturo Vasquez II 2000 |