Vibe
is located at 909 W. 23rd St. in Cedar Falls on the second floor of
Bought again Books.
Persons needing access accommodation should call 266-7115 by the
day before the event. For more information, contact
Jim O'Loughlin.
Read Work by
Past Featured Readers
Now Available from Final Thursday Press
Kyrie
Poetry by Jonathan Stull
Ghost Wars
Poetry by Vince Gotera
***Winner of the 2004 Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry***
Laugh. Damnit.
Poetry by Ahkos
Bad Men
Microfiction by Jim O'Loughlin
from "The Hoomei Singer"
by James P. Roberts
It was the strangest sound I’d ever heard. Stopped me dead in my tracks as I passed the Nepali restaurant. I stood completely still, listening. People detoured around me, some glancing back with quizzical or annoyed faces. Didn’t they hear it? I thought, still practically frozen in mid-stride. Or is it that they do hear it but block it out as of no immediate significance to their own goals. It was Saturday night – 8:45, to be precise – on State Street in downtown Madison, Wisconsin. The river of humanity that flowed past me was probably thinking of just one thing: a good time. But that sound…
Suddenly my mind was filled with shards of vision. I couldn’t make anything out at first, just a jumble of colors and feelings, like a computer screen zoomed in to show each tiny pixel. Then, the fragments coalesced. I was seeing a landscape of some unknown place. Tall stalks of wild grass bending to one side as if in a high wind, and the frozen shore of a wide blue lake. The contrast of the blue water reflecting a cloudless sky and the brilliant sun glinting off the edges of the ice hurt my eyes. In the distance I could see snow-covered mountains, beyond which hung masses of gray storm clouds. I was cold and I had trouble breathing, like I do when at high altitudes. It only lasted a moment…then it was gone.
The sounds of State Street flooded back and I found that I could move. The weird sound, or sounds, for there were two distinguishable…melodies? seemed to come from a dark, narrow alley that ran adjacent to the Nepali restaurant. I walked back about five steps until I was at the entrance to the alley. It was very dark at that spot. The streetlights encircled a pair of refuse bins and, further down, a dim light bulb illuminated the area around a service door to the restaurant.
There were two men beneath the light, two very strange-looking men. That they were Oriental I could see at first glance. Well, one of them was Oriental -- his face I could make out easily enough. An oval coppery moon, although pits of shadow hid the eyes. He was sitting cross-legged on the stoop of the service door. He wore an astrakhan fur cap and a huge poncho made of a coarse woven fibre of a mixed tan and brown. Marks like Chinese characters had been inserted into the fabric. The poncho concealed the rest of the body except for the feet, which were encased in animal skin.
The other man was dancing, jumping up and down in a ritualistic fervor, his face hidden behind a mask made of the head of a wolf, and wolf skins draped over his body. He held a rattle made of bones and claws, shaking it wildly but I could hear no sound.
All this I noticed in just a few seconds, before I stepped into the dark alley and my knee collided with something that fell over with a loud jangling of metal. Instantly, the weird singing stopped and the wolfskin man seemed to fade away. The other man rose, looked at me, then turned away, poncho flapping, and ran off into the shadows.