Busk

His case sagged with age. Clopping with syncopated rhythm on the cold path, the case’s base thumped along the sidewalk. His creaking shoulder bowed as he moved, and his elbow bobbed in a patched sleeve, and his fingers slacked enough on the stripped handle to ground the vessel briefly with each uneven pace.

A man, alone, in a stained tuxedo, barefoot, sat center-bench under a large bare maple, staring into a little black notebook laying open on his lap. Linus stopped on the moonlit path of McKinley Terrace, a central square of a drive-by town manicured by lifelong residents long since forgotten by the municipal powers-that-be. That particular bench, as Linus had understood it, was his.

“Hey,” Linus bellowed, but it came out choked, all H.

The man acknowledged Linus. “I’m sorry,” the stranger whispered.

“What?” Linus coughed. “I have a thing I do here nights.”

The man moved to the right, opening a space for Linus on the left. He convinced himself forward, eyes on his shuffling feet in their fraying shoes. Linus finished his lumber and sat on the left.

“I’m Titus.”

“Are you?” Linus laughed, and the morph to cough was swift and thick.

“Yes,” Titus admitted. He sobbed.

Linus laid the case down softly on the stone ground, unfastening the last functioning latch. He lifted the loose lid and gripped the chipped neck and scuffed base of the guitar with slow fingers. He pulled the instrument close to his chest and muttered a worn prayer, then rested the concave base on the knob of his right knee.

Titus pulled a pick out of his pocket and offered it to Linus.

“I pick.”

Titus nodded, returning the plastic to his pocket. Linus played. Titus dried his tears.

“Beautiful,” Titus breathed.

Linus squeezed his eyes in appreciation and looked up to a bare branch of the overhanging maple. The trees lining the perimeter of the Terrace were crisp; all potential summertime excesses had been proactively removed. “I tell them not to cut this one,” Linus said. “It gives me shade in the hot months.”

“And a view in the cold ones.”

The moon had paused in the slingshot V of two rivulet branches; from their perspectives it felt a little like God.

“Would you read this?” Titus pushed the black notebook over the ridge of his leg into the negative space between them. The notebook was new, spine just broken. Linus felt the taut leather for a moment.

An appeared lady dropped a bundle of cash in Linus’s case; the bound bills landed with force, jolting the skeleton. “I’ve enjoyed your music,” she smiled. “I won’t have much use for this.” She motioned to the money. Linus understood what sat in the case: two rolls, each marked $10,000. They occupied the cavern like a monolith, ruling over pennies lost to creases of repetition.

Feeling the phantom touch of Titus’s leather notebook, and of Titus’s fogged breath beside him, and of the glowing moon caught in place above them, Linus garbled, blurredly, “Thank you, ma’am.”

The woman breathed deeply and walked silently back into the darkness.

Linus fingered a nick in the instrument’s face. “What is it you want me to read?

“A song.”

Linus heard it then in Titus’s voice. Titus observed Linus as he urged a cracked pair of glasses from his jacket pocket and slid the glasses over the arc of each ear and held the notebook close as his eyes moved over the words, through them.

Linus returned the notebook to the shrunk sliver of negative space between them. He removed his glasses, and shared a look with the stranger. “You too?”